Only The Curious

I’ve been working a lot more lately. I realized at a certain point that I was no longer having the freelancer issue of not enough work. I’ve had plenty of work to be doing (yay!) but I have been struggling to find the time to do it. I’d gotten so used to only having 10-15 hours of work a week that I had filled up my time with other things. So when I started getting 20 or 30 or sometimes even 40 hours worth of work a week, I found myself starting to fall behind, and straight up missing out on money that could be earned. That was the worst part – knowing that I could be earning more money, and I just… wasn’t.

But why? I’ve been so worried about money for years, and for the first time ever, I can earn as much as I have time to. I don’t have a huge emotional attachment to money or define my success by it, but I do recognize its value in the things it allows me to do (or the things it prevents me from doing when I don’t have it.)

So really, it was coming down to how I was using my time. That elusive resource. I needed to find more of it to devote to work and earning. But where?

I started paying a lot of attention to exactly what I was doing every day, and how much time each activity actually took. Like budgeting or dieting, finding more time meant some lifestyle changes. I had to sacrifice some things (midday yoga or guitar breaks) and just go of others (my neat-freak tendencies.) For a couple of weeks (and sometimes still) I wonder how normal people possibly work a 40-hour week and still have clean clothes in their closet, fresh produce in their kitchen, a current oil change in their car, and get to the gym 3+ days a week. Without that extra 5 hours a day, when do people do these things? Being a grown-up is hard.

I’m still working on finding the balance. I’m learning to plan more, so I only have to go grocery shopping once a week, only do laundry one night a week without running out of clothes by Wednesday, (no, I do not have a large wardrobe,) and I haven’t really gotten on a solid new gym schedule. But I have added 6 hours a week to the amount of time I’m billing, and that’s awesome.

Perhaps the biggest shift I made was giving up on trying to work at home. I used to love working from home and always wondered what other freelancers were talking about when they said that they couldn’t do it. But when I started paying attention to my time, I realized that as much as I loved the ability to go meditate or play my guitar or squeeze in that load of laundry, those were the things that distracted me. Then I read an article about how people in an office setting lose 15 minutes of productivity for every 1 minute they stop to say “hi” to someone, because of the time it takes them to get back into the groove of working. I realized I was probably losing hours every day going in and out of the work groove. Not to mention the hours lost by just wanting to tidy up my work environment instead of working in it.

So I have started to establish a steady rotation of coffee shops (hello Rooster & Moon!) and coworking spaces (Creative Density, whatup?) that I visit every week. I also realized that the hour I used to spend going home to make a sandwich instead of buying one was actually resulting in a net loss of money. For the first time in my life, I’m earning enough that it is more reasonable for me to buy a sandwich and work through lunch than it is to stop what I’m doing to make one.

Is this what success feels like?

For the moment, for me, it is.

How do you balance your time? Freelancers, what are your tips for finding the time to work?

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I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. My 30th birthday is later this week and it’s been giving me pause. It’s a good time to stop and think about things, kind of like New Year’s eve. Except instead of looking at the next year I’m looking at the next decade. And the past one.

It always seems like life passes so quickly. But then I think back to 10 years ago, and everything that has happened in that period of time, and it calms me down. I have a lot of time. All the time in the world.

…which is not to say I’m going to stop trying to live every day like it was my last. I heard someone use that phrase on the radio the other day, they were saying that 9/11 is a good reminder to live every day as though it’s your last, because you never know when it will be. Which caused me to stop and ponder, what the hell does that mean, anyway?

Really, if it was my last day and I knew it, I’d probably fly somewhere I could stick my toes in the ocean, go skydiving, eat all of my favorite foods, and round up all of my favorite people in one place. But I can’t do that every day. And most of us will never know when our last day will be. I have come to the conclusion that “living every day as if it were your last” really means not to do anything you’d regret, or wish you could go back and re-do, or change. It means to be nice to people, don’t go to bed angry, tell the people you love that you love them.

But it also means not to concede the things you want. Make the choices that are what you really want out of life, every day. Live with integrity.

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking that these things sound a lot like The Four Agreements: Don’t make assumptions. Don’t take things personally. Be impeccable with your word. Always do your best.

Really, that last one sums it all up. If you’re always doing your best, then you’re already doing the other things.

So I will live every day like it is my last by doing my best.

How will you live every day as though it were your last?

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There were two really great blog posts in my inbox today, both of which left me feeling better about my life and the way I’m running it.

Matt Chevy wrote about focus. Sort of. Really he wrote about priorities. He talked about how time and time again he’s set himself up to do things – write 500 words a day for his book or write a blog post every day for a month – but then fizzles out well before the task is completed, because he gets overwhelmed and it starts dragging him down. I was relieved to hear I’m not the only one who does this, often over and over again. Just this morning I woke up thinking about the fact that my 30th birthday is this month and I’ve only done about half of the things on my 30 before 30 list.

He came to the conclusion that it’s important to focus on your priorities, and not worry about the things that are taking time and energy and weighing you down. If they’re really important you’ll get to them, and if they’re not, then it doesn’t really matter if they happen, does it?

I left his post feeling okay about not doing all of my 30 things. In reality, I’ve done a whole bunch of other epic things this year I couldn’t have planned for myself, and I might have missed out on them if I’d decided, for example, that I needed to stay home and write more instead of going rock climbing for the first time. My resolution is to follow my energy – what’s flowing, what’s working, and what I’m getting excited about – and not let my worries over my unwritten book keep me from getting things done. I’m going to trust that when the time is right, the energy will start flowing for those things.

Then I opened up Peneolpe Trunk’s post. Sometimes I think she’s brilliant and sometimes I think she’s crazy, (she’s both) but she’s always a good and thought-provoking read. She talked about several things in her post, but the one that stood out to me was the idea of decision fatigue, and how people only have so much capacity for decision making on a daily basis. At a certain point we tire of figuring things out. I think this is why my boyfriend and I fight the most right after work – when we’re both burnt out from the day and something as simple as deciding what to make for dinner can provoke us into hostile miscommunication and anger.

This is also why I’m most productive in the morning, despite the fact that I’m not a morning person. Being self-employed and working alone means I have to decide what I do with every minute of my day – how I do it, where I do it, and ideally, why I’m doing it. By about 2pm I’ve got three free hours and a list of things to do, and by that point I’m usually tempted to call my mom and let her pick, or make a list and pull one of my possibilities out of a hat.

It makes sense that overwhelm and overcommitment aren’t just about time – maybe there’s time to do all of it, but is there energy? Mental capacity? Focus? Decision-making ability? I think both of these posts really get to one point: simplify. Figure out what’s most important, what will have the greatest impact on reaching your goal, and do that first. Don’t let anything else distract you. Don’t worry about what you aren’t doing. Then if you’ve got anything left in the tank, you can start writing your book, or learning spanish, or deciding what to make for dinner.

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