writing – Jo Ind

Review: Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business

Jo Ind — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:11:21 +0000

It’s a sign of the success of a charity, community group or small business when it can outlive its founder members. An organisation has reached its coming-of-age, when the vision of the people who set it up is so embedded, it can thrive and survive without them.

Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago. He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter. (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions. “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says. Yes! Absolutely! I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them. By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

Why I stopped writing books

Jo Ind — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 20:52:35 +0000

It took an artist creating a paper model of Balsall Heath Park, a world-renown Imam explaining Ramadan to non-Muslims and the gifting of trees in an inner-city neighbourhood, for me to understand why I no longer write books.

I am delighted to be the producer of Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath, a project in which we are making a beautiful map showing Balsall Heath as a place of trees, bees, and blue and green spaces rather than roads. We have three brilliant artists –Shaheen Ahmed, Rachel Pilkington and Dave Gray – a great project manager in Abbas Shah and a steering group made up of representatives from two mosques and a church.

It was my idea.

For almost ten years I have been fantasising about creating an artists’ map showing the waterways and wildlife of Birmingham, so that, even in the UK’s second city, we can imagine ourselves as people of nature.

Through gathering together project partners in the form of the United Church of St Paul’s, the Hazrat Sultan Bahu Trust and the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre, all in Balsall Heath, we became a Creative City Project generously funded by Birmingham City Council programmed by the Birmingham 2022 Festival.

Now we are forming relationships, praying together under stars, planting fruit trees and planning to make beautiful art.

I didn’t start my professional creative life as a producer. I started out writing books. I was aged 21, straight from university when I wrote Fat is a Spiritual Issue, followed a decade later by Memories of Bliss.

With both books, I remember the point at which I sent them off to their publishers, a point at which nobody else had read them in their entirety apart from me. Writing books was a solitary activity. I discussed the content with others, but nobody read what I had written, commented on it or steered me along the way.

In writing, there was an intimacy between me and the page. It was a place through which I grafted and despaired and became. When I finally got to the point where I could say: “So THAT’s what I needed to write,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. The great river of creativity had carried me to a place that had been hidden even from me.

Having done that twice, the day came when a publisher said: “What do you want to write next? I don’t mind what it is. Tell us what you want to write and we’ll publish it.” It was an enviable offer by any standards and yet, for reasons that alluded me at the time, I found myself thinking: “Nah…”

Looking back, I can say I stopped writing books.

That brings me to today and Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath. Unlike my books, which were written entirely by me, this is a project I couldn’t possibly do by myself. And that is the very thing that touches me. I go out of the room to make tea and when I come back the artists are talking about the nature map and making it their own. The project manager is forming relationships in ways that I couldn’t. The Chamberlain Highbury Trust gives us fruit trees. The mosques are inviting us to Iftars I hadn’t imagined. It’s humbling. It fills me with gratitude. It’s where I want to be.

At the same time, I am working on UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a celebration of creativity taking place in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the summer of 2022. In the interests of simplicity, it calls itself a celebration of creativity, but it’s actually a particular kind of creativity that it’s celebrating – not personal self-expression but creative collaboration. It’s about what happens when you bring together people form science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics; what happens when you bring established organisations together with emerging artists. It’s about our creativity and its power to change the world.

I am excited by this because this is the kind of creativity I want to experience in my life right now.

Am I saying that I will never write a book again? Of course not. Anything might happen. I can only go with the flow of the river of creativity and be surprised at where it takes me. I’m not into goals, aims and predictions.

But I AM saying that, when I was in young, I was very concerned with the question of what I was doing with my life. It was a question that had an urgency that drove me. Today it’s not even a question that interests me. “What are we doing together?” That’s the question that drives me now.

Place

Jo Ind — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:32:11 +0000

Written in lockdown from the spring equinox (79 deaths) to the summer solstice (128 deaths)

Lime trees in Highbury Park, Birmingham, like a nave in nature’s cathedral.

HOME AS PLACE

The summer house in our garden has become my writing place. At one time, I used to write in the study, our converted loft, but not anymore. The coronavirus lockdown means school is no longer a place but a series of emails. Consequently, the loft has been taken over. It has become the classroom and music room (and place for the Xbox, natch) while I have moved to the wooden shed at the bottom of the garden.

As I sit in my summer house, the blackbirds and wood pigeons are singing. I can hear children playing from somewhere in the mid-distance – between number 56 and 68, I would guess. Sometimes I hear a violin from number 72. Weeks ago, there would have been ambulance sirens, but those come less often now. I look back at our terraced house, through the fruit trees, over my son’s goal post and the homes of our neighbours snuggled down the street.

