Finding a Superior Time Suck

It’s been 10 days since I last posted on this blog. It’s also been 10 days since I wrote anything for My Mitten in Yours. The length of time that has gone by since I worked on Swedish Lessons is too embarrassing to put in numerical form.

Bah…

It’s weeks like this one (and the last) that make me wonder why I chose working for myself over a reliable, jobby-job if I was just going to end up in the same predicament of being too busy to work on my own writing projects.

Good thing I know the answer to that complaint. And though I can let myself grumble about it from time to time, I know there are several reasons why this life is far superior to my former one. These include the facts that I control my time, that working on my own projects is as least possible some of the time, and that even when I’m writing for “work” instead of on my things, I’m still writing. I’m still putting in my 10,000 hours, a concept that my genius, in-house talent development guru touts as super important.

But these are also the weeks that I’m thankful that the tasks that keep me busy, though they are writing for “someone else,” are still things I love. I love doing communications work for downtowns. I love getting to meet and interview and write about the entrepreneurs who are making things happen in cities I care about. Before, I certainly loved parts of my job – the events and promotions and communications – but I hated others, like the meetings, the politics, the paperwork, the politics. When I got to the end of the day and added up all the time I’d spent working on things I didn’t like doing, I could see the hours I wanted to be spending writing, but I just couldn’t access them.

So that’s why I did this, I remind myself. I do this because when I don’t have the time to focus on one thing I love, it’s because I’m too occupied with something else I’m excited about. That’s the key, it seems, to be satisfied with a career that includes lofty, long-term goals – to be happy with your short term ones as well.