BOSS Young Executive and Coles head of digital, Remya Ramesh, shades potentially difficult meetings red in her diary. “If it’s a sea of red I know it will be a bad week.”
I had taken a job at Facebook [Head of Design, AMEX] and moved my life to London but the pandemic hit four days later. This was like early March 2020, they shut the office and I left my Macbook charger thinking I would be back soon. I was staying in a serviced apartment. All my stuff was being shipped from Melbourne which was going to take three months to arrive. I came back to Australia when they warned they were going to shut the borders.
We are all working remotely at the moment. I’ve been working from Tasmania for the past six or seven months, so all my team are right across Australia. Just before Christmas was the first time I met the whole team. If we even said we wanted people to come back one day a week people would quit. I was able to hire two or three people because other companies made that decision they wanted people to come back.
I didn’t realise but I lost about 12kgs. I didn’t drink at all. We had a champagne for my partner’s birthday before I left for London and I told my partner we would have a champagne next time we met in London. But he never joined me and so we waited to have that drink.Mainly planning the week. I like to colour code my work calendar. All the meetings which are important or stressful I’ll put in red. Any meetings with my peers or my team that I know will be less stressful I make blue.