The Day Job Blog

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Are you hard at work on projects that bring you tremendous fulfillment but don’t exactly pay in folding money? Do you face the ever-harrowing struggle of balancing creative work with life’s other responsibilities? Is the job where you spend a substantial portion of your time not what really drives you, even though you do it anyway?

Then you’ve come to the right place. We all gotta keep the bills paid.

Don’t Just Say “I’m Too Busy”

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I’ll try to keep this one brief, since I’ve got stuff to do today.

I don’t like saying “I’m too busy” when someone invites me to something or asks me for a favor.  It feels like a copout—because in a lot of ways, it is.

If have a chance to pick up a new editing job or write something or even just go out for drinks with friends, I try to think about the other things I’m currently juggling in comparison to this new opportunity.  Do I really want to do this new thing, or would I rather focus on what I’m already working on? Continue reading »

Thoughts on Hyping Your Shit

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I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it.  I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.

For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful.  Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about.  The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.

Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written Continue reading »

I Paid Off ALL My Student Loans!!!* (with an asterisk)

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Happy New Year everybody—I’m feeling rejuvenated after my vacation and ready to take on a whole new set of challenges for 2019.  Hope you’re feeling the same way.

I also reached a big, BIG milestone, as implied by the title: last month, after making my first wire transfer of money back from Japan, I paid off the very last $3,400 of my very last student loan.  At 5.8%, that final loan was costing me $16 bucks a month in interest, but moreso than the monthly savings is knowing that I’m now COMPLETELY FREE OF INTEREST-ACCUMULATING DEBT, which just feels all kinds of awesome.

It was hard to describe the feeling of pure freedom I experienced when I clicked Send on that last payment, Continue reading »

Why I Still Write in a Journal Every Day

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(well, really like 4-5 days a week, but that made for a less catchy title)

I first started journaling seventeen years ago back in early December 2001, when I was sixteen, worked in the dairy section at my town’s grocery store, had just gotten my first car, still watched Simpsons reruns every night on Fox, and spent more time acting in school plays than writing.  So why did I start journaling?

Truth is, I don’t really remember—maybe it’s that I’d entered a time in my life when I was first starting to do things on my own (getting that first car was a BIG deal) while the last remnants of my childhood were slipping away forever.  Or maybe things in my life were just going really well and I wanted to record how awesome they were so I wouldn’t ever forget.  Also, I won’t lie—I secretly hoped I might be famous someday Continue reading »

I Edited a Writing Anthology!!!

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So this one’s pretty cool.

Last spring I put together and edited Concord Writers Night Out 2018: An Anthology of Writers and Writing in association with the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.  It’s a collection of short stories, novel excerpts, poems, and essays from writers around the area with an introduction and a short story by yours truly. (My piece is called “Rejection,” a fictional rejection letter to a REALLY bad writer).  I handled the editing and the bulk of the organizing while fellow writers Gary Devore and Kevin Barrett formatted the e-pub and distribution ends.

It was a pretty rad project to work on, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally out.  After much discussion we decided to make the electronic versions available FREE to literally anyone who wants one, so if you want to check it out you can download the PDF from the NHWP website or get the e-pub for Kindles and tablets directly from the publisher or the iTunes store. Continue reading »

Here’s What I’m Working On Right Now

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A lot’s changed in the past six months—the most glaring thing being that I LIVE IN JAPAN NOW so my routine’s changed a lot from what I was used to back in the States.

On a grander scale, though, the landscape of how I’m spending my time and which goals I’m pursuing is also different—not because my goals have changed, but because I’ve made some decent progress in the past few months in crossing bigger projects off my To-Do list, and that feels pretty good.

So without further ado, here’s an up-to-date list of which goals I’m pursuing right now, in approximate order of importance: Continue reading »

Guest Reflection – 3 New Developments a Day

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So two weeks ago I posted about making good use of your time and the challenges that go along with it, which a lot of folks seemed to appreciate.  (A sign that maybe we’re all struggling with the same problems??)

One of those folks happened to be my old board-game playing cohort Darryl Parker, web designer and self-employed entrepreneur who opened up Schoodac’s coffee shop in my hometown of Warner, New Hampshire back in 2015.  He wrote some wise words down in the depths of the comments section about how he manages his time, and I found it way too thought-provoking not to share as its own post: Continue reading »

How to Deal When Your Day Job Makes You Do Pointless Shit

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We’ve all been there: You’re sitting at your Day Job minding your own business when your boss or some coworker comes up and asks you to attend a boring meeting, fill out a pointless report, finish some useless project, or take on a new task that you know will absolutely 100% never benefit anyone or anything.  It’s times like this when you sit back, throw your clenched fists in the air, and voice that familiar lament we’ve all felt a million times:

Why do I have to do this????

Being handed pointless tasks at work reminds me of being in middle school when a teacher needed to fill a lesson period and would give us some hastily photocopied worksheet that didn’t even try to teach us anything or hone any skills.  Instead, the whole point of the worksheet Continue reading »

A Short Piece (Promise!) About Making Good Use of Your Time

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I think a lot about time.  Namely why I never seem to have enough of it.

I think about the things I do in the short term to waste time, like scrolling through news after work and watching chains of Youtube videos after dinner and lying in bed too long on weekend mornings.  When these things start to become habits, that’s dangerous, because the amount of time they take away increases over a longer period and you lose even more of your time in these small chunks.

So, I’ve been trying to catch these habits and get rid of them before they do more damage. Continue reading »

I Got SICK (But I’m All Better Now)

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The title says it all—last week I got hit by a nasty case of strep throat that had me writhing in tonsil-pinched agony for three nights and coughing in a runny-nosed mess for four days, plus some lingering coughing and sneezing I just couldn’t shake.  (That’s the most graphic I’m going to get in this post—promise!)

We’ve all been sick before and know what it’s like (no fun, except for the staying home and watching movies part), but this week I want to share three illness-related observations you might not have thought about: Japanese health care, taking days off, and falling behind on creative work. Continue reading »

Why I Blog About My Shortcomings

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A few weeks back I was talking to a friend about this blog, and he summed up the entire thing like this:

“It seems like you’re always talking about some problem you’re going through, and how as soon as you’ve dealt with it you’re FINALLY going to get some work done for serious this time.”

As usual I’m exaggerating, but his point was basically the same: I often sound like a procrastinator who’s vowing to finally get down to work as soon as the latest distraction is out of the way.  Especially in the wake of my last post about kicking bad habits in Japan, I’ve been thinking: have I fallen into a pattern of letting one distraction after another interfere with my work?

Here’s an even crazier thought: have I fallen into a pattern of blogging about these same distractions so that everybody can see how inefficient and easily distracted I am?

To supplement my point, here’s a list of distractions and difficulties I’ve written about since I started this blog: Continue reading »

Bad Habits I’ve Fallen Into in Japan

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Opportunities aside, a big disadvantage with packing up all your stuff and moving halfway around the world is that it screws up your rhythm big time.  Back home I had a set work schedule, a familiar desk where I could write, and ingrained habits for how to get my shit done.  In Japan, not so much.

Part of why I love schedules is that they help me develop better work habits: by doing my work at similar times of the day in similar ways in a similar place, the process becomes more familiar and less intimidating, thus helping me ward off procrastination and save time by getting down to work faster.

This is the same reason I do things like make my bed every morning and eat a similar breakfast (eggs over easy with toast if I have the time, cereal with milk if I don’t) so that instead of having to think about how to get my day going I can just do it, like a kind of reflex or muscle memory.  Get enough of these little routines Continue reading »