This is my place. And it has changed during lockdown. Our road now has a WhatsApp group which means I know food has been collected from our doorsteps and taken to the foodbank. Shopping has been dropped off at the homes of the sick. Plants have been shared and libraries of books have been left on the little brick walls outside our houses. Now, when I look down our street, I don’t just see a row of terraced houses, I see kindness.

This is my place and I notice that, in many ways, my place has shrunk. I used to think of Kings Heath, with it rows of terraced houses and useful shops, as the outer edge of the neighbouring suburb of Moseley, where my son went to school and whose U15s cricket team I manage. There was never a day when I didn’t go into Moseley and so I felt as though I lived in Moseley/Kings Heath. But those days seem a long time ago and Moseley seems like somewhere else. My place is smaller now.

Even the High Street seems some distance away. I’m sure Asda, Smith’s and Wilko are still there, but I haven’t walked eastward and seen them for weeks. Each day in lockdown, I have walked west. I have taken my sadness, my peace, my worry or my joy to the trees; to Kings Heath Park with the oaks and poplars and silver birch. And I have walked down the lane, scented with cow parsley, to the neighboring park of Highbury. I have seen it change from the pink of April to the blue of May and the yellow of June. I have found an avenue lined with lime trees, like a nave in nature’s cathedral. Each day I have walked down that aisle saying Mary Oliver’s words “I am a bride married to amazement” in renewed wonder at the beauty just yards from my door.

So now, as I sit in my summer house, I no longer imagine my home as a place near the number 50 bus stop. My home is in a village on the edge of a meadow. It’s down from the wood, across the way from the pond where ducklings hatch and marsh irises bloom.

Church as place

Church used to be a place. We have all known since Sunday school that the church is the people, not the building. But the fact that the people only ever met in a building meant the whenever we talked about “going to church” we meant going to that place with a steeple or a bell. Not anymore. Our building opens once a week on a Thursday for the food bank. Otherwise, those that can – which I’m painfully aware isn’t everyone – meet through Zoom.

To my surprise, it works. In amongst the glitches and freezes and struggles with mute, we manage to pray. We can’t sing together. Even saying the grace together is tricky. Yet somehow that doesn’t detract from the simple experience of being a people together in prayer.

In many ways being released of “place” has made thing easier. For the past four years or so, we haven’t had a regular vicar, so we have exhausted ourselves either finding a stand-in priest (so we can have communion) or devising a service ourselves as the next best thing. Without a place, we can’t meet for communion anyway – so that sorts out the need for a priest at a stroke.

It sorts out another problem too. We are actually two churches that came together because the church can no longer afford to have a priest in every parish. The two congregations have tried to hold joint services but in practice, because the services have been in either one building or the other, one congregation has always been host and the other guest. By removing “place” we have been able to meet for the first time on equal terms.

All of which makes me wonder if we’d be better off without a building. Can we be a people without a place?

There are no easy answers to that one. The community has been formed through place – through the parishes and the buildings that stand proudly in each one. At the start of lockdown, I drove down to our church building in Balsall Heath with a boot load of food for the foodbank. There was Ivor tending the garden, Ann at the door with her apron on and Theo, my Godson, loading a trolley with food. How I had missed them! I missed them because they are amongst those who can’t join us on Zoom. I missed those ways of being together that are about tea and welcome rather than words. I missed the place because that’s where we feed the hungry, say farewell to the souls of the departed and share the seasons of our lives through song.

If we want to do those things – which we do – then having a place helps. But in the effort to maintain a place, with the history of expectation that goes with it, we lose our simplicity. Instead of serving us, our buildings become heavy weights of policy, finance and quotes for leaking roofs. I have no idea when we will return to our place or how I will feel when that happens, but I guess it won’t be like sinking back into a comfy chair. The affection for the organ, the sanctuary and bread and wine upon the altar, will be underpinned by a disturbing question. In holding onto our place, have we lost something more precious along the way?

Work as place

For the past 18 months, I have felt ambivalent about my place of work – London. I work for ScreenSkills, an organisation with goals dear to my heart, not least because it opens up careers in the screen industries to those who have been excluded in the past.

