I’m not going to lie: I feel pretty beat up at the moment.
One of the short-term issues with the BWF job is simple: I didn’t expect to get it. Which meant I spent the week prior to starting the job soliciting a metric ton of freelance work to cover the rent once my small business grant ran out (which happens today). And my partner is still two weeks away from picking up the admin side of Brain Jar, which means I’m getting up to speed on an insanely busy full time + doing twenty hours a week of freelancing + maintaining a publishing company + trying to fit personal writing projects around the edges.
And, because I’m a masochist, I’ve thrown in an hour of walking home in the spring heat every day, because running events requires cardio, and after two years of working from the couch mine is pretty negligible.
I tried a little experiment with the first half of my week, forgoing the morning writing shift before work under the theory that sleeping in and getting home a little fresher would mean I could get work done before I keeled over in an exhausted heap at 9:00 PM every night. It had the advantage of giving me a workspace with internet, with is great for the freelancing and publishing gigs, but terrible for writing.
Sound in theory, terrible in practice. By the time I got home, did chores, and ate dinner, there weren’t many spoons left for writing or freelancing/Brain Jar work. Some work got done, but far less than when I started the day in a café, getting some words down, and I’m still dropping balls that shouldn’t be dropped.
So I’m back to the pre-work routine, working my way down the pyramid of priorities, getting as much done as I can in the hour and a half before work begins. Truth is, my day works better when work is the middle layer of the obligation sandwich, rather than the foundation.
The big challenge of this week is reminding myself that OCTOBER IS AN ABBERATION. A confluence of mis-matched expectations collided and created far more work than the norm, and I’ve got about three weeks of clearing the decks before I get a sense of what my routine needs to be going forward.
On the plus side, one freelance project is almost clear. Another two are heading towards their end-point. One their done, I’m closing the doors to everyone except a handful of legacy clients, because it’s pretty clear this is at least one major set of commitments too many.
Which is actually one of the upsides of declaring this an exploratory period, specifically set aside for testing approaches and trying new routines: every failure is actually a success, because it’s one more piece of data that informs the new normal I’m working towards.