Tag Archives: Work

04.02.13
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A digital worry-bead to keep yourself honest

Daniel Gross talks about how he carries around the files for his long-term projects on an old thumb drive (it’s funny to think that they’re a little antiquated), as a physical reminder to work on them:

It’s precisely the physical, antedeluvian aspect of the drive that makes it useful. It’s like a worry-bead, or a bracelet — a constant physical reminder that there’s something I should be doing. When I remove it from my pocket to put it on the tray at security, before I board an eight-hour flight, it’s a reminder that maybe I should make some progress on that chapter rather than watch “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” for the eighth time. Or, leaving the office for the one-hour train ride home, I check to make sure it’s there and realize I should tinker with the presentation I have to give next month instead of spending the commute checking blogs on my iPad.

I like this idea. It reminds me of David Allen’s “leave it by the door” trick*, where you put something where you’ll literally trip over it on the way out of the house if you absolutely have to remember to bring it with you. Like Gross says, it’s a physical reminder that you can’t ignore, partly because it seems slightly out of context in a slick touchscreen and cloud world, and partly because it simply has a physical size and weight, not some list you can tuck away in a notebook or close on an app. From my experience, making long-term promises to myself in an Evernote list or Dropbox folder is a surefire way for me to forget them.

* PS: No joke, I went to search for a link on David Allen of “Getting Things Done” fame and one of the first things I found was something I wrote years ago for 43 Folders. I’ve been thinking about this stuff way too long.

01.21.13
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So, what do you do for a living?

From Alizah Salario, on how to answer that dreaded question when you’re just working a day job to pay the bills:

I take pause when people ask me what I do. I’ve held full time paying positions as a high school teacher, a journalist and at a financial services firm, but first and foremost I consider myself a writer. Yet I often don’t identify myself as such because I fear doing so would sound pretentious, as if I sit with my herbal tea in a bucolic setting and the koans of wisdom just pour out of me. (Okay, I am drinking herbal tea as I write this). But I also hesitate to call myself a writer because, though I make my living stringing together words in various syntactical and stylistic forms, it’s not quite that simple. I feel like a fraud, because to me “making a living” means having disposable income and putting money into savings. I have to hustle to pay the bills, and if I were to stop writing, nobody would be asking me to continue. A writer writer seems like someone the world can’t live without.

I had the hardest time with this question when I was a stay-at-home dad, even though it was a voluntary decision. I hesitated to answer, or mumbled something about helping out with my wife’s business, instead of just owning my life choices. Of course I wanted to say I was going to grad school and working on becoming a writer, but that seemed pretentious too. After I had to go back to my old IT job it was even worse, because I felt like I’d failed after putting so much time and energy into writing.

After a few months of being back at work, I went to a reading where I was talking to a friend of a friend. I told him about how I used to stay at home, then the whole sob story about going back to work when the economy crashed, etc, etc. A few minutes later his girlfriend walked up; she hadn’t heard the first part of the story, and asked me what I did for a living. When I finished explaining, the guy said I visibly slumped and sighed before I answered. It’s like I was embarrassed to admit I had a responsible (if boring) job. I couldn’t see it for the practical decision it was.

Writing has this weird, unpleasant tendency to make those of us drawn to it feel guilty if we don’t do it (or at least think about it) 24/7. Couple that with the American tendency to let our jobs define us, and that’s a lot of emotional baggage to carry around. The funny thing is that once I finally accepted my fate as someone who worked in IT to pay the bills and liked to write on the side, I ended up getting the job I have now, where I can legitimately call myself a “writer.” Maybe it’s fate; it was probably just persistence and dumb luck. But even now that I genuinely like what I do for a living, I still have trouble with that question. I’ve switched jobs and careers enough times now to know this one won’t be my last. It just happens to be what I do to pay the bills, for now.

07.22.11
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Turning pages and losing count

I used to keep lists of all the books I’ve read, one for each year. I started in 2003 so it wasn’t really a complete bibliography, but I did try to put together a list of everything I’d read up to that point, including all the Dragonlance and Shannara books I read through high school. I don’t know what the point was other than the sheer compulsion of my borderline OCD, but I had these lists for posterity. Maybe I could show them to my kids someday, or put them on a job application (“Read 35 books in 2008. 20 in 2009, but one of those was Infinite Jest”). I took a lot of satisfaction out of updating my lists, and I even kept them in Evernote so I could add a new title on my phone as soon as I closed the cover.

