I've looked at clouds from both sides now

There are two ways of looking at my life.

One is that I work part-time. This is true. I go to the office from Tuesday to Thursday, I do a few hours from home on Friday, and I draw a part-time salary.

The other is that I have three jobs. This is also true. Besides my office job (subediting), I do freelance editing, with widely varying regularity, and I run a little website. You know all this already.

Thing is, both views really are true. Most of my co-workers — probably all of them — assume* that I spend my weekends lolling in the sun and knitting. Yes, that has been known to happen.** I’m not very good at getting out of bed at a reasonable time when I don’t have to. I get to run errands at my convenience, rather than on Saturday mornings with the rest of the world, which is a great relief but also interferes with my attempts to instil in myself a proper work ethic and structured work-from-home routine.***

But even though out of the office, I don’t work to any kind of regulated system, I most certainly do work. So far this year, f’rinstance, I have already done almost twice as many freelance hours as I did in all of 2005. Much of this has regularly kept me up till 3am as I tried to finish a particularly hard-to-kill job for a Canadian client, working on Canadian time. I get a lot of emails saying, “Help! Can you turn this around, like, RIGHT NOW?” …And I say yes. Because I work fast, I am flexible**** and I like the money.

And the website, while more fun than you might believe possible, is a whole bundle of challenges of its own. The stuff that presents itself for immediate attention ranges from daily tasks like packing and posting orders to irregular (but fairly frequent) big jobs like unpacking, photographing and uploading new product arrivals. And, you know, accounting, maintaining the blog, monitoring stock levels, and basic planning and emailing and advertising and market research and so on.

But then there’s the stuff that doesn't demand attention, the stuff that is potentially the most important — long-range planning, creative marketing, networking… this shit takes time too. And energy. And a clear headspace. And this is hard to find.

So my to-do list***** is quite interesting. It includes things like “phone scary Hollywood lawyers”, which frankly has me quaking in my adorable high-heeled boots,****** as well as “order more boxes”, which is a bit less glamorous but a lot less scary and might get done sooner. It doesn’t get much shorter from week to week, it just changes shape. At the moment it is a huge bloated beast of fear, frankly, since there’s that social life thing happening. It dominates my weekends and my waking thoughts. It controls me. It controls my sleep, or lack thereof. It is a manxome foe indeed, and it has thoroughly slain that delightful concept of a Nothing Day that I remember with great fondness from about two years ago.

And it has had the quite remarkable effect of turning my Tuesday-to-Thursday “working week” into recovery time. Whatever my co-workers may believe.
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* They know about my extracurricular activities, but I don’t think they really believe in them.
** When there is sun, at any rate. So not very often.
*** It must be said that these attempts are more theoretical than practical. As in: Must learn self-discipline! Must work from 9 to 5 even when at home, and not in pyjamas! …Hang on, was that 9am or 9pm?
**** I do yoga.
***** Actually I haven’t signed up for this yet, but I like the look of it very much.
****** Not really. They are adorable high-heeled sandals. This being summer.