What to Do When You Double Book

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Last week, things got pretty fucked.

Okay, to be fair, nothing actually got fucked—I was just REALLY busy juggling different deadlines, appointments, and other commitments that all seemed to fall to the end of April.  To make matters worse, I still haven’t entirely unpacked at my new place, so my office and much of the rest of the apartment is still a mass of boxes and piles.  This meant that when I needed to find something from those boxes or piles, instead of just reaching over and grabbing it, I needed to search for it, which meant I spent a lot of time searching that could have been been spent on other things (like actually unpacking…) Continue reading »

A Fond Farewell to My Old Office…

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Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment.

The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before.  The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips.  This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline.

While I’m very much looking forward to having my own place again (especially once everything’s finally set up!), in this post I want to say a warm goodbye to my old office, where I had a lot of good times and did a lot of meaningful work.
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The Freelance Life vs the Employee Life Part 2: The Drawbacks

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Last week I dove into the differences in mindset that separate freelance workers from regular full-time employees: things like how you view your job, how you schedule your time, and how you relate to coworkers. (If you missed that post, definitely check it out before you read this one!)

I had a lot to say (and the post title definitely grabbed people’s attention!), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the negative aspects of working for yourself as well, since it’s not all wine and roses.

Interestingly, when I talk to full-time employees about differences in our working lives, a lot of them are quick to point out the cons of self-employment, which they’ve clearly given a lot of thought to.  In some cases, though, I think they focus on the cons because they don’t know how they would handle them if they were working for themselves.

I recently heard an entrepreneur on a podcast say that even though starting a business in the internet age is easier and involves less risk than at any point in history, people still feel scared to try it.  That’s because they’re stuck in a pre-internet mindset, where working for yourself involves a lot of start-up capital and could cause you to lose everything Continue reading »

How to Get the Most Out of a Creative Work Break

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I’m at an odd point in my work routine, and thought I’d reflect on why.

On Wednesday, March 1st, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel, which I started in January and have been working on four days a week (give or take) ever since.  This development came after finishing Draft 1 in August and Draft 2 in December, which means I’ve been working continuously on this novel for almost a full year.

I want to let Draft 3 sit a bit before diving back in, so part of my work plan for March involves pausing active novel revisions so I can type up the revisions I’ve already made on to the computer, which I estimate to be a 30-35 hour job.  Most of the heavy revisions were in the opening chapters (which thus take longer to retype), and now that those are over with, I’ve settled into a routine of typing out two chapters a day with the goal of finishing by March 17th.

However, typing is different from revising: I like to do it at the end of the workday while listening to music, and it requires a LOT less mental energy than sitting down to actively edit a draft.  This means that while I still have a big typing project to work on (in addition to all the other things on my backlog list!), the type of work I’m doing has changed significantly Continue reading »

2023 New Year’s Resolutions!!

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Happy (late) New Year, all.  I spent most of December working through a pretty big miasma of, well, stuff.

Biggest of this was finishing the Second Draft of my Secret New Novel, though I also kept busy with some bigger editing jobs, personal projects, and a whole load of Christmas shopping.

All of that combined to burn me out in a pretty big way—I just barely got all of my gifts wrapped in time for Christmas, enjoyed some fun celebrations and holiday gatherings, then spent the last week of 2022 taking it slow, which I very badly needed.

What does taking it slow mean? In my case it meant sleeping in, taking some alone time, and enjoying time with family and friends, in between some light personal and work projects and some much-needed cleaning and organizing.  It wasn’t quite a vacation, since I still did some work, and I even picked up a last minute editing job that a client needed for an early January deadline, even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t be taking on new jobs Continue reading »

To Work or Not to Work: The Eternal Weekend Question

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I’m writing this post on Saturday (yeah, I tend to schedule these posts in advance, EPIC SHOCK), where I woke up at my usual time, made breakfast, wrote out a to-do list, and sat down to finish a lot of things I didn’t quite have time for this week, including drafting this post.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t normally work a standard day on the weekend.  Usually I use my weekends for seeing friends, reading, doing physical chores, and in general, relaxing and de-stressing from my creative and editing work to put me in a refreshed state of mind for the week.

The problem is, though, that some weeks things get really busy, and taking an entire two days off for a weekend can be incredibly refreshing…but also leave me scrambling with a SUPER busy week where I’m rushing to not only finish the usual things I have to do, but all the things I wanted to do the previous week but didn’t.

And that SUCKS Continue reading »

October 2022 Novel Update: Organizing Big-Picture Edits

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Happy Halloween, everybody—it’s been a pretty good month for novel writing.

For those who haven’t been following, I finished the rough draft of my Secret New Novel in August, and since then I’ve been revising the draft, printing out each chapter and making changes directly on the page with a pen, after which I type up the edits to make a new digital draft of each chapter.  The process helps me to more easily find areas that need to be cut or changed, but also to look at the novel with fresh eyes when it’s on the page instead of a screen.