I think I hit my peak (of my list keeping years, at least) in 2008, then it dropped off precipitously in 2009. The reason I can’t say exactly how many is because I deleted all of my lists this year. They were bothering me. My stats dropped off for obvious reasons: I had gone back to work full time and I had two kids. Of course I wasn’t reading as much, but I felt like a fading slugger who couldn’t catch up to the fastball anymore. I always thought of myself as this voracious reader, and here I was not even getting through a book every two weeks. I take a lot of pride in reading books, and when the raw data showed me it wasn’t as big a part of my life as I thought it was, I didn’t want to see it. Those lists were a reminder of how my life has changed over the past few years, good and bad. If I was reading fewer books because I was working full time, it was also a reminder that work was the IT job that wasn’t my first choice, the career I fell back on when my attempt at changing careers didn’t work out. Pegging my self-esteem to the number of books I read was a bad idea in the first place, but using it to fuel resentment against the demands of life, family, and mortgage payments was even worse.

If you follow me on Twitter you might have seen that I’m starting a new job soon, one that will involve writing and is much closer to what I had in mind when I tried to leave the IT world six years ago. It won’t give me any more time to read though. It’s still a full time job, and if I were still keeping count I doubt the number of books I read the rest of this year or next will increase. Today is my last day at my current job, and I have three weeks off before I start the new one. Of course, I’m going to spend a lot of time reading while I’m temporarily unemployed. I’ve already picked out which book I want to read too, one of the biggest ones on my shelf. I probably won’t even finish it before I start my new job, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to enjoy myself and not worry what it’s doing to my stats. I think I’ve earned it this time.

02.23.11
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Job Security

I pack my lunch for work most days, but sometimes I still want to get out of the building so I take my food over to the Willis (née Sears) Tower and eat in the lobby. There are some aluminum tables and chairs outside of a Starbucks down the steps and off to the left from the Wacker Drive entrance, and I sit there so I can sponge off the free Wi-Fi. The part of the lobby accessible to pedestrians wraps around the core of the building in a rough circle, walled off from the elevator banks by futuristic glass partitions and security card scanners for employees who work in the office floors above. A lot of people pass through there, workers heading in and out of the elevators and guests like me hanging out or heading up the escalators to the restaurants on the mezzanine.

Every time I’ve been there, the same security guard watches it all. She stands in a strategic position across from the Starbucks so she can see both into the main entrance hall and back around the corridor to the other side. She’s the most vigilant security guard I’ve ever seen, wielding her only weapon, a walkie talkie, like a nervous teenager checking her cell phone for text messages. If a passerby dawdles too long or makes a little bit too much noise, she has it ready to make the call for backup, lifted closer to her mouth with her finger on the button. She makes me nervous. She’s middle-aged and very plain looking, with an unfortunate perm and a broad, vaguely Eastern European face. It doesn’t help that her drab, gray jacket and black pants is reminiscent of a Stasi uniform. I once saw her accost a man in a tour group who dared pull out a video camera, as if your average tourist from Elkhart was casing the joint for Al Qaeda.

I have no idea what motivates her, whether she’s truly scared of the next terrorist act or just scared of losing her job. But what I see is someone who truly cares about what she does. I guess I’ve always assumed that someone working a menial job like that is just going through the motions, doing the minimal amount of work allowed and punching out at the end of the day. But this woman truly gives a shit about the safety of that Willis Tower lobby, and scary as she is, it’s a little inspiring.

I talk a big game about how I’ve accepted my lot, decided I’m satisfied with the career I have and the choices I’ve made, but it’s not so simple. I struggle with it every day, this nagging feeling that I’m the embodiment of the Peter Principle, slowly working toward my level of incompetence. But then I take my lunch over to the Willis Tower, see that security guard ready to pounce like Jack Bauer, and I think about people making the best of whatever they have. That’s been the key every time I slip and start to feel sorry for myself. I have to remember that none of my problems are unique, and pretty much everyone could complain about work. As my uncle likes to say, “There’s a reason you make them pay you for it.”

