It begins with the short work week right before Thanksgiving.

I head out of the office on Wednesday and don’t return until four days later.  By that time, Black Friday shopping and holiday decorating have sufficiently cemented me into seasonal work mode.  The rapid succession of extended weekends will keep me there until New Years if I let it.

I’m distracted.  I’m counting down the days until the next weekend or vacation.  I’m worrying more about Christmas lists and holiday meals than I am about monthly sales goals and marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, businesses - including the one that employs me - do not shut down for the month of December.  And they tend to take things like customer service and earning a profit just as seriously as they did for the first 11 months of the year.

This is when I find productivity tips, like the ones below, the most helpful.

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When I was a little girl I dreamed about growing up and having a job.  I would get up in the morning and put on my power suit, hop on a train and head to the office. At the end of the day I would pack up my briefcase, put on my very professional coat and head out for an evening of adult activities.

Now that I’m all grown up, I have a relatively important (in the sense that it pays the bills) job.  I carry a laptop bag instead of a briefcase, and I own a very flattering black trench coat.

What I also have, which I never in a million years imagined, is a soul sucking commute.

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Do you ever feel like you are keeping score of your performance as a working mother?  I know, I know… the game of life is not a competitive sport.  Still at the end of every day, I know the score of that day’s juggle.  And whether it was a win, a loss, or a draw.  Sure, these games will never be played on ESPN and there is no fancy Superbowl Ring being handed out for a job well done.  But the announcer in my head is keeping score of how I am doing as a working mother.

“Mom starts the day strong with a 3-point bonus: she manages to pack her kid’s lunch AND pull out the leftovers for Dad and herself.  Everybody eats today!  In fact, it looks like she scored an additional point for extra difficulty; each family member received a fruit, a veggie, a protein, and a whole wheat grain.  Mom is clearly taking control today.”

 “Oh no, Mom lost 4 points for not using her hands-free device on a conference call in the car.  Nervously looking for any cops who can dole out a hefty fine clearly shows that she is not on top of her game.  Can she recover, folks?”

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Voting Day is a pressure-filled day for working parents.  Not only do you have to manage drop-off, pick-up and a busy working day, now you have to throw voting into the mix.  In history-making elections like this one, more people turn out to vote making long lines… and even more stress for the working mom.  I’m sure if I had asked my boss for time to vote, she would have approved the time off.  But then I’d be feeling pangs of guilt since my polling place is open for hours before I get to work and hours after I return home.  And I know that many employers are not willing to allow employees to leave early or come in late so that they can fulfill their civic duty.  I even heard of bosses sending out emails to their team telling them to “vote on their own time.”

For the last two years, I almost always voted via absentee ballot.  For me, it was the only way to manage the juggle.  There are days were I barely manage daycare drop off and pick-up with work meetings.  And I’ve already admitted that I often don’t take a lunch.  So voting was just one more thing to do on the list.  Switching to voting by absentee ballot meant that I had plenty of time to research the candidates, measures, and propositions.  Voting day no longer had to be the day of the election - but whatever day was convenient for me.

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Using an old cell phone that has been converted into a toy, my son pretended to email people on his “blackberry” yesterday evening.  He sat there for 10 minutes, thumbing the keys in remarkable similarity to my own style.  When I asked him to come to the dinner table, he casually responded “I’ll be there in a minute after I finish this email.”  In fact, he didn’t even look away from his “blackberry” when he responded.

I wonder where he learned that one?

I am living in a virtual avalanche of email.  Too much, too often, and too many accounts are bogging me down.  Between all of my email accounts, I easily read over 250 emails per day. 

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Last week Friday, the second day after my last day at work, I did something that I’d been dying to do, but hadn’t been able to find the time:  I visited the exhibit entitled The Black List Project at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.  The exhibit features large format portraits of 24 prominent African-African Americans, and the accompanying documentary included their views of what it means to them to be African-American in 21st century America.

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When I returned to the practice of law a little over a year ago, it was admittedly with some reluctance:  at the time,  I was working from home for a large Fortune 200 corporation, helping manage several of the online publications.  I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was generally happy:  my time was my own, I was ever-present for my young daughter, it allowed me to write and gave me time for my photography, and I was helping contribute financially to our household.  But then, two former bosses called me and practically begged me to come back to law; because I respect and enjoy working with these two men (and despite my better judgment), I did.

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Last week, right about the same time the first commenter was leaving her comment on my previous post , I walked into the office of my boss, and turned in my written resignation.

The truth is, he knew it was coming.  I’d warned him it was coming about 5 weeks ago — I told him that I intended to leave the company, and while I wouldn’t leave him before September 30th (because my role becomes crucial to closing deals at the end of the quarter), my intent was for my last day to be October 15th. For this reason, last week’s conversation was merely a formality.

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I’ve been a working adult for what … 20 years, now? … and for every one of those twenty years, I’ve been in search for the perfect organization system.  I have tried them all:  Filofaxes and Palm Pilots, Day Runners and Blackberrys, nice pristine legal pads and Outlook — and yet none of them are just right.  The reasons are varied:

– I hate electronic task managers, because I like actually writing down to-do lists, and I adore the self-satisfied feeling of actually dragging my pen across the page, marking out an item completed.

– I really love calendar functions that allow for alarms, so that when I’m lost in the middle of a project, my PDA will actually buzz or sound a tone alerting me that I need to get ready for a meeting.

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People always tell me how lucky I am that I have the opportunity to work from home.  And I agree, for the most part.  But working from home is not sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies.  I’ve had to re-learn working in a virtual environment.  It’s a different ball game.  While I do love getting to fold a load of laundry while on a conference call, my life can be totally unbalanced while I work from home.  And I’ve seen many a co-worker crash and burn when moving from the corporate office to the home office.

You may have thought of your office as distracting with water cooler conversations, idle hallway chit-chat, and that one person who always manages to burn the popcorn in the breakroom microwave.  But just wait until you are at home with a whole new set of distractions.

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