Beyond the 2008 EOWA Australian Census of Women in Leadership

The good news from EOWA's recent report released on 17 June is that once women have been appointed to boards, they are as influential as men. Among the 89 individual women holding ASX200 board seats, 49.4 % are chairing at least one board committee, compared to 32.9 % of male board directors. However, the pay gap at executive management between men and women is still dramatic and in some positions (CEO and Finance) women earn less than half of their male equivalents. To read the complete report click here.

Wendy has recently become an ambassador of 1 Million Women - A campaign of daughters, mothers, sisters and grandmothers - Committed to protecting our climate, our communities and our future, leading change for the better.

Their goal is to inspire 1 million Australian women to take practical action on climate change by cutting 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main greenhouse pollutant causing global warming. Every woman who joins has a personal goal to cut 1 tonne of CO₂ from their daily lives within a year of joining the campaign.

James O'Loghlin is the host of the The New Inventors on ABC TV and Sunday Evenings with James O'Loghlin on ABC Local Radio in Sydney.

He has been a stand-up comedian and a criminal and commercial lawyer. He is also a mentor and has recently written a book called "How to balance your life – practical ways to achieve work/life balance".

James, why did you write this book?

I have lots of friends who have interesting jobs but the common factor amongst many of them was that they did not have enough time away from work, particularly with their children, so I wanted to write about how people can perhaps reorganize their life so that they can keep doing their work as well as they are doing it -and still find it as satisfying -but somehow grab an hour or two back each day. It seemed to me that there was a gap between many people having a desire to do this and the same people not quite knowing how to practically go about doing it.

It's something we all tend to put in the too hard basket. People often say ‘it would be great if my 50hr a week job was a 44hr a week job' but they don't seem to know how to make it happen. So I wanted to write a practical strategic book advising people how they could make it happen.

You suggest a number of strategies for people to find more time in their day to do the things they really want to do… What are your own work life balance secrets?

Well I am a bad example because I work in the media. I have unusual work hours anyway but I try to make that work for me. What I have tried to do - particularly since I have had children- is to have my head down the minute I walk in the door to work and to work as efficiently and productively as I can. For example, rather than have a 15 minute chat in the tea-room with someone, I am aware that doing that means that I have to spend an extra 15 minutes at work and it may sound a bit hard hearted, but I would rather spend those 15 minutes at home with my family. So I try to be very efficient when I am at work.

Most of the jobs I have had have not been not shift work. They have been jobs where you get measured not on how long you are at work but on how well you get your work done, and so I focus on getting the job done as efficiently as possible in the shortest time possible without sacrificing quality. I always focus on the opportunity cost of NOT working efficiently i.e. The longer it takes me to do a task, the longer I have to stay at work and the less time I get to spend with my family. I find if you focus in on the opportunity cost it is a great motivator to get more work done each hour.

Then there is working out when I work. There is a lot of work I can get done at home after the kids have gone to bed so rather than watching American crime shows at night I would much rather get home earlier and spend more time with the kids while they are still awake, then do some more work after they have gone to bed.

And I think this is an important one, really practicing switching on when you get to work and switching off when you leave. The more you practice doing that the better you get at it.

And work out how to maximize your use of time through the day. For example if you are travelling from A to B in a taxi or on the train you can plan to read something you need to read for work on that journey. It's important to work out how you can use the whole of the working day in a productive way, because that will make your working day shorter.

Most people strive to combine earning money with some level of fulfillment in their work, have you achieved this?

Yeah, I think I have, though not on purpose. My first career move was going from being a corporate lawyer to being a criminal lawyer which resulted in a huge potential loss in future income. I have only really made decisions on what I have though would satisfy me and I have been very lucky in that my decisions have led to positions where I have been able to earn an income. I know a lot of people have to make really hard decisions between doing what they want to do and earning an income.

In the 1990's I did stand-up comedy for years where I'd drive out to places I never heard off before and got booed off stage and never get paid a cent and I did that dozens and dozens of times. So now that I am earning an income doing that sort of stuff well it feels like I am getting my own back. When I decided to move from corporate to criminal law, when I decided to leave law and focus on stand-up comedy, these were not decisions I made for economic decisions, they are not necessarily decisions a financial adviser would advise. But at the time I didn't have dependants, and let's face it, we spend more time working than we spend doing anything else except maybe sleeping and I don't want to spend that large a section of my life being bored

You suggest that many of us are unimaginative and passive about work and that a little bit of creativity and some negotiating could lead to more flexible work conditions. Can you explain how you have done this?