Today Debbie picked me up from work with the kids, and we went to dinner at Chipotle. Sadie ate a quesadilla and spilled her lemonade all over the table. Carter ordered a whole steak burrito and complained that it was too spicy. They fought over the side of rice. But it was awesome. I overheard someone at work saying the way to get through a job is to remember the date of your next day off. You need something to look forward to on the outside, to remind yourself that it’s not all about the work. If I can grab a burrito with the family every now and then, I think I can make it.

02.20.11
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Failing Forward

Miles Harvey, my thesis adviser at Northwestern, used to have a favorite saying during his workshops. “Sometimes you have to take the pretty little puppies out back and drown them,” he’d say as we debated the merits of one of our carefully wrought essays. What he meant was that sometimes you have to be willing to put one of your precious sentences out of its misery for the sake of the overall narrative. You might think a particular string of words is the most adorable subject and predicate ever set down in type, but it’s really just shitting all over the carpet and ruining your piece. His point, besides the black humor of a writer facing his worst critic, was that we shouldn’t get too attached to any part of our work because it was all subject to being euthanized.

Miles always pushed me to open up more with my writing, stretch it out and give myself more room to say things. He struggled with this himself, he said. He once told me he used to spend hours just to eke out a paragraph at a time while writing his first book, The Island of Lost Maps. I don’t know if I write this way because I started in the attention vacuum of the internet or it’s my natural reserve in real life, but I try to get my point across in as few words as possible (it’s no wonder I like Twitter so much). Concision can be good for quality control, and there’s a long tradition of macho American male writers punching out short, declarative sentences. But it also means I have to choose my words carefully. This gives me another convenient excuse for not writing. When I finally steal some quiet time to work with a half-decent idea rolling around in my head, I can still back out because I think I won’t do it right. It’s not laziness. It isn’t even failure. It’s perfectionism taken to its extreme, which is really just fear of failure.

I’ve had two good conversations with friends in the past week about where I can fit writing into my life now. For the past ten years since I signed up for my first creative writing workshop, I’ve harbored a fantasy that I could turn it into a full-time career. I went to great lengths to make this happen, walking away from a career in IT to be a stay-at-home dad/freelancer and signing up for full-blown graduate school to study the craft of creative writing, only to find myself back where started four years later. A cynic might say this all means I just didn’t have what it takes. I’m a cynic, but not not too cynical to know that it was really just a combination of life choices and bad timing. It’s hard to switch careers. It’s harder to switch to a career that is rapidly being rendered into a free service. It’s even harder to do it while supporting a family. And it’s impossible to pull it off during the worst economy since the Great Depression. That sounds like a lot more excuses, but to me it’s just the facts (I have to believe that to feel like this last decade of my career hasn’t been a complete loss). Both of my friends, simply by asking me how things were going and listening patiently while I spilled my guts, helped me get closer to the answer.

I’ll spare readers the whiny specifics, but what it comes down to is that I’ve accepted that I’m not going to make a living from writing, and I’m finally okay with that. I have a certain skill set in IT that people will pay me to use. I have a good, stable job within walking distance of my house that, when I’m honest with myself, I really don’t hate. It’s a good life and writing can always be a part of it, just as an avocation, not a vocation. I’ll write things because I want to, because it makes me happy when I feel like I have something to say, rather than writing things I think I should be writing because it will push me toward some vague career goal. This starts with finally deciding to heed Miles’ advice and stop being so precious with my words, stop being afraid of throwing something out there because it isn’t perfect, and start remembering that I can always try again if it fails.

I’m also going to stop apologizing for writing here. I’ve always felt like I was selling myself short publishing things here because it’s “just my website,” but it’s where I feel most comfortable, and the one place I know for sure that the people who care will read it. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking for opportunities to publish my work elsewhere, but my days of randomly stuffing manila envelopes with SASEs and filling out Submission Manager forms are probably over. If I’ve given up on writing things I think I should be writing, then I need to start writing things that make me happy. And that’s building something better here.

I know better than to promise a set schedule or word count, but my goal is to start writing here more often, with more variety and a little less precision. I’ve been enjoying Chris Jones’ new blog about writing lately, not so much for the writing advice, which is great, but for the sheer energy and joy he seems to be putting into it. In his first post he wrote, “I can’t help imagining the readers who might find their way here, but I’m trying not to over-hope things. Maybe something will come out of it; maybe it will prove just another stutter-step. It doesn’t really matter. For now, I’m just going to write, because that’s what I do, and it’s also what I am.” This blog has been a lot of things for me, and maybe this new dedication will be another stutter-step too. But for now, it’s what feels right.

