For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
I’m not going to lie: 2023 was a rough year.
Though 2023 started off on an optimistic note, and the first half went really well, the second half took a major nosedive as my productivity, organization, and overall mood went WAY down.
So what happened? How did the year spiral downward, how did I handle it, and where does that leave me in 2024?
Let the 2023 reflections begin. Continue reading
I’ve had a rough couple of months because of something REALLY bad that happened back in the fall. At first I wasn’t sure how to talk about it online, or even if I wanted to reveal it because it involved my family. Fortunately, though, the problem’s cooled way down in the past month, and in thinking about what a crazy time it’s been, I decided I wanted to write about it frankly and honestly.
What happened is a long and complicated story, so please bear with me while I explain some intricate details, simplify others, and leave a handful of moments vague to protect some people’s anonymity.
In telling this story, though, I want to share that 1) Sometimes really bad things happen that make it incredibly difficult to do creative work, and 2) Dealing with those problems, and ultimately solving them, is a vital skill.
Here’s the story: Continue reading
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
Ever since the birth of this blog I’ve been grappling with how best to avoid electronic distractions, since it comes with the territory of managing a creative life.
In a damning scourge of anti-productivity, the same laptop, smartphone, browser window, and email account that we use to take care of productive work tasks also lead to horrible distractions. How many times have you gone on Facebook to check the spelling of someone’s name and ended up poring through old photos? How many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you wandered down when pausing for a quick fact check? And worst of all, how much time have you burned through watching YouTube videos during work time because the algorithm Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel. And this year, the same thing happened again.
I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long. Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do much of anything.
I write about this in detail not because I want to share a play-by-play of being sick (because not only is that gross, but it’s unnecessary storytelling-wise), but to emphasize that sickesses come up unexpectedly, often at bad times when we have other things going on, creating real repercussions for how we deal with them. Charging forward with your regular routine even when you’re sick is rarely if ever a good choice: not only will you not be at your best and likely make mistakes, Continue reading
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
Since coming back to the US last year after three-plus years of living abroad, I noticed a lot of things had changed. And one of those things was the people around me.
More specifically, I noticed a lot of my friends complaining about their jobs. They talk about problems with their bosses, suffering through boring meetings, dealing with checked-out coworkers, and even worrying about layoffs. My friends who work for big companies in particular talk about things like salary negotiations and jumping ship to make more money at a different company. They also talk about retirement like it’s the end of a long, harrowing journey where their work will finally be over.
These are all things I don’t deal with in my own work, so I often feel left out of these conversations with little to add.
That’s why I wanted to write this post about what makes a Freelance Life different from a Regular Employee Life. I’m less interested in technical details like taxes, getting paid, and how freelance workers get jobs, and more in the mental experiences that separate regular employees from freelance creative workers like me Continue reading
One of my all-time favorite blog posts is about how much I hate commuting—both because of the cost of the gas and the time spent on the road that basically counts as unpaid worktime. I felt this most painfully back in 2011, when I was working an office job and driving 46 miles per day round trip. When I did the math, I found this was costing me $33.50 in gas per week, which came out to 84 cents per hour, or 7% of my total paycheck. Yikes!
There was also the matter of time: because I was going in early to beat rush hour, my 8 hour workday turned into a 9.5 hour day total, adding an extra 7.5 hours per week that I could have spent on other things. Double yikes!
Though I’ve also spent time commuting by train and bike, the experience made me think more about where my time and money were going, and how much more efficient it would be if I didn’t have to spend so much of both on commuting.
Though I wrote this post back in 2016, in the post-pandemic age, I and a lot of other people work from home and don’t have to commute at all. This has given me a lot more time during my workweek while also drastically lowering how much I spend on gas, which should mean Continue reading
I’m writing this from a coffee shop in my town where I sometimes go to do work in the afternoons. For the price of a small (or sometimes large) drink, I can grab a table, set up my laptop, and work on editing, emails, miscellaneous tasks, or even this blog, like I’m doing right now. Sometimes it’s crowded, but usually it’s not, so I can work in a relatively quiet atmosphere.
But an ideal workspace for me is about more than just quiet: sometimes I like being around other people, and I need to change up my surroundings to freshen my outlook.
I wrote about this in an earlier post about working in family restaurants in Japan, but for me, spending so much time working from home at the same desk in the same surroundings day after day can start to feel repetitious: I love my workspace, but sometimes I want to get out and work somewhere new. Continue reading
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
A few weeks ago I shared my Awesome Work-From-Home Freelance Writer/Editor schedule and talked about how I structure my workdays in a way that makes sense to me. Writing in the morning, handling email and admin around midday, and working on editing and marketing in the afternoon has helped me create a really useful workflow that makes me feel comfortable during my workday and get more done.
There are a ton of other advantages to being self-employed, of course: not having to deal with horrible bosses, navigate toxic coworker relationships, deal with pointless Day Job shit, or fight the pressure to care about your company when you really don’t. Avoiding these downsides is pretty awesome, and it’s helping me feel better about my creative work/paid work balance.
One HUGE advantage, though, is that when you work for yourself, you have a flexible schedule. That means you can schedule your own work when you want to, as long as it gets done Continue reading