Even so, on my train rides down to London, I would look back with nostalgia at my home city of Birmingham. I would remember the days when I worked in the West Midlands as a journalist, combing through the region and crafting its stories. I would look wistfully on the days when I was an ambassador for Birmingham’s beautiful library, worked alongside the Grand Union Canal, or listened to the waves of protestors from an office in Victoria Square. I mourned the sense of belonging I had enjoyed through working in the heart of Birmingham for more than two decades.

For the past three months, I have imagined the city centre as still. I have assumed that stillness was either eerie or tranquil, depending on your point of view. I have imagined a thick quiet in the air where once there was the clacking of heels crisscrossing Pigeon Park and dodgem-style bumps of shoppers in the Bull Ring. (Like, I said, I’m guessing). In a way, there’s nothing for me to mourn anymore, because that hubbub of activity to which I once belonged, is no longer there. ScreenSkills, too, is of no fixed abode. We have a conceptual abode – a memory, an address that’s listed on Google and with the Charity Commission. But the daily reality is that we’re a community of people united by cloud, through purpose, not place.

In many ways, I like work better. We have an all-staff meeting each Friday, over Zoom, where we play games and hang out in breakout rooms. I no longer feel like a person commuting in from the regions but an equal member of the team. We ask the question: “Do we even need a place?” (No answers yet.) And while we’re asking that, I know that Birmingham-based businesses are asking the same.

So what happens when work is about purpose not place? What happens to cities where that work once took place? Will those who worked in offices ever return? And if we won’t, what will happen to our city centres? Will they become places of leisure more than industry? A place we go to change buses, try on clothes and go to the theatre, rather than hang out with colleagues in the nine to five? And if that happens, what will happen to the buildings? What will happen to the coffee houses that service them? If council meetings no longer need a council chamber, will there still be protests in Victoria Square?

As I reflect upon this, my picture of a city starts to change. Once if you named a place like, “Birmingham” or “Manchester” I would picture the centre with suburbs around it. Now, when I imagine Birmingham, I begin to think of a series or neighborhoods, linked like a web rather than connecting to a place with middle. And where once I used to think of goods and services as “made in Birmingham”, now I picture their origin in homes – homes that could be anywhere. With some sadness, I see my city as its residential streets rather than the industry that was once at its core.

Place and belonging

And so, as I sit in my place at the bottom of the garden, watching the spring equinox slowly turning into the summer solstice, I notice that my inner world is turning as the places turn around me.

Places are guardians of our memories. They are our photograph albums, the soundtracks of our lives. When our places change, our connection changes with them. Being displaced has changed my imagination around my home, my church and my Birmingham and so my sense of belonging is changing too.

Some of those changes are sweet, like the fur lining of a winter coat. Others are quite disturbing. Comfortable or not, there is nothing to be done, except resist the temptation to hold onto the old ways of belonging or grasp prematurely for new ones. The old places and my attachments to them must fall away. The new belongings will come. They will come. They will surely come. I learnt this from the trees.

Words – what matters most at a wedding

Jo Ind — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 09:49:57 +0000

When I was preparing for my wedding, someone (I can’t remember who) said: “The most important part of a wedding is the photographs.” She was a little shocked when I said we weren’t going to have a photographer as such – just three friends taking candid shots and giving me their films the following week.

If you are a photographer, I have no doubt photographs are indeed the most important part. I imagine chefs feel the wedding breakfast is the bit that matters most. But I am a writer. And so for me it was the words over which I agonised as I wrote the service, for the most part, myself.

By Ewan Clayton

That was fifteen years ago today. The calligrapher Ewan Clayton wrote our words on a document (pictured in part above) which everybody signed. And Rosie Miles, our poet-in-residence, wrote this poem as she sat among the congregation on the day.

The words I give to you

To say I want to make a life with you

Will be the best that I can find:

They will be fit to purpose,

They will make love happen,

They will include,

They will speak of your God who is my God,

They will be words we can both indwell,

They will dance with desire and delight,

They will be all the colours of the rainbow,

They will be full of children and chaos and tulips and purple and lilac splendour.

The words I give to you

To say I want to make a life with you

Will be the very best:

They are all I have,

They are all I am;

Here are my words,

Here is my heart.

Rosie Miles

20 April 2001

What does loneliness look like?

Jo Ind — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 13:02:08 +0000

Most of us can say, from our experience, however small, what loneliness feels like, but what does it look like? That question was more than hypothetical when trying to imagine how my most recent publication Loneliness: Accident or Injustice? would be illustrated.

Loneliness: Accident or Injustice? was commissioned by the Diocese of Oxford in response to research by the Church of England and Church Urban Fund which found that loneliness or social isolation was the most prevelant social concern of our time.