04.02.10
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The Teller

This story originally appeared at Is Greater Than

Each day he woke up and put on the same thing: black pleated slacks, a blue button-down shirt, black belt, and black wingtips. Sometimes, out of necessity when he’d gotten behind on the laundry, he substituted a pair of charcoal gray pants. They were dark enough that no one could really tell they weren’t black unless they inspected them closely, and no one at the bank branch where he worked had said anything the few times he’d worn them. Still, he preferred black, because that’s what it said in the dress code for tellers: men–blue dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes.

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01.22.10
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Substitute

This story originally appeared at Is Greater Than

Six months after I dropped out of medical school I took a job as a substitute biology teacher at the local high school. The regular teacher was on maternity leave. Normally, the long-term jobs go to substitute teachers who’ve put in their time doing spot work, filling in for teachers who call in sick or wake up and decide it’s a good time to use up some of their personal days, but my friend, Jeff, who taught social studies at the school, called in a favor with the principal. I needed to do something to make money, and with my science background, this was the best I could do.

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10.23.09
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Freaky Fortnight Wraps Up

Slate editor Michael Agger and his wife Susan Burton have finished their two week stint switching jobs and parenting roles (he took her place as primary caretaker, she took his place at the office), and have posted their final thoughts. Again, as someone who’s now experienced both sides of that equation, their whole series was both frustrating and an affirmation. It made me want to try staying at home again, to do it “better” next time. But it also helped me accept my new role working full-time.

Michael wrote something today that really cut close to how I think about my time at home with the kids. I’m a harsh self-critic, a second-guesser, and I sometimes think I could have done a better job taking advantage of that time to get a writing career off the ground:

I’d like to correct one of my bigger blunders in the series: when I wrote that I wouldn’t mind staying at home as long as I had “a writing project to sustain me.” I realize now that I had a Platonic idea of a “writing project” in mind. One that I could work on when Will was napping, or at night and on the weekends. But real writing projects involve deadlines, research trips, ready access to muffins, and–most crucially–the frame of mind to get the writing done. When I contemplated staying at home, I didn’t fully account for the possibility that being with the kids could become mentally as well as physically all-consuming. That I wouldn’t be able to switch into work mode whenever I had a free moment. Two weeks is not enough time to truly experience that.

He’s exactly right. It was mentally and physically all-consuming, and most days when Carter or Sadie did fall asleep, the last thing I wanted to do was write. The fact that I finished a graduate writing program and landed the few freelance gigs I did should be enough.

And what Susan wrote today reminded me that while I had to be pushed back into the workforce kicking and screaming, four years at home was probably enough:

The point is that even if you only temporarily drop out of the work force, your losses compound; if you stay in, though the cost of child care may be crushing at first, eventually your children will be in school–eventually they’ll be out of the house–and you’ll go back to making gains.

If I had seen it through to the end, going on eight years by the time Sadie will be in school full-time, my earning potential would have dropped to barista levels if I tried to go back to work. So while this transition has been painful, I understand that it’s best for the family in the long run.

10.07.09
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Freaky Fortnight, Freaky Nine Months

Slate writer Michael Agger and his wife Susan, a stay-at-home mom who is a freelance writer on the side, have switched roles for two weeks and are filing dispatches about it called “Freaky Fortnight.” I’ve been thoroughly enjoying them, not only because they are both witty, insightful writers, but because both sides of the story read like they were written by my own hand. From Susan on her first day in her husband’s office:

Outside at lunchtime, I have a powerful sense of being in the wrong place. My real life is not on Hudson Street! My real life is somewhere else. This feeling of displacement underscores some of the limits of Freaky Fortnight as an experiment. During these two weeks, I’m not really going to get a sense of what it feels like to be a mother who works in an office, because a mother who really works in an office has a sense of belonging there that I don’t. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan spend Freaky Friday stumbling and bumbling, trying to get back to their real lives, and that’s a little bit how I feel today. Partly I miss my children, partly I miss my regular work, but mostly I just miss my real life because it’s mine.

