with Britt Reints
Forget the 9 to 5; Full Time, All the Time is a blog about the mobile working life - when you have the freedom to work from anywhere and the responsibility of always having your smartphone turned on. Britt Reints works as a freelance writer while traveling fulltime in an RV with her husband and two kids. She explores balancing real-life bills with an unconventional work life, and finding time to maintain relationships with family and friends.
You can also find Britt at InPursuitOfHappiness.net.
In case you missed the news, the White House is hosting a “Forum on Workplace Flexibility” today. According to press releases, President Obama and the First Lady are planning to talk about “creating workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families.”
In other words - all that stuff we’ve been trying to figure out on our own forever.
For as long as I’ve been married, I’ve had kids. And for the majority of that time, both my husband and I have worked full time jobs.
If both parents are working, it stands to reason that both parents would equally share the other responsibilities of being a parent - including playing taxi, cooking dinner, helping with homework, and staying on top of the laundry. Right?
And yet… not so much.
Most people don’t like to complain at work.
No. Wait. That’s not right. Most people don’t want to get caught complaining or be known as complainers. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop us from having grievances about our workload or our bosses or our company’s policies - but it may prevent us from giving our employers valuable feedback.
Have you seen the TV show Undercover Boss? The premise is basically that top level executives at large companies go “undercover” as entry level workers within their own companies. The goal is to get a better idea of how the company is really running. Hilarity and heartwarming revelations ensue.
“If you’re not careful, you’ll burn yourself out.”
This is a warning that has been offered to me over and over and over again by my mother, my husband and my well-meaning friends. It’s not surprising, considering the way I define balance: I throw myself into one project or area of my life (sometimes to the detriment of other areas), and then move on to the next project; I eventually get it all done, but rarely do it all at the same time.
What was surprising to me was to find that “burnout” is a real phenomenon discussed by mental health and productivity experts. Burnout is generally described as long-term exhaustion and diminished interest or motivation. Symptoms of burnout include moodiness, extreme tiredness, suppressed immunity to illness, and a lack of interest in your work.
Excuse me while I go take another horse pill for my most recent respiratory infection that will not go away.
Apparently, burnout is extremely common in people who have high-stress jobs (not me!) and people with Type A personalities (oh.. um.. er..).
While I clearly have everything well under control in my own life, some of you may be interested in a few tips to prevent burnout.
Before I became a mother, I was an avid exerciser. I worked out in the company gym with my work best friend nearly every day of the week. On weekends, I would take a 3-5 mile walk with a girlfriend. I weighed a good 40 pounds less than I do now and was fit. Not like Jillian Michaels fit. But I was healthy. And active. And my ass didn’t have it own zip code.
When I was pregnant with my son, I lost all my energy. The third person I shared our good news with was my VP. I was so tired that I was falling asleep at my desk every afternoon. So I asked to be able to work from home after lunch. He was so wonderful about it and agreed. Good-bye working-out every afternoon. Hello 2 hour nap!
It didn’t help either that my pregnancy cravings were nacho cheese, thin mints, and pancakes. I was ballooning and quickly. I gained 20 pounds in the first half of the pregnancy. When my son was born, I had packed on nearly 60 pounds. I always thought that I’d be one of those moms that quickly bounces back into her pre-pregnancy sizes. Reality is my pre-pregnancy clothes are still hanging in my closet nearly six years later.
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I don’t remember exactly what conversation he was overhearing, or what he may have been reading over my shoulder*, but my 10 year old son asked me a question this weekend for which I had no immediate answer.
I’m curious if you do.
“Mom,” he asked, “what’s the difference between a job and a career?”
I hemmed and hawed a little before offering an ambiguous explanation that your career was made up of all the different jobs you had in your life. He didn’t seem quite satisfied, and I wasn’t either. I thought about that question more over the next few days.
Wandering through the food court in the mall, I recalled the numerous food service jobs I worked during high school and college. Were these jobs part of my career, as I had explained to my son? If I was still pulling a part time shift at a local restaurant, would I consider myself in the midst of a waitressing career? I had to admit - probably not.
If you asked me what my job was now, I might tell you that I work in sales and marketing. That’s what my W-2s say, anyway. But I’m also a freelance writer, a career that makes up almost as much of my income as my regular job does.
We often talk about focusing on our careers. Oddly enough, you rarely hear someone say they are postponing other life goals to work on their jobs.
Dictionary.com describes a job as “a post of employment; full-time or part-time position” or “anything a person is expected or obliged to do; duty; responsibility”. A career, on the other hand, is defined as “an occupation or profession, esp. one requiring special training, followed as one’s lifework” and “success in a profession, occupation, etc”. Interestingly, the archaic definition of career is “a charge at full speed”.
It seems the difference then might lie in how well you do your job, and whether it’s part of something bigger for you.
I don’t know that I’ve ever used the term “career” to talk about the various sales jobs I’ve held. As time passed and my skill level developed, my pay certainly increased - the ultimate mark of success in sales. But no matter how many bills I am able to pay, sales is and always has been just a job for me. There’s no passion there. There’s no feeling of working towards something more or moving towards a distant goal. There’s nothing I can look back on and point to and say “that is my life’s work.”
And then there is writing. I hesitate to call freelance writing “a job”, despite the paychecks it provides. It’s more of an evolving process, a journey towards bigger and better assignments. Although I’ve been writing for money for a lot less time than I’ve been selling things, it’s been the closest I’ve come in my life to feeling like I had a career.
Maybe all that means is that I was in the wrong career for a very long time.
Do you have a career? Are you working a job to pay the bills, or are you working on building something you’d call your life’s work? Does the difference between the two matter to you?
*and can I just say how much I hate when people, even my own children, read over my shoulder? Lots.
Photo by wili hybrid on Flickr.
