The Quest for Time
I’m straddling: left leg in my the firm where I work, and right leg in the firm I’m trying to found. It’s a place many entrepreneurs know well.
If I could get laid off it would be perfect, but no such luck has come my way. Instead, I have to juggle both jobs until the revenues from my right leg turn black.
Even though my day job is a little slow these days, that doesn’t lend me much extra time to work on founding a firm. After all, it’s not like I can work on founding my own firm while I’m actually sitting at a desk and computer of another company. That’s just bad form. Ok, maybe I’ve returned a few emails. But mostly, I have to do that work on the evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks.
This stuff takes serious time, and I simply need more. My first attempt to squeeze extra time out of the week, without quitting my job, was a request to work from home two days a week.
If I could work from home a couple days a week, I could save commute time (about 1.5 hours each day I commute). Then there’s the efficiency factor. At the office, I could be more productive if I needed to, but my project is a little slow and the firm isn’t exactly overflowing with extra work. So if I had a little down time at home, I could jump on one of my own side tasks in a way that I can’t practically do at the office.
I put together what I thought was a bullet-proof argument for being allowed to work from home 2 days a week:
- There’s only one person on my team who is the same office as I, so I already do all my work via email, ftp, and phone.
- The CAD files live on an ftp site
- The posted set is electronic, and lives on the cloud
- Our laptops have AutoCADD on them already, so I could just check out a laptop and we wouldn’t have to buy another license
- I was only asking to work from home 2 days a week, and only for a trial period
I underestimated how conventional old architects are, and they shot me down without a fight. Something about “opening the floodgates.”
My second tactic was to tell the bosses my project has been slow recently, and to ask to be reduced to 3 days per week. This was less than ideal for several reasons. First, it meant taking a serious paycut. Second, I was afraid it might also mean they’d stop paying for health insurance, which would mean I’d have to get added to my husband’s policy. That would, in essence, be a second paycut.
I was also nervous they would get angry or suspicious and there would be a scene and uncomfortable questions. I got the courage up and made the request.
The request was granted! Luckily for me, the client had been putting pressure on us to reduce our hours (this project is a time & expenses contract). Now I have two days per week where I can focus entirely on this new business.
