Time management in my job has been a lot more of a balancing act than I am used to experiencing in previous jobs I have worked at in the US. As mentioned in my previous blog post, the European model of work seems to heavily emphasize a healthy work/life balance. But if I’m being more specific, it promotes a different brand of flexibility in when the “work” stops and the “life” begins.

I’d like to preface this by saying that this is my first real technical position, and US tech jobs may be vastly different than my previous teenage work experience. With that said, my previous work experiences have been fairly cut and dry. Come in at 11 and leave at 9. Communicate with your managers when your lunch break will happen at least an hour before you take it. The US model of working is very orderly in this fashion. It is straightforward as to avoid any source of confusion.

The German model is nothing like this. On day 1, I was asked to come in at 10:00. Assuming the US model, I thought this would just be your standard 9-5, just pushed forward an hour to be a 10-6 instead. When I arrived, I was told that I would be free to just come and go whenever I wanted in the future.

What? After being used to time responsibility and always keeping my eye on the clock, this was a massive culture shock. But as long as the work was finished, I was free to come and go as I needed, even if that meant only half of my week was actually spent in the office.

This has given me much more to think about in terms of managing my time. The structured framework was nice in a way, because it forced you to sit down and focus on your tasks whether you wanted to or not. Now I need to wrestle with the fact that I can stay out late on a work-night, I can go to that bar that our group has eyeing on a random Wednesday. I just need to make sure my high priority tasks are out of the way before I make such a venture to account for it.

Even within the office itself, there is a solid amount of flexibility in how tasks are carried out. As a general rule, the bigger the task, the more nebulous the due date is. If the task is simple enough, my supervisor will be fairly strict about me checking it off quickly and succinctly, but these simple tweaks will be assigned in large blocks.

For example, in our group meetings, we go over topics like improper margins and broken links. More often than not, these fixes are near instantaneous. Even though many of these smaller tweaks are assigned in the span of one large meeting, they are expected to be wrapped up as of the next day or two, since they each individually only take 5-10 minutes to address and failing to address them strips the company of its professionalism.

But on the other hand, we may talk about larger initiatives like creating a new design layout or prototyping a new menu system. In these cases, the task itself is larger with a web of subtasks, and the due dates are far more flexible. Most of the time, these are new features, and as such they aren’t critical implementations. If I am falling behind on one of these bigger tasks, I can contact my supervisor and she will extend the due date by days or weeks even, no questions asked.

Juggling with both the cultural and workplace-specific patterns in time management has been rather interesting. Even though the work/life balance flexibility seems to be a pretty European trait, the prioritization of small bug fixes over implementing large features is something I expect to use even back at home. I really do understand why those in the industry hold internships in high regard, as they teach these habits that academia simply can’t.

Until next week… Tschüss!