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.
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
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