The Church in Action report found that loneliness is not restricted to parish size or social class. It’s more often noted in deprived parishes (81 per cent) than affluent ones – but even amongst the well-off, 55 per cent of leaders say loneliness is a significant cause of concern.

In response to this, the Department of Mission in the Oxford Diocese commissioned a publication looking at the causes of loneliness, celebrating what churches are doing to address the issue and making recommendations.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be sharing some of my findings in a series of blog posts but in order to do this, I had to ask myself an interesting question – how am I going to illustrate my post? In other words: “What does loneliness look like?”

This is the question that John Morse-Brown, of Morse-Brown Design, also had to think about that when he designed the front cover for the book. You can download the publication: Loneliness Accident or Injustice by Jo Ind (PDF 536KB) if you want to see what he came up with.

For this post, I have decided to use an image of nature. That is partly a cheat, I know (holds up hands) but it’s also because I believe feeling connected to nature is the ultimate antidote to loneliness. Knowing that we belong in the cosmos; feeling right through to our bones (and beyond) that we are the trees, the sky, the air, the sea….this is where we know we are never alone.

And so I start my series of posts with an image of two autumn trees, taken at Plas Talgarth, in the Snowdonia National Park, near Machynlleth in Mid-Wales. I found myself thinking about marriage every time I looked at them. But marriage is only a partial solution to loneliness. And it’s only available to some. And, unless you both die at the same time, it doesn’t last forever. Feeling at home in the glory of autumn leaves – that is a sense of belonging that endures.

On being let loose in the Oxfam Bookshop

Jo Ind — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:42:23 +0000

I have had the great pleasure of being let loose in the Oxfam Bookshop in Kings Heath, Birmingham. The store came up with a great idea – The Curated Shelf – to bring writers and readers closer together. During September, it invited five local authors and members of the OxfamReads! series to curate shelves from the donated offerings.

The writers were:

David Hart, 1997/8 Birmingham Poet Laureate
Catherine O’Flynn, winner 2008 First Novel Award at the Costa Book Awards
Katherine D’Souza, author of the Birmingham-set novels “Deeds Not Words” and “Park Life”
Gaynor Arnold, whose work “Girl in a Blue Dress” was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize
Jo Ind – yes, that’s me – author or Memories of Bliss, former Birmingham Post journalist.

I greatly enjoyed being able to choose any book I wanted from the store to sit on my shelf. It was better than being a child let loose in a sweet shop.

Rarely, do I allow myself just to pick what I want. Normally my book selections are constrained by concerns about money and whether I will have time to actually read whatever title I’m considering. For The Curated Shelf, I could just pick what I fancied and there was a luxurious freedom in that.

My shelf turned out to be biographical. I chose books I had enjoyed as child and enjoy reading with my own little boy (Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle), novels where I had interviewed the author through my work as a journalist, sheet music because I love singing and playing the piano, a book on language to reflect my enduring interest as a philosopher and writer. In picking whatever I wanted, I found a story of my life displayed through the spines on books. That felt pleasurable and somehow important to me.

I hope people enjoyed looking at the curations as much as I enjoyed selecting the items – but I doubt that they could have done simply because I enjoyed it so very much.

Children are the best clients

Jo Ind — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:15:50 +0000

Looking back over my work in the past five years, there are two projects that stand out as the most enjoyable. The jobs that have made me happiest have been designing the content for:

Evelina London Children’s Healthcare (through my contract with Digital Life Sciences)
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (through my contract with Maverick Television)

Both jobs involved doing workshops and interviews with children, play therapists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and support staff and then using that information to create the style and voice of the website’s content.

I have gone through similar processes to make digital content for adults – West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, HEWM Learning, Modality Partnership, NHS local – but, though I have enjoyed it, it has not made my heart sing in quite the same way.

When I make content for children, I have a child continually in my mind. Going to work, turning on my computer, travelling, meeting, grafting…I am holding the needs of children in my heart.

For some reason, this makes me happy. Children are the best clients.

First sex, then babies

Jo Ind — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 11:26:26 +0000

I will be doing two gigs in Birmingham in the last week of February 2015.

On Tuesday, 24 February at 7.30pm, I will be leading a workshop on sexuality for Birmingham Changing Attitude. We will be trying to find constructive ways of talking about sexuality in churches.

The next morning – Wednesday, 25 February at 11am – Katrice Horsley and I will be celebrating the re-opening of the Oxfam Bookstore in Kings Heath by telling stories and opening a conversation on motherhood and creativity.

