Roz's organisation of time was tightly focused around balancing the needs of the business and the family. She wanted periods away from the children when they were in care and to be able to spend time focused on being with them. Her primary work days were thus limited to Thursdays (for database clients) and Fridays, in addition to two nights a week and four to five hours spread over both days of the weekend. Roz had consciously worked on writing a contract that limited the database work to these two days, and "refused to have a mobile phone"
(208).
She spoke extensively about the fIrmness of the temporal boundary she created around the work:I've limited my availability, I've limited the amount of what my contract is, what I'm promising, so I'm not available
24
hours a day. I'm not saying I'm available out there ... I'm not excusing the fact that I have young children here and they know if they ring other than Thursdays then I'm liable to be only half there. So yeah, potentially there could have been a lot of disadvantages,if
I hadn't been very clear about what I was able to do(2 1 2).
Roz's clarity about the limits of her availability when she tendered for contracts allowed her to dictate a clear separation of her 'work' and 'family' times. She felt this reflected a broader change
in her priorities from when she was a single career person who ''worked
every spare minute", to being married and having children where "homesimply
got more important and I got much better at saying 'no' and containing my work"(2 1 6).
Roz managed her teleworking time by placing the children in care o n her work days and working at a high intensity in the hours they were gone from the house, such that she felt she was "more productive" at home but working "less hours"
(334).
She usually began her work days by driving the children to day care in a nearby town and then sometimes staying in town for meetings or using the time to shop in an attempt to minimise the time she had to spend commuting(326).
She then returned home and ritually started her telework with cash balancing and the in-tray, followed by a goal setting exercise for the day so that she could reach that goal and "have a break"(338).
Roz was aware that when working at home "intensively", breaks became more important because time wasn't broken up by colleagues dropping by as it had been in the organisation(360).
These breaks included the highly organised system of expressing breast milk she developed for the days when baby Sally was in care. She liked to ''keep a week ahead of herself'(338)
in terms of this task, and found that the discomfort of her breasts would remind her that she'd been "sitting engrossed in (work)" without taking a break and needed to express some more milk(366).
Additionally, the demands of breastfeeding made Roz feel hungrier so that when she was "feeding (her) bodyand
(her) body was feeding the baby" she took breaks to have morning and afternoontea, which she would not have done within the organisation
(397).
At the end of the day Roz would clear the desk she shared with Ben in the home-office and "pack away"(46 1 )
her work, and then "reward" herself with time in the garden to "get messy and clear the air"before she picked up the children
(356).
Roz, like Jill, was aware that with such small children she did not have an option to focus on her work outside of the hours she devoted to it to meet client deadlines. She needed to "keep at it" because if she got behind she could not "lock herself in that office and work (her) butt 0fI"
(296).
She did however "allow" the work to move into night time (on the two evenings when the home-office was 'hers' and not Ben's) because she sometimes used Thursday mornings ''for her" by doing errands, shopping or visiting the library while she was in town and without the children( 141).
The other strategy Roz usedif
she needed to work outside of Thursdays and Fridays, was to "steal time" when the children were asleep during the week, when she would decide between a number of competing possibilities what she would do with this precious resource. She said:I have to make that decision, do I do some work or do I go and do something for me or do I go out on the garden, whatever. Then