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.
A few days before Christmas, after a day of sorting, packing, taping, and maneuvering three armfuls of boxes to the backseat of my car, I finally mailed out this year’s Art Swap packages. This was the fourth annual Art Swap, and since I’m a sucker for stats, here’s what this year’s looked like: Continue reading
I used to be really bad at job interviews.
Not only that, I didn’t know that I was really bad at job interviews, and would walk out of them thinking I’d done really well only to get really disappointed when I didn’t get the job. Continue reading
This is Part 2 of my interview with poet, artist, and part-time cookiemaker Paul Hanson Clark, so you can check out Part 1 here.
But I Also Have a Day Job: So to make your life work and still do your art, you have to go to your web editing job during the day and make the doughs in the afternoon. Continue reading
Paul Hanson Clark is a poet, visual artist, and occasional musician heavily involved in the local poetry and art scenes in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. Until recently he worked two jobs: mornings in an office doing web design and afternoons mixing dough for a cookie shop (more about this in Part 2!), though he went on to leave the cookie shop job several weeks after our interview.
We sat on the floor of his living room—a large, carpeted room with no furniture and walls hung with his drawings and paintings—to talk about structuring your time and keeping organized. Continue reading
A couple years ago, I had a Day Job where sometimes I had to go to parties with my coworkers and other people involved with where I worked. These parties were usually pretty awkward because I was the youngest one there and didn’t have much in common with the people around me.
At one of them, though, I met a guy a few years older than me who was pretty interesting, and I told him that I’d lived in Japan and was working on a novel about the lives of foreigners there. Continue reading
I used to commute. A lot.
Back when I started my first office job, I was driving 23 miles to work and back, which took 35 minutes AND since I used a busy commuter route I had to get to work 20 minutes early or waste even more time sitting in traffic. I listened to a lot of music during that time, though, to the point where I still to this day associate certain parts of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming album with that drive. Continue reading
Budgeting is awesome and literally everyone should do it. As a creative guy with a Day Job, budgeting’s especially important for me since I need to track my Day Job hours and keep the accounts balanced while I finish my novel-in-progress. Not only that, it also shows me how I’m doing in my quest to pay off my student loans and helps me track how much of my income goes toward essentials (like rent!) and how much goes toward fun stuff (like books!). Continue reading
So back in my Day Job Basics Guide I wrote about the difference between Day Jobs and Real Jobs, but in real life the spectrum’s a bit more complicated. I’m a big fan of being honest with yourself about how your job fulfills your goals and passions, since knowing one way or the other helps you organize your goals and make positive changes. Continue reading
I taught English lessons at a for-profit Japanese eikaiwa (conversation school) in Yamanashi Prefecture from 2009 to 2011, and one of the things that most struck me about the Japanese work environment was how easily the Japanese separate their work lives from their home lives. There’s a lot of cultural factors at work here, but the one people explained to me most often was the idea of honne and tatemae: Continue reading
(Naturally, I’ve got my phone on silent while I’m writing this.)
I’m like you: when I hear my phone make noise, I absolutely have to go find out what that noise means, not necessarily because it’s urgent, but to satisfy the deep, immediate, and all-encompassing sense of curiosity that stops me from thinking of anything else. Continue reading
…well, most of them anyway. Last week I cashed out a good chunk of savings to pay off one of my final two student loans, a financial move that cut my monthly payment by two-thirds (!!). That basically equates to a ton more financial flexibility each month (i.e., more cash for whatever I want).
The biggest reason for the payoff, though, was to ease the transition into working fewer Day Job Hours. Think about this: It took me 20 hours of Day Job work each month Continue reading
So in Parts 1 through 4 I went through what makes a Day Job different from a Real Job, the philosophies involved with working that Day Job, and how to find which Day Job best fits your current goals. I talked about money, time, and handling your energy, but there’s one really, really important thing left.
Working a Day Job serves absolutely no purpose if you’re not also working toward your creative goals. Continue reading