Despite my taking a week off from writing in mid-October when some friends visited, I’ve made substantial editing progress this month compared to last month.  That’s party because the first four or so chapters of the draft were in MUCH rougher shape than the rest of the novel.  That meant that when I hit Chapter 5, I suddenly found myself revising faster, finding less to fix, and making more smaller-scale edits than drastic rewrites.

In short, this translates into more pages revised per day Continue reading »

Feeling Overwhelmed? Make an Emergency To-Do List!

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When I was in middle school, every once in a while I found myself home on a weekend with too many things to do: I had homework to finish, a school project to start, chores to do, my own projects to organize, and probably a phone call or two to make and a letter to mail.  I used to worry about getting all of these things done and would tackle them haphazardly, doing whichever one seemed most urgent, or that I felt like doing at a given moment.

Then I discovered To-Do lists, and everything changed.

Instead of dashing around throughout the day, I’d take a scrap of paper about 5½ inches by 4¼ inches (my family used to tear used pieces of paper into quarters, then use the blank side as notepads) and write down all the things I wanted to do that day, in the approximate order I wanted to do them in.  I felt relieved getting all of those tasks out of my head so I didn’t have to think about them anymore, but more importantly, having the list in hand gave me a tangible plan for making my way through the maze of a day when I had so many varied things to do.

Now I’m an adult who also has a lot of varied things to do: some writing-related, some business-related, some housework-related, and some random things Continue reading »

Reflections on Six Years of Blogging

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Hard to believe that I started working on the But I Also Have a Day Job blog six (!) years ago this week.  At this time in 2016 I was testing designs and playing with WordPress formatting while I drafted the very first posts on Day Job Basics, and from there, it was off to the races.

This blog represented a really big step for me: back in 2016, I’d finished grad school, was trying to sell one novel and finish another, and made a major life change by moving out of Nebraska, where I’d gone to grad school and stayed an extra year working in the Agriculture department.

I knew I had to start taking my writing more seriously and figuring out my next steps, and the But I Also Have a Day Job blog was a HUGE step in clarifying the direction I wanted to take my creative work and my life in general.  Before this blog, I didn’t have much of an online presence at all, had very little published work, and it felt like I was just barely starting out.

Fast forward to six years later, and I’m…pretty satisfied with how how far I’ve come.  I haven’t done as much as I’ve liked, but I’m overall Continue reading »

My Awesome Work-From-Home Writer/Editor Schedule

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Over the years I’ve held a lot of different Day Jobs, all of which required me to be there during set hours.  As a result, I’ve had to schedule my writing and creative work for whatever time I had left over.

This led to some interesting workarounds over the years: for example, I went from working mostly after dinner when I worked in an office to working mostly in the afternoons when I taught in Japan, as well as sneaking in whatever creative work I could during my free periods.

You might remember, though, that before I moved to Japan I spent about three months without working any Day Job at all, and during that time I had free reign over my time as I revised MFA Thesis Novel and edited a writing anthology.  During this time I set my own schedule of working on the novel in the morning when I felt fresh, taking a long break, then doing whatever other email or editing work I had to throughout the late afternoon and evening Continue reading »

Playing Catch-Up All the Time is REALLY Stressful

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In my trusty Schedule Book, I not only keep a column of To-Do list items I plan to finish in the next 1-3 weeks, I also keep a list of tasks that aren’t quite as high priority.  These tend to be things like miscellaneous writing projects, plans to add to my website or organize my writing life, and things I’d like to research for the future.  I also tend to keep personal projects on there: organize these folders, paint that room, email this person I haven’t talked to in far too long, etc.

Sorting out long-term tasks in separate lists is similar to the Bullet Journal system, where people keep a master list of things they want to accomplish, then use that list to narrow down their goals for the week that they feel they can easily get done.  (You might be using a similar system to sort through your long- and short-term goals already, but if you’re not, I definitely recommend trying one!)

My problem, though, is that because I’m busy, I don’t get to the Long-Term list as often as I’d like—there’s stuff on there from years ago I’d still really like to get to, plus stuff from six months ago I wish I’d been able to make time for much sooner.

Sometimes I look at my Long-Term To-Do List and feel disappointed, stressed, or like my system isn’t working Continue reading »

Freeing Up Your Mental Space is REALLY Important for Creativity

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Sometimes I get burned out or depressed—and when that happens, it’s a whole lot harder to work on a creative project.

I talked about this at length last fall, when a towering workload at my Japanese university job combined with a ninety-minute commute and having to check the final formatting on MFA Thesis Novel left me feeling overwhelmed, constantly pushing myself to the limit, and crashing hard on the weekends when I wanted to work on my secret new novel project.

All told, I felt overwhelmed and too damned busy.

I’ve written about the double downsides of being busy before: the first one’s obvious, but the second one’s something we often forget:
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