“First sex, then babies,” is how I’ve been remembering it. But whose to say it happens in that order? Chickens, eggs…you know.

Either way, it would be great to see you there.

Invitation to Sexuality – The Inclusive Church Resource

Jo Ind — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 18:16:53 +0000

I am delighted to have contributed a chapter to Sexuality – The Inclusive Church Resource, which is due to be launched in Birmingham in February 2015.

Dr Susannah Cornwall, who wrote the theology section of the book, is a woman after my heart and mind on sexuality.

She says the church tends to think that sexuality issues are about homosexuality because it constructs homosexuality as “other”.

One things that follows from that is that heterosexuality is often unmarked, it’s just something in the water that people barely notice or comment on because they take it for granted.

“Sexuality isn’t just to do with orientation it’s broader than that,” she says.

I do so agree. Much of my own work, has been around finding a way of conceptualising sexuality so that we can all sit down and listen and weave our theology together.

I hope some of us will be doing that at the Birmingham launch of the book. Everyone is welcome on Tuesday, 24 February 2015 at 7.30pm at Balsall Heath Church Centre, 100 Mary Street, Balsall Heath B12 9JU

The event is hosted by the Birmingham branch of Changing Attitude.

The book is part of a series published by Darton Longmann and Todd which aims to make the church more inclusive on matters such as mental health, disability, sexuality, poverty, gender and ethnicity.

Inclusive Church is an organisation founded in 2003, initially because of concern at the resignation of Revd Dr Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, but thereafter because it wanted to work towards a church that is welcoming and open to all.

Work-life integration – the new work-life balance (darling)

Jo Ind — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:59:42 +0000

The good news for those who’ve struggled to strike a work-life balance is that you’re let off. Work-life balance is so turn-of-the-millennium (darling). Work-life integration is the must-have of the teeny decade.

It was six years ago the Chartered Management Institute produced a report Management Futures – The World in 2018 which claimed that rather than balancing work and home demands, by 2018 we will be weaving the two together.

More recently Mashable has been asking if work-life integration is the new norm and Harvard Business Review has considered what successful work-life integration looks like.

Work-life integration

To me work-life integration looks like doing my supermarket shopping in five minutes while waiting for a meeting at work to begin. It’s picking up an email from the office while standing in the school playground. It’s saying to a colleague: “Let me share this document with you so you can work on it tomorrow at home.”

It means the boundaries between my paid work and the rest of my life are less rigid than they were before Google was a map, a calendar, a filing system, a note book and an address book as well as a store, a video channel and a search engine.

Where I once restricted work to work, I can now nip into work while watching telly, lounging by a hotel pool or crawling through a tunnel in a soft play centre.

Do I want my work and life to be integrated?

I CAN do these things. But is it a good thing to do? Do I want to? For me the answer is about the extent to which the integration is within my control.

For the most part Google and its suite of tools have greatly enhanced my life. Being able to glance at work emails when I’m not in the office makes working part-time considerably easier. I don’t have to respond to emails if I don’t want to, but I can pick up on important things, if do.

And because I am only ever a click away, I can leave the office to see my son star as Joseph in his school nativity play or care for him when he is ill. It’s a win-win situation. Everyone gains.

Google calendar makes it possible

Apart from the capability of picking up emails anywhere, the tool I find most useful in leading an integrated life is Google calendar.

I remember the days, not so long ago, when, if I was trying to organise a get-together with a friend, she had to go home to look at her calendar before we could arrange anything. She and her husband kept a calendar in their kitchen, so they could see what the other was doing. This was fine – unless she was at work, in the pub or anywhere else when she needed to make an arrangement. How she needed Google calendar!

I now have a Google calendar for home and one for work. I have one for my husband and one for my son and I can access the calendars of whoever gives me permission in the office.

This functionality is invaluable to anyone who aspires to lead an integrated life. If I need to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I can click into my work calendar, my home calendar and my son’s to find a space when all are free. And I can do this wherever I am – from my phone, from the office or from my desk top computer at home.

I can turn the calendars off

But the real beauty of Google calendar is that I can turn the calendars off. I don’t share my home calendar with anyone outside the family. And when I’m at home or on holiday, I can tag a box which means my work calendar is not longer in my view.

Sometimes I need to see my personal and professional arrangements together. Sometime I want to separate the two. The beauty of Google calendar is that I can integrate or not, depending on what my needs are at the time.

Google calendar is not just a tool for work-life integration. It’s a metaphor for it too.