What color is my parachute again?
It's been three months since I was laid off my job at fring, and I'm still working out just what I'm going to do with myself when I grow up now. I'm thrilled to be back to my life as an independent contractor, but I suffer from having too many ideas and too many opportunities. Believe you me, I'm not complaining! I'm just taking some time to contemplate the situation and decide how best to prioritize my time.
Here's the rub: I can't bring myself to do just one thing. It's simply not in me. My parachute isn't a single color. It's a rainbow!
While working at fring I continued to coach at the local ice rink and I started working with Crictor as a staff journalist. At the job before that, I was also coaching at the rink and doing freelance writing.
Back in the States, before coming here, I was writing, coaching and running an herbal pharmacy while I took a three year break from writing code.
Even back in the late 90's I was busy studying Anthropology, Linguistics and History at college, being active in my kids' schools and programming Websites for a living.
In the past 20 years, I've lived in El Salvador, England, Israel, California, Washington and Idaho. I've traveled to a few more places for work, study or just for fun.
You get the picture. There's just too much in the world that's interesting. I want to do all of it. I want to see all of it. I want to learn all about it.
Do I sound a bit too greedy? Perhaps, but it's not a "thing" sort of greed. It's an experience greed, and I don't think that's bad, because I am able to use all those experiences to help others in one way or another.
So, here I am trying to figure out how to balance the pieces of me in a comfortable professional package. I've narrowed my professional activities into three main chunks: ice skating, Web consulting, and *writing/journalism. Then I have another important chunk of time that I need to account for: Homeschooling activities. The day to day learning just flows into the fabric of our days, but the outings with other homeschoolers take me away from work and require their own separate space in my calendar.
For the moment, I have it worked out like this:
Sunday and Wednesday evenings are ice skating time. I teach three hours each of those nights, and I skate for myself one hour.
Wednesdays will (probably) be homeschooling outing day. There is a group here in the Tel Aviv area which goes on a trip every Wednesday. We may not go on every trip, and we may go to the once a month Jerusalem Zoo Tuesday instead of the Wednesday trip sometimes. In short, this is all a bit fuzzy, still. But I think it's Wednesdays.
Sunday day will be meeting day in the Tel Aviv area. I'll probably camp myself out in a coffee shop someplace convenient so that I can work between meetings on code and/or prose throughout the day.
Thursdays belong to Crictor. I've been doing at least one show per week for a while now. We've managed to do most of them on Thursdays, too. Some of these are interviews, some are whiteboard shows. Some in the studio, some on location.
Of course, I also go to lots of conferences for Crictor, either to cover the conference in general or to scoop up as many interviews as possible in one go.
Monday and Tuesday are uninterrupted, head-down-in-the-computer work days. Whether I'm writing or coding, these are the two days where I play music on my headphones, check out of "reality" and plow through as much thinking, puzzling and typing as I can.
Friday morning is shopping time. I've tried doing shopping at other times, but there's something about the lack of open grocery stores on Saturday that just makes me nervous. I MUST shop on Friday or else I feel certain that I'll wake up Saturday morning with no milk or something.
I'm going to try to be good about getting this done early, though. If I can get to the shuk by 9 in the morning, I can get the best pick of the produce and the challah. Then I can stop in at the grocery store and pick up the other necessities on my way back to the house. Also, going early means that I can ride my bike comfortably, even in the summer heat.
Once I get back from the shopping, I'll work until 1 or 2 hours before shabbat starts on whatever work I need to do -- code, writing, studying or business development.
I don't "keep shabbat" in the halachic sense, but I definitely need a day off, and it seems like a good idea to use the religious and cultural day off that my ancestors have been using for a few millennia now. So, Friday night is for family dinner and Saturday is all about kicking back.
My dad is my role model for self-employment. He's been working for himself since I was about 6 years old, in part so that he'd have more time to be with me when I was young. He likes to joke that the best thing about being self employed isn't that you get to work half time, but rather that you get to pick which 12 hours a day you'll work! So, yeah, I know that this schedule is likely to get thrown out the window when crunches force me to work every waking moment and squeeze family into the cracks -- kind of like what happened this last two weeks. Still, it's good to have a guideline, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to continue living with my multi-colored parachute without driving myself into an early grave!
* Journalism & writing get to be in one chunk because they are related and function in the same sort of box. Not all the journalism I do is in written form, since most of what I do with Crictor is video or audio, and StreamingIsrael is a mix of various media, too. Not all my writing is journalism, either.
