Still playing with your fidget spinner? Keep up! The newest craze is painting rocks and leaving them around town. Yes, really. It's not litter because it's art.
My county, Norfolk, is, as usual, right on trend. The Norfolk Rocks (UK) Facebook group has gathered more than 34,000 members in just a couple of months, and the feed is full of photos of happy children, and almost as many happy adults, brandishing their painted treasures. Whether decorated with toddlers' scribbles or full-blown works of art, you'll find the stones in parks, in shops and on sea walls, ready for the lucky finder to admire, keep or rehide (a word that's too new for spellcheck to recognise).

It's got me thinking about beauty and art and shared experiences and how much fun it is to paint a stone despite having no artistic skill whatsoever.

And it's also made me reconsider 'serendipity', that delightful word that perfectly summarises the joyful happenstance (another delightful word) of discovering a pretty stone in the street.

​The OED Online defines serendipity as 'the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way'. Merriam Webster's definition is even more appropriate: 'the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for'. It goes on to describe the rather, well, serendipitous story of its origins as both a word and a concept. In January 1754, serial letter writer and linguistic inventor Horace Walpole described the discovery of an interesting fact as:

'... almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word… I once read a silly fairy tale, called “The Three Princes of Serendip” [Sri Lanka]: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...'

It's rather handy for dictionary compilers that Walpole not only appears to have created a new word but also took the trouble to claim the credit for it.
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As a (serendipitous) aside, Merriam Webster lists other words that were first recorded in 1754, including avocado pear, consensual, disgusting, extravaganza, face mask, polymorphous, postbox, prima donna, self-importance, unsportsmanlike and washing machine. One wonders how they communicated in 1753.

​Anyone would think we’d got our work/life balance pretty well sorted. After all, seven female self-employed editors had taken a weekend away from our usual home responsibilities to gather around a kitchen table in a chic London suburb (one remotely), leaving partners, pets and kids to sort themselves out while we discussed our careers. Of course, you could also argue that we were missing precious family time by choosing to work on a Saturday, but we all felt liberated by the opportunity to focus on ourselves for once.
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So the discussion about work/life balance, coming at the end of a long, hot, productive day, was well timed. But first things first – what exactly does it mean? And does it matter? Work is part of life but has anyone ever, honestly, achieved the perfect balance with their personal time? After all, we would all far rather work from home, with all its domestic distractions, than in a noisy, stuffy office with a two-hour commute.

When life gets in the way of work
Clearly, enjoying your work is key to making long hours easier to manage. Sometimes writing a blog post or proofreading an intriguing book doesn’t even feel like proper work. But then there are the endless, stressful, troublesome projects that take forever to disentangle and straighten out. Either way, it’s easy to blink up at the clock and wonder if that time should have been invested in our families instead. Will the kids’ memories of their childhood be their mum, harassed, at her desk, snapping ‘Make your own dinner!’ when they poke their heads round the door?
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Perhaps it’s because we’re women. Perhaps, in allowing ourselves to take charge of domestic routines, our generation has failed to take forward the lessons of feminism. Even if our partners willingly contribute to the household chores (and, on the whole, they do) we still help to perpetuate the myth that we can achieve it all. Is it entirely fair to complain about our husbands’ full-laundry-basket-blindspot or should we take responsibility for deskilling our men when we insist on doing all the ‘wife work’?

It's time to take control
Whatever our personal circumstances, we agreed that it was the ‘life’ part of work/life balance that’s often the problem. We all hate those pick ‘n’ mix days that involve short bursts of work interspersed with personal obligations. Whatever we often tell ourselves, work is far more controllable than the randomness of our personal lives. But how can we control it without obsessing about losing income? Well, we had plenty of ideas:

1. Be organised. Calculate the number of hours you have available in a day or week and be realistic about what you can fit into them. Factor in how much money you want or need to earn and how much time do you want to devote to that. You may realise that you need to increase your rates or improve your client-base.
2. Create routines, even minor ones. If you know that you are going to empty the dishwasher each morning before you start work, the act of putting away the plates may get you into work mode. It’s not always easy when deadlines loom – one of the group hadn’t managed to go running each day before lunch as she'd planned, and Gillian Michaels on my pre-breakfast exercise DVD rarely gets the chance to shout at me – but at least introducing some structure helps to identify what you’re aiming for.
3. Be confident. Say no more often, don’t apologise for yourself and practise negotiation – “Can I deliver that on Monday instead of Friday?” “I can’t do that on x date but I am available on y date. Is that any good?” Even when you plan not to overbook yourself, projects may run late and all come in at once.
4. Encourage children to do their own tasks. It’s often surprising what they’re capable of achieving, given the chance. Even tiny kids can manage simple tasks and, when you’re sweeping up the shards of another dropped plate, tell yourself they’re learning life skills.
5. Share tasks with your partner. It’s often surprising what they’re capable of achieving, given the chance.
6. Take time off if you need to. Staying at your desk when you’re ill or distracted by a family crisis will reduce the quality of your work and be more likely to lose you clients than if you tell them you’re unable to work in the first place. They’ll understand the impact of personal issues and, if not, maybe you don’t want to work with them anyway.
7. Book holidays, stick to them and turn your email off while you’re away from your desk.
8. Take regular stock. Make a regular note of your successes, praise from clients or colleagues and jobs you’ve enjoyed. It’s heartening to realise how many positives you can collect when you allow yourself.
9. Set goals for the next six months and post them to yourself at the deadline (yes, using an actual stamp).
10. Don’t set yourself up to fail. Be realistic about what you can do within your own circumstances and try not to compare yourself to others who, in any case, are probably struggling with the balance just as much as you. If you keep waiting for something better to happen, it won’t – and constantly striving and wishing for that indefinable something won’t make you happy either.

In short, we must fight our inertia and take time out of that endless busy-work, even if it’s just to identify exactly what needs to change in our current routine. But don’t beat yourself up about what you haven’t done. Nobody can do it all but everybody can find ways of making life work for them.
Now, I’d better go and do some proper work. It’s either that or hang up the washing.