For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
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.
I used to check my e-mail once, sometimes twice a day, usually after work or at the very end of the night. (I know this is starting out all lame and nostalgic, but bear with me….) I’d respond to anything that was important, then wait a few days for things that weren’t. My back and forth conversations were usually separated by a day or longer, Continue reading
So this is the end of my three-part series spelling out my entire work history. In Part 1 I covered my early years learning about work, and in Part 2 I moved on to post-college struggles to both scrounge up some money and get out of New Hampshire. Continue reading
This week I’m continuing my list of every job I’ve ever worked with my first four years after college. If you missed the high school and undergrad years, check out Part I here. Continue reading
I blatantly stole the idea for this post from one J. Money did a few years ago, since laying out people’s actual job histories shows how work doesn’t always form some straightforward linear path. We tend to think of careers as a track that goes from College, to a Job, then to a Better Job, and then to Even Better Jobs that steadily pay more Continue reading
Staying focused is important—and hard. My biggest faults in this area are procrastinating, getting distracted during worktime, and taking on too much and getting overwhelmed (especially when I’m supposed to be writing). Case in point: I probably should have started this entry an hour ago.
As I’ve talked about before, structured Day Jobs make it easier to get things done because they provide goals, timelines, Continue reading
I get asked this question a lot.
When I applied to grad school, I was at a crossroads (wanted to become a writer but wasn’t sure how) and had a Day Job I needed to get out of since I wasn’t yet at the point where I thought of it as a Day Job. Years before, someone had suggested grad school as the main path Continue reading
When you’re a kid, life’s easy because you don’t have to make any scary, life-changing decisions. Mom and Dad buy the food, decide where you’re going to live, take care of Christmas, and send you off to school. All of your goals are clearly laid out, and until age 18, they pretty much look like this: Continue reading
Writing about overtime hours last week reminded me of last spring when I took on the challenge of working 70 hours a week, every week, between three different jobs. It was pretty intense.
How did this happen, you ask? Since there wasn’t much to do at my regular Day Job working at the research greenhouse, I sought out a work from home opportunity (a.k.a. my Continue reading
There’s a lot of things I hate (rude people, traffic jams, being called “buddy” in conversation), but not getting paid for the work I’ve done takes the top slot. This isn’t because I’ve been stiffed on a paycheck, but because I’ve had jobs where I had to face off against my arch nemesis unpaid overtime.
Check out this graph from the Economic Policy Institute showing Continue reading
Let’s get one thing straight: if you spend less money on dumb shit, you’ll have more freedom to do the stuff you want to do. This means fewer hours spent doing Day Job work and more time for your creative work because you’re not working harder to pay for that coffee table or those three steak dinners you ate last week. Continue reading
I went in for a haircut the other day and was about to take a seat when the barber asked me to wait until he’d swept up. He got a broom from the corner, swept up all the hair clumps from around the haircutting chair, then bent over and scooped them into a trash bucket all by himself.
Sweep, sweep, sweep. Continue reading
As far as I can figure, there are two ways to think about the work-life balance:
In the first model, people spend most of their working time (or at least as much time as possible) doing work that’s meaningful to them. That work can be creating something powerful or unique, doing something to better the community or the world, or simply providing a service that makes people happy. In return, Continue reading