I think I’ve just now gotten over this feeling, after nearly nine months of being back at work full-time. Until very recently, whenever I could come up for air from my work, I’d say to myself, “I don’t belong here.” I would look at the clock and think about what I would have been doing in my previous life at home with the kids, the naptime schedules, the trips to the park. This was driving me mad, of course, so gradually, I’ve accepted this new life as my own, a transition Susan fortunately won’t have to make.

For his part, Michael sums up the new attitude I’ve learned to adopt. It had been building beneath the surface for me as each week passed and I grew more confident in my new job, but I hadn’t quite put my finger on it until I read his take:

I also used to worry a lot about my particular job. What kind of writer should I be? Why did my last piece only get 10,000 hits? Wasn’t my real plan to finish a novel at some point? Is it too late to go to law school? I still worry, but kids have changed this, too. Now the job thing has simplified: gotta feed the family. Work provides health care, a steady paycheck, and the opportunity to stroll out for an afternoon coffee—and the kids have infused it all with a sense of purpose that it didn’t have before. Being the provider is actually kind of soothing.

“Being the provider” gives me permission to let go of a lot of those old worries about what kind of person I want to be when I grow up. It’s been decided already, and to see it that way takes a tremendous amount of psychic pressure off me, the disappointment and resentment I feel thinking that I deserve a different job that makes better use of my writing. This just happens to be what I do during the day. That is what I like to do when I’m not at work. The two don’t need to be mutually exclusive or preclude each other. Now it’s just a matter of remembering that they need to coexist.

09.30.09
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The Writer in the Workplace

I had a fantastically social weekend by my standards. On Saturday, I attended my third Chicago(ish) Tweetup, where I interacted with Internet People in real life (see, Debbie, they do exist). Then on Sunday we hosted a cookout at our house with my writing group, i.e. my classmates from grad school who manage to get together once every three months and promise to actually write something for the next meeting, three months later.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of listening to me whine about it in person, my current obsession is trying to reconcile my new/old career in the corporate world with my fanciful notions of becoming a capital-W Writer. I’ve known all along that I was never going to be able to sit at my desk all day, alternately composing great reams of text while tallying royalty checks and grant awards, but I did hold out hope that when I ended my Mr. Mom sabbatical, I could return to the workforce in a capacity at least tangentially acquainted with the written word beyond sending email, something like copywriter, editor, web content manager, Chief Anecdote Officer, etc. Sadly, I tried to look for said work in the worst job market since Tom Joad was picking produce, and eventually I crawled across the bridge I had the good sense not to burn on the way out back to my old job in corporate IT.

In the eight months since I went back to work, I’ve accepted the fact that this is the career I have, and it’s not likely to change very soon. Sure, I’m still keeping my eyes open for Work Acceptable for a Writer, but the likelihood of that coming along is less and less given my checkered resume and the glut of out-of-work newspaper and magazine employees also looking for Work Acceptable for a Writer. And I know I’m an ungrateful bastard if I can’t at least appreciate a steady job with good benefits within walking distance of my house. Things could be much, much worse.

The thing is, I’m starting to think that I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy a Job Acceptable for a Writer any more than the one I have now. A friend in my writing group works for a university chemistry department, where she writes grant proposals. This would certainly qualify as Acceptable Work by my standards, but she said that part of the job is repetitive, boring, and frustrating, i.e. pretty much the same deal I have now. Short of writing features for, say, Esquire or playing major league baseball, I’d probably I’d probably always find a way to bitch about work. That grass is always greener. The most enjoyable writing is what you do of your own choosing, for your own enjoyment, out of your own ego, and not what you do on deadline or for a paycheck. I can do that kind of writing no matter where I punch the clock.

I’m not the first Writer to hide out in a 9 to 5, a phenomenon so rampant that managers apparently need guidelines for dealing with the species. The salient advice for me to remember from that guide comes near the end:

The managers who deal most successfully with writers in the workplace are those who recognize that 1) the writer does not want to be there, and is convinced that she will be leaving at any moment, and 2) the writer is not going anywhere.

So, to borrow a favorite phrase from Infinite Jest, I am in here. I will have this job indefinitely, and I need to get over it. I need to get over myself.