When Life is Off Balance

On today’s show we are talking about the process of finding life balance, while living in several different time zones concurrently. 

We have spent the past two weeks living on board a boat in Northern France, all the while working to repair things on board, maintain client meetings by phone, keeping in mind the time zone differences with home. 

Everything seems to be a little off balance. 

On the west coast of France, we are actually further west than much of the UK. But we are on Central European time and an hour ahead of Britain. As a result, it’s daylight here until well after 10:30 PM. We are eating much later than normal, often having dinner at 9PM. 

Our phone calls with North America start at 3PM, which is the start of the business day in eastern and central North America. 

The mornings are spent working on the boat and doing paperwork. Fortunately our internet access has been excellent which has made getting work done much easier. 

Many of our meetings are held by video conference using either Skype or Zoom. 

Structure is vitally important in maintaining a sense of organization and order. Without that structure, life seems chaotic. Our business day has been shortened to only a few hours of time zone overlap. It would be too easy to allow meetings to go on until 11PM at night. That actually happened once this week already.