I guess work/life balance has always been a priority for me. Even when I started as a corporate lawyer I knew I wanted to get in, do my job, then get out to live the rest of my life. Every night I stayed back at work was one less game of tennis I would play. Everything is a trade off. The more you work, the less time there is there is for something else.

Is finding balance really as simple as doing a regular audit of our lives like we do with our cars, finances and teeth? Why do we not intuitively allocate time to something so important and do something about it?

Well yes, in my book I suggest the first step is to do an audit, in which you ask yourself ‘How much time do I spend at work?', ‘how much time of that time do I spend actually working?', ‘how much time do I have for my hobbies and interests?', ‘how much time do I spend with my family?' and then on a separate piece of paper list how you would like to change things. List how much time you would like to spend with your family and then start getting realistic and thinking about what type of tinkering you can do to get a bit closer to the life you want to be leading.

I think about these things all the time. I am always thinking ‘is there a better way to do this?'

Maybe I am very easily dissatisfied but I think we are too meek and we don't always realize that we all have a range of choices we can make. Some people have more than others, but we all have some choices

Your book offers tactics to work smarter and be more productive in a shorter time… some of the suggestions to save time include: being less friendly, more focused, having lunch, ignoring office politics, delegating office social events…. You propose that ultimately your boss wants you to do the job and office chit chat and schmoozing clients is all icing on the top…is this realistic for people who are ambitious?

Every workplace is different and everyone has to work out for themselves how single minded they want to be about ambition. If you write a list of the things you want and if all that is on the list is ‘be successful at work' then you would focus purely on work. But most people will have other stuff on the list. If you do have other things on the list then it becomes about prioritizing, and working out how much of one thing on your list you are prepared to sacrifice to achieve something else on the list. It's all a trade-off. For example you might think ‘I will give up 2 evenings a week away from my family to focus on schmoozing because it may benefit my career'. Or you might think, ‘I don't even know if going out and having drinks and dinner with work people IS going to help my career. Maybe it will a bit, but it's not worth the sacrifice of all that time away from my family so I am not going to do it'

In your 18 years of working post university you have had about five careers - commercial lawyer, criminal lawyer, standup comic, TV and radio presenter and author – some simultaneously. What has been the most exciting? Was this a balanced time of your life?

The most exciting time was when I was simultaneously learning how to be a criminal lawyer by day and a comedian by night and it was exhausting. I had work/work balance, in that when I got sick of being a lawyer I could focus on being a comedian and vice versa. What I found was that the thing about ambition is that you are so focused on getting somewhere that you just don't enjoy the ride. I think that's the only thing I regret; that I didn't spend more time enjoying the ride.

What's career number six?

I am very happy with ‘The New Inventors' and radio so I have no plans.

You speak very personally about parenting and how you think you've become a better person from the experience. Do you think the world would be a better place if we all worked part time and spent more time with our kids?

Well that was the dream. If you look back 50 years people were talking about how computers would increase our productivity to levels where people could work less, but it hasn't happened. We have decided as a nation that we want to take those productivity gains not in the form of decreased working hours, but in the form of increased pay. 50 years ago a 5 day week was standard, and today it is still standard.

I think that if you ask a lot of people what they want more of, they would say time with family. But there are ways of achieving it. For example many who live in the city could decide to move up the coast and halve the size of their mortgage and their travelling time, and thus create lots of opportunities for them to spend more time with their family. I think most of the time we think we have less choice than we actually have. We need to selfishly look at our lives and examine what we have and what we want more of. One of the things about Australia in 2009 is that a lot of people are very comfortable and it's pretty damn good but that doesn't mean we can't make it better.

What do you like best about being a mentor?

It is a wonderful experience because you form a relationship with someone, and they can come to be quite open with you about their life, and you have an opportunity to help that relationship grow and help them bounce around some ideas for changes they may want to make to their lives to make it better. It can be very lonely when you are wrestling with big questions and trying to make important decisions that will affect the rest of your life by yourself. So it is a privilege to be in the same room as someone who is openly confronting some big and small questions that are important to them and helping them get to an answer that they think is best for them. Sometimes talking to someone can allow you to see something from a different angle or to things more clearly or to see complexities that you weren't previously aware of. I think one role of a mentor is to help people to continue to wrestle with these questions.

If you could have a mentor who would it be and why?

It would be someone who shared their experience insofar as it was relevant to my dilemmas, and who helped me stumble toward my own answers.