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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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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I’m not usually a quitter. I don’t like giving up on things. This can be kind of a problem, because I like doing a lot of different things, which makes becoming over-committed far too easy to do.

This quitting was sad, too. I was quitting something I had wanted to do for YEARS. But sometimes when you want something that badly for that long, you stop seeing how it really is and just picture it as the way you want it to be.

So, here it is: I’m not going to be a wedding planner. Not in the near future, anyway.

It’s weird to say that. For about 7 years I’ve been wanting to start my own wedding planning business. I picked out a name and wrote a business plan years ago. I LOVE weddings. And I love planning parties. And I worked on a lot of big events in college, and was darn good at it. So I thought “let’s combine a bunch of my favorite things! It’ll be great!”

Last summer, I started writing an Examiner column on Wedding Planning. The idea was to use the column to get into the industry, get an internship, and work my way up to being a planner. And it worked – since November I’ve been interning with the fabulous Kerri Butler and her team over at A Touch of Bliss. I met Kerri by interviewing her for my column.

The day she brought me on, I called my mom and screamed into the phone “I’M GOING TO BE A WEDDING PLANNER!!!” Then I went directly to the library and checked out as many wedding magazines as I could. (I already had a bunch of books at home I’d started collecting years ago.)

The internship was great. Kerri is a fantastic planner, and I love all of the ladies on her team. I got to see a ton of the industry from the inside, met lots of people, and even worked on a couple of events. It was fun and exciting and I was thrilled to be part of it.

But, the point of an internship is to learn about the industry, see if a job fits you. I found out it didn’t, basically for three reasons:

1) I’m NOT a design or fashion freak. I don’t have an aesthetic eye. (This is why my art is in words and singing and dancing, and not anything visual.) Half of what people hire a planner for is the design piece. I realized I would always need to work in tandem with someone who could do that stuff, because I just can’t. And I don’t know if it’s something I could learn.

2) The energy started really flowing with my social media and freelance writing work. As anyone who is a business owner or freelancer knows, you have to pay attention to what’s bringing in your income. And I found myself needing to spend more time on that stuff, and less on my internship. It wasn’t really fair to either thing not to give it my all. Sometimes you have to recognize where the energy is flowing and where it’s not, and follow it.

3) As anyone who knows me will attest, I love doing about a bajillion things. It’s a huge part of why I moved to Colorado – for everyday adventures like rock climbing, biking, playing ultimate, hiking, skiing, etc. And those are just my athletic/outdoorsy hobbies. But the important thing to realize is that no matter how much I loved weddings, I would never love working at one on a Saturday instead of being on one of my adventures. It wouldn’t be true to doing what I love, and it wouldn’t be fair to the bride or the wedding not to be completely focused on her and happy to be there.

I sat with this all summer, thinking about where I REALLY wanted to devote my time and energy as I flipped through pictures of epic weekends and time spent with friends. I stopped contributing much to my internship. I started writing more. And I was okay with that.

Ultimately, I realized that I still LOVE weddings. I love helping people come up with ideas, being a resource and offering recommendations, and telling peoples’ unique stories. But I can do all of that as a writer. So, I’m going back to writing my column. My goal is to eventually get to write for The Knot, so here’s to my column working its magic a second time!

There was a huge lesson learned in all of this, and I’m grateful for the journey that led me to this conclusion. I hate closing doors, but it feels good to walk away knowing exactly why, and that I’m still going to be part of it all, in the way that suits me best.

So go read my column. And tell your friends who are getting married or who work in the industry. New articles will be going up 2-3 times/week from now on. And if you have any ideas for topics, people to interview, etc. I’ll always be looking for inspiration.

Here’s to turning away from one thing so I can move forward to the next.

And thank you, Kerri.

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