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.
It’s not like I didn’t know January 1st was coming.
First of all, it happens every single year at the exact same time. And if that isn’t enough (because I forget lots of things that happen at the exact same time every year), there is a massive world wide countdown to its arrival.
10… 9… 8…
What? It’s 2011? It’s been 2011 for five days and I still haven’t taken the time to make a single resolution or goal for the New Year?
Well, crap.
As my colleague Karen pointed out in her post “Why the death of Elizabeth Edwards breaks our hearts”, when we hear of another mother dying, it’s hard not to think about our own mortality.
Specifically, as mothers, we think about leaving our children. Conversations I’ve had with other moms have revealed that my fears about dying when my children are young are pretty universal: we worry that they’ll need us, that they won’t know how much they were loved by us. It seems that fear is even greater than the idea of us missing out on the experiences of raising our children.
We want are children to be OK. We want them to know that they are loved, in a way that only a mother can tell them.
Hearing the news about Elizabeth Edwards and reading subsequent posts has brought that fear to the forefront for me and many other mothers. Please, we think, please don’t let that be us. But the truth is, as Elizabeth herself pointed out in her last statement on Facebook, all of us know that our days are numbered. We will, someday, leave behind the people we love most in this world.
The question is not if we’ll die, or even when, but what will we leave behind when that time comes?
Last week on the Work It, Mom! blog, Nataly talked about those magical times when you love working. We’re not just talking about loving your job, but rather those periods when all you want to do is work because it’s exciting, or there’s a lot to do and you just can’t wait to get to it! In other words, those times when you’d maybe rather work than do anything else - including spend time with your family.
I find myself in the middle of one of those stages right now. I have so many exciting things going on and new projects that need my attention. Every time I shutdown my computer I am walking way in the middle of something; I have a handful of major ideas in development that can’t be completed within a work day. I love this feeling of loving what I do, of rolling out of bed eager to get back to the grindstone. What’s not to love about loving your job? Well…
Last week we started talking about spending quality time together as a family after a long day or work and school. Work and school can drain parents and kids and leave even the best-intentioned among us staring at a TV and calling it family togetherness. How do you get past the weeknight exhaustion and squeeze a little conversation into your nights?
As usual, the comments were filled with some great ideas.
“What we try to do is save all housework-type things like cleaning up dinner and packing lunches, making formula bottles, etc. for after the kids are in bed. I’ll be completely frank: we make time for the kids, but it leaves us tired and not able to make much time for each other.” - Meg
I’m ashamed to admit this, but I have a hard time finding stuff to do as a family on the weeknights.
Like most mothers I know, I’m a proponent of quality time over quantity. I know that interacting with my children and my husband is much more important in keeping us connected amidst our incredibly busy lives than logging a certain amount of hours together. I also know that it’s not easy to do a lot of interacting when you’re all huddle around a TV screen.
Sure, it can be done. We can watch a sporting event together or stick four sets of hands into one bowl of popcorn during movie night, laughing and crying and sharing our opinions on what we see. But usually our shared TV time involves shutting down and tuning everything out - including one another.
“Your failure to plan ahead does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
For people who have had to learn the fine art of saying no, this is a familiar adage. Even if it is only said internally, this little quip can be a helpful reminder about personal responsibility - where yours ends and mine begins. It’s about keeping your own priorities in place in the face of huffing and puffing, basically.
If you haven’t heard it, imagine yourself in this scenario:
You get a frantic call at 3:00 pm on a Friday. Your coworker forgot that they needed information only you can provide in order to finish an important job they’ve been tasked with. This important job is due at the end of the day. You? Normally need at least a full business day to supply the type of information that’s being requested. You also have plans for after work and a few more things you need to finish up before heading out at 5:00 (because you have one of those TV jobs that ends at 5:00, in this scenario). Your coworker is, of course, adamant that you need to get them what they need immediately.
Read the rest of this entry
I’ll admit that I get bored easily.
I like to say I’m “goal oriented”, but the reality is probably that I have a really short attention span and constantly have to have some new shiny in the not-so-distant future to keep me interested. The negative side effects of this itty bitty attention span are numerous, but there is also a really cool upside: I don’t stagnate.
Because I am constantly working towards new goals, I am always learning new skills or achieving new levels of mastery of old ones. It’s good for my brain and (usually) good for my bottom line.
Do you ever find yourself getting bored? Have you been doing the same job for years? When was the last time you learned a new skill that made you more marketable? If your answers make you realize that it’s been a while, it may be time to step outside your comfort zone again. Try these tricks for pushing yourself to the next level.
Who among us would not love to work less and play more? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could replace pointless meetings with our favorite hobbies? What would you do to create a Utopian world with no unnecessary client calls or annoying “reply all” emails? Would you lie? Stretch the truth?
I’m currently listening to the audiobook version of The 4-Hour Workweek
He also suggests that you can save yourself a lot of time if you tell a few half truths here and there.
The only thing worse than attending a meeting is trying to schedule one.
If you work in one of those offices where the boss walks into a room and announces, “everyone in the sales room at 4!”, then you may simply hate meetings. If, however, you have ever had to respond to 38 emails in an effort to coordinate one meeting between 2 or more people - you get what I’m throwin’ down.
Enter: Tungle.me
Although many business books have advised it, I’ve never found the nerve to go and get myself a mentor. Something about asking someone to give of their time and wisdom so freely - emphasis on free - causes me to break out in guilty hives.
What I have done, instead, is found myself a handful of role models.
Most of them don’t know that I watch them. And I assure you, that’s not nearly as creepy as it sounds. But it’s accurate. I watch their work from afar, taking note of how they interact with people and the things they are able to create. I’m not getting insider tips, but I’m paying closer attention than most and picking up on tiny details most people miss.
It’s like watching the guy in the back corner of the Broadway show I saw last week. The rest of the audience was captivated by the lead, but I was fascinated by the swinger in the back, hitting every step perfectly despite the fact that 90% of the theater couldn’t even see him.
But I digress. Role models.
