The Freelance Life vs the Employee Life Part I: The Benefits

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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 »

Can Commuting Help You De-Stress?

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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 »

Working Out of the House Can Improve Your Mood

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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 »

5 Advantages of a Flexible Work Schedule

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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 »

Bad Bosses Blame Their Employees for Mismanaged Workplaces

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A while back, I worked at a Day Job that was really, really busy.  While I was there the workload went up exponentially, though we only had a small increase in staff.  That meant we had slightly more people doing a LOT more work, which meant way more work for all of us.

During that extremely busy time, my boss dealt with the situation by checking in that we were constantly on task and not goofing off.  “Utilize your time well,” was her favorite phrase (complete with pretentious use of the word “utilize”), and she repeated it over and over at meetings.

Years later at a different Day Job, I experienced something similar.  At this particular Day Job I was responsible for waaaaaaaaaaay more work than a reasonable person could do in a 40-hour workweek, which led to a lot of stress and confusion.  To make matters worse, my boss often expected me to be in two places at once, and would regularly add extra tasks on to my already enormous workload.

This time, I tried explaining to my boss that there was simply too much work to do.  However, when I did, he always pivoted and said that I needed to manage my work better, stop wasting time, and learn to prioritize.  Continue reading »

I Used to Lie During Job Interviews: Here’s Why

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The other day I was updating my CV in preparation for a part-time gig I picked up through word-of mouth.  In the opening section I wanted to summarize the work I do, and after some trial and error, I came up with this:

I’m a working fiction writer and editor/writing coach with experience in EFL (English as a Foreign Language). My teaching experience extends to Japan and across cultures, while my editing work extends across both fiction and academic scholarship.

When I think about the work I’ve done, and the work I’d like to be doing in the future, this statement feels really natural to me—as in, it sums up my experience accurately, and isn’t just an exaggerated image I put down so I can get jobs.

That got me thinking more about previous years, when every time I wrote a resume or went to a job interview, I tried to craft an image of myself that the company wanted to hear.

In short: I used to lie about myself and my career goals. Continue reading »

Finding Meaning in a Day Job, Career, or Creative Work

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Having a meaningful life is pretty important.

Think about it: If your life isn’t exciting, interesting, stimulating, fun, important, influential, or engrossing, what else is there to look forward to?  Mindless consumption of entertainment?  Repetitive chores and routines?  The empty pursuit of money and material wealth?  Those don’t sound very good to me.

People, I’ve found, find meaning in all kinds of ways.  Many find meaning in family relationships: finding a romantic partner, having kids, raising their own family, or connecting with parents, siblings, or other close relatives.  Society places a lot of value on family too, like how the nuclear family is super important in the West.

A lot of people grow up with the impression that family and romantic relationships are the best way to make a meaningful life (i.e., that family is the most important thing).  As such, many people have the impression that careers and paid work are only important in that they allow you to provide for a family.  In other words: Continue reading »

I Told People At My Day Job That I’m a Writer and They’re Totally Cool With It

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One thing I’ve struggled with since the days when I first started working was how to present myself and my goals while at a Day Job.  Should I pretend that I was totally interested in whatever work the company was paying me to do so I could take care of my bills, or should I be honest with my boss and coworkers that my real passion lay with writing and a career where I could do something creative?

Fortunately, in the days when I stocked grocery store shelves or cleaned preschool classrooms as a college student, this wasn’t a problem because everyone realized I was just doing these jobs for spare cash.  They knew I was in college, that I was only doing the job part-time, and that I was majoring in an area that had nothing to do with grocery stores or janitorial work, so we were all on the same page.

The problem was, though, that after college when I went out into the world, I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to move in, but needed Day Jobs to help me to pay my bills while I figured that out.  And while I was working those jobs, people tended to regard me with suspicion, derision, or just plain view me as incompetent Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 3: Doing Creative Work at My Day Job

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the third in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. If you missed the beginning you can get caught up with Part 1 and Part 2.

The cover photo shows the local government office in Namerikawa City, Toyama (役場, yakuba) sometime in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

Last week I talked about how hard it’s been to leave a job I really, really like and gain tremendous fulfillment from because I want to move on to a new stage of my life, especially with writing and creative work.  It’s been getting harder and harder to both teach as an elementary school ALT, work on my new novel, and keep up with all the other activities and commitments I have, including this blog.

This balancing act has actually gotten a lot harder since I first got to Toyama in 2018.  Back then, I had a lot more free time, Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 1: I Love My Day Job, But I’m Leaving

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the first in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future.

Also, the cover photo shows an actual boys elementary school from my town of Namerikawa, Toyama, from the early- to mid-20th century.

I really like teaching English in Japan.  A lot.

I work as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) in Toyama, Japan as part of the JET Program, a Japanese government program that recruits teachers from overseas to teach in elementary, junior high, and high schools.  I live in a small town, and work at 3-5 elementary schools per semester, often a different school every day.

ALTs on the JET Program work alongside Japanese teachers in the classroom, rather than teaching alone.  While this can often lead to dull, repetitive work that JET researcher David McConnell and others call Human Tape-Recorder syndrome, I take a more active role in lesson planning Continue reading »

Companies Treat Their Employees Like Garbage Kind of Often – A Pattern Explored

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A while ago I was talking to a friend who was having trouble at his job.  His company had gone through a merger with another company and was in the middle of a major consolidation/reorganization.  As part of this consolidation/reorganization, some higher-up got on a video call (this happened during COVID) to announce that they were instigating major layoffs, then immediately signed off and declined to comment because he was too cowardly to face the repercussions of what the company was doing.

Man, what a douchebag!

Anyway, my friend was fortunate enough not to be affected by said layoffs, but when the smoke cleared he found that his department was badly understaffed and everyone was overworked.  As a result, he started working a lot of (thankfully paid) overtime and having an overall rough time at work.  My friend had also been promised a raise several months previous, but Continue reading »

Sick Days Are Super-Important, and Don’t You Forget It!

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The title of this post says it all.

Last weekend I came down with a cold—not a super terrible one, but one that had me coughing with a sore throat and made my body ache for a few days.  When I realized what was wrong, I put some unnecessary projects on hold and took it easy for a few hours.  Then, when it was clear that I really feeling well, I called in to work and took a few sick days to recover.

Since I already wrote an entire post about how the national Japanese health care system makes it super-easy to go to the doctor, instead I want to emphasize that because my job as a teacher on the JET program gives me as many sick days as I need, I felt really comfortable calling in and staying home. This is because: Continue reading »