works of wanderlust

Tag: productivity

  • derailed

    I’ve been tiptoeing around the realities of my recent detour into part time work partly because I was trying to keep myself sane and partly because I was trying to avoid offending anyone there who may have stumbled upon this blog.

    No one ever did, of course.

    But as I’ve written a couple times now, I recently quit that job. I quit so recently, in fact, that I’m technically still just “between shifts” as far as my regular schedule there went. It hasn’t sunk in. It hasn’t had time to sink in. I still reflexively checked the app this morning to make sure I wasn’t missing something… you know, before that first coffee kicked in.

    But I’ve been sitting here thinking about the whole thing and feeling a lot of regret. I’ve been sitting here thinking how agreeing to go back for a second round was a big mistake.

    It wasn’t the people. First off, let me put that down.

    But here’s the backstory: Last August I decided I wasn’t quite ready to go back and get a real job, or at least I was still romanticizing the notion of a larger scale shift in my career, so I was dabbling. I thought maybe I’ll dabble in the retail grocery industry and see where it takes me for a bit. I promptly found myself working for a local small business that was expanding in our community and (insert complex business mumbo jumbo here) I got a part time gig helping build that out, launch it, and work in it. I mean that literally. I literally helped assemble shelves, frantically help customers on opening day, and then physically stumbled through the chaotic warehouse for the first two months of operation. A lot of bullshit decisions got made by people (and I can say that without flinching because when I did go back the new management literally apologized for the conditions under which I ultimately left in December). I walked away the first time, which was a bummer because I had left the little pipe dream behind but also because it was supposed to keep me busy for the cold, cold winter months. I could write for pages and pages about that time (and I have in personal documents) but I simply need to tell you that was the first time I quit.

    I did keep busy, tho, for that cold, cold winter.

    There are days and days of cold when you don’t even want to leave the house. You just crank the space heater and wrap up in slippers and a blanket and forget that anything outside exists.

    I started work on a video game.

    I made serious progress on my novel.

    And, more importantly, I went back to school. I signed up for a serious continuing education course program that consisted of seven modules of Business Analyst Certification training involving course work and post-lecture assignments.

    And I was doing great.

    There is a whole elaborate string of coincidences and conversations that led me back to the grocery store. Promises. Idealized futures. Criss-crossed expectations, mostly.

    And so for two and a half months I put an apron back on, resumed making myself available for shift work, and there I was back working. And for the first month (singular) of that back to work time it was great. They had some programs I was supporting. They had big goals for how they, as the third set of management in six months, were going to clean up the store and put it back on the rails. Whatever had happened in those months since we first walked in the building to build the shelves, something had derailed it to near crashing. I was helping, not just literally, but actually making a measurable difference to the success of the store. I had purpose.

    So I was back. And it was fine. It was fine. Really. Fine. Until it wasn’t.

    Because going back, simply, sadly, frankly, it derailed me.

    I’ve been tiptoeing around this. I’ve been writing about my struggles with multitasking and my thoughts on working towards bigger goals, and sure… all of that is true. But the reality of it is that taking on this stupid little low-paying part time job, as much as it was good for my social health and my getting out of the house motivation, it derailed everything that was important to me.

    Derailed me hard.

    My game development efforts waned.

    My writing, save for my reflective blogging, ground to nearly a halt.

    My school work measurably suffered as I rushed assignments and squeezed them into the spaces between even just those handful of infrequent shifts.

    I arguably gave it too much. I arguably didn’t compartmentalize. I arguably stumbled over my own metaphorical shoelaces and let it trip me up and throw me off. But it all of those things are true and more, too.

    The whole experience made me feel lesser. Despondently so. I was seriously becoming borderline depressed at the inertia that this stupid little job was consuming in my life. I would go to a shift, and with each shift it seemed like I had less purpose in the store, futzing around trying to fill my block of paid time with useful tasks that were become increasingly rare as they shuttered programs and made alternate plans to the handshake deals they had blue-skied when I first started, and all while getting yet another day further from the things where I was making real actual progress in my life: professional development, tangible skills, and measurable outputs towards nearing-completed projects. I was selling not just my time, but selling it to the lowest bidder and throwing in my heart and soul all tangled in the mess of it.

    At least if I’d donated it I’d have felt good about that part. But selling something for less than it’s worth?! Come on!

