Wondering where the blog posts and Patreon content are at? Well, so am I.
All joking aside, though, I know exactly where they’re at. I have a couple of blog posts and a ton of writing planned out– I just need time to work it. The Other Job continues to eat an extremely excessive amount of time– 75 hours this week– and I’m running on empty.
This is not a time management crisis. Wednesday was a fairly typical day for me, plus a few hours. I woke up at 4 am and was at work by 5 to unload 40,000 lbs of freight arriving for the day’s flights. We close for business at 6 pm; I stayed until 10:30 finishing paperwork, answering questions, and drafting emails to send Thursday morning.
I eat lunch while working, but I don’t actually get a lunch break so writing on lunch isn’t an option. When I get home –whether at 8 or 9 or 11 pm– I’m exhausted and I have nothing left to write with. I try to eat some food, take a shower, and check into Twitter and Facebook so that my author social presence doesn’t die off entirely.
I used to write before work. It gave me 30 minutes to an hour of writing most mornings that I wasn’t too tired. Now I get up at 4 am for work, and I’m short enough on sleep that getting up earlier isn’t much of an option. This leaves the weekends, and I spend mine frantically trying to catch up.
This isn’t a situation that can go on forever. I’m desperately in need of a break– which is ironic to those of you who follow my writing, I know. What else has 2020 been, but a succession of missed posts and breaks?
After nearly 80 hours a week, some of my time off needs to actually be time OFF. I’m cracking under the strain of week after week and month after month spent trying to plow through the avalanche of requests, obligations, missed deadlines, and looming failures.
That said, I’m not interested in giving up. I’m not a quitter, and writing is one of the few things that matters to me.
If you were here, what would you do?
Stephen Reeves says:
Hmm. America is a difficult nut to crack, employment wise. Like the whole virus thing, your government is stuck with a damned-if-you-do/don’t situation; send people to work and maybe contract cov19 or watch them starve.
In your situation I would do the logical things. First, map out the skills, systems, knowledge (like programs) you currently use in your job, have used, or are familiar with. Then, map out the ones you have previously used, and or are familiar with. Label them according to strengths, assuming that the currently used skills are the ones you are strongest in. Then, for each skill and or knowledge, do a bit of google research and determine what other systems, skills, etc are similar enough to those. This is your pool of resources which you can then match up to perspective jobs, throwing out a wider net.
I guess the previous paragraphs gloss over the one major assumption: you may need to change your current work. This could be inside the company itself, even. The goal is to regain free-time, with the maximum amount of monetary compensation.
Not sure any of this helps.