Work, life and a personal business case of globalization · Kalli's way north

I wanted to share a bit on how we deal - or try to deal - with the burden of my global work demand.

It's way too big topic for one post of course, but some thoughts to start with.

My trigger tonight is actually the fact that the bacteria, which Liisa brought from her visit to India 4 weeks ago, has just revived and put her once again to bed with high fever. She's been suffering badly from this; it started the day after we returned, and was found to be caused by some chicken meat she ate. It must have been one burger at the airport, as this was the only time I didn't eat the same food (as I felt sick and very tired at that time).

So travel is not only great experiences and new insights, it also comes with some ugly side effects and "costs". Most people we know come back somewhat sick from their first India trip.

India is different - great, but different.

But why did she go there in the first place?

This is something we did a lot last year, and it turned out to be a very good thing to do: As I was travelling to various places for work, we found it difficult and annoying not to share the experience and the excitement; so we set priorities on time and finances, and went together:

January - Dallas

February - Beijing

December - Noida

Obviously I did some trips "alone", but travelling together turned out to be a great blessing. Liisa came much closer to my work life, found very good friends with my work mates (and their spouses), the thing just was more a "together" than me just travelling and slogging away.It is different if I hang on the phone with some work stuff for half of the night, or if I talk with Nelson. And eventually Nelson would tell me that someone is waiting for me and I should stop working now :-).

So one approach to the challenge of "work - life - balance" is to bring life to work and work to life. Not a silver bullet, but gave us precious treasures in our hearts.

Two side notes on blogging:

Thanks for encouraging me, especially Prasanna and Georg! I have to say it almost feels more difficult to write knowing that someone will read this... but hey, I'm reading your stuff as well ;-)
I absolutely need to do something on this editor, just using some standard Google Blogger interface; there must be a way to create posts a bit smarter without typing native HTML (I once learned to do this in SGML / DCF3, but that's a while ago and ran on IBM Mainframes)

Edit/addendum: Google guided me to this, so I'll give it a go with Windows Live Writer