    The trade off was so imbalanced I can’t even clearly articulate how much it derailed everything that I loved for the uneven trade of time and loyalty and value I was giving to this stupid little store.

    You should shop there. I’m not going to name it, but if you know me you know what it’s called. It is a great little local market filled with cool people and almost certainly being run a thousand times better than when I quit the first time. But it was a terrible fit for me. It hurt me. Every bit of momentum I had gathered before that seemed suddenly at risk and arguably been derailed by my hubris in thinking I could go back and work there again without giving too much of myself. And I haven’t wanted to admit that. But it’s true, and unfortunate.

    It’s been barely thirty six hours since I last walked out of that place and I’m never going back to work there. There is no third act. But I may wander down there with a laptop and get some real work done, work meant for me and work that has purpose for who I need to be, as I get myself back on track.

  • keyboard life

    I have developed a lot of little productivity hacks for myself in the past couple years.

    It’s odd, actually.

    Realizing that.

    Odd.

    For the first year of my career break I wrote about it all the time. The career break I mean. I was always writing about it. I was slightly obsessed with working through the whole thing in long rambling essays, very few of them published anywhere but in my own personal files, but all of them detailing my reasons and logic and emotions and everything to do with this whole deal of quitting a well-paying desk job (thanks stress and burnout) and spending the following months and months and months sorting through the effort of trying to rebuild myself professionally.

    So many words.

    It’s odd, because thinking about it right now I realize that I haven’t written much about career breaking in nearly a year now. And yet, no, I haven’t moved on, nor found myself breaking through the far side of that career break quite yet, but then too all the tangled complications of the last year have sort of left me a little less introspective on this thing that I did nearly two years ago now. I think about it. Write words. But those two haven’t really intermingled recently.

    Yet, it was the first thing I thought to write about now, just sitting here looking at the keyboard under my fingers, and I guess that means it still comes up, particularly when I start introspecting on some of the changes and habits that manifested in the meanwhile of my not quite but kinda still a career break era.

    Like, I’m typing on one of those productivity hack things as I write this.

    Yeah, the keyboard.

    About a year ago I bought myself this little portable mechanical keyboard.  Well, in fact I bought two of them, each for very different purposes. First, I bought a really nice one that is amazing to type on and which I carry in a little bag along with my iPad when I go off to a cafe to write. It’s wonderful. Clicky. Solid. Durable. And no I’m not selling them. But then I also bought a cheaper, smaller keyboard. It’s not quite as nice, though still pretty nice, and its a lot more plasticky, and it tends to live in the glove box of my truck. It is a little trickier to type on, I will admit, mostly because it is lacking about twenty of the more familiar keys like number digits and punctuation marks, and when I need them I need to access those with little function key combos that also make it a bit cryptic to type on, but I use it even more than I thought I would, squeezing in a session of writing before work or, like now, sitting in a park at a picnic table waiting for the run crew to arrive and taking these twenty free minutes to pound out a blog post.

    All of this is tangled together, of course, because this whole career break has given me this little new productivity skill of forcing myself to be much more free and effective about my writing. Impromptu. Spontaneous. Picnic table in the park free-ish. 

    Oh, and that’s the other thing I should mention. If nothing else comes of this career break, I am emerging from it feeling a lot more like a writer than I ever did prior. I’ve always fashioned myself a writer, but right now I feel it inasmuch as I would not hesitate to put it on a resume and defend it as a professional skill. 

    In fact. I’m a writer in the same way that I’m a runner, because I practice and practice and practice it a lot. I’ve just logged the time, you know?

    So, here I sit in yet another gap of free time writing on a keyboard in the park on this little keyboard. And the culmination of this anecdote is that I know damn well that I was not a type in the park on a little keyboard kind of writer before the career break. 

    That is the little productivity hack. 

    The hack is that I just write anywhere and everywhere now, shamelessly, even though as I’m sitting here in the park and cyclists and dog walkers and kids on skateboards are passing by looking at me with this idle curiosity, some weirdo at a picnic table typing away like a nut. That’s just what this looks like, I suppose.

    And that is a cool realization for me, fumbling and tangled and unfocused as I feel in the emergent spring. If nothing else, I’ve been productively hacked.

  • multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    Some may think of this as just a bit of opportunity cost comparison, huh?

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.