Reworking Working from Home

Personal Update

Oct 11

Two cats hissing at each other. — Photo by Pierre Bernard on Unsplash.

I’m going through a time of mental shifting. This is proving to be trickier than I thought it would be.

For many years, my daily pattern has looked kind of similar—the things that I need to do for my home-based businesses were always tucked in and around activities having to do with the kids, house, and family, and therefore I always felt “behind”.

“Oh, what I could do if only I could dedicate proper time to this,” I’d lament.

Well, beginning last year, that time was suddenly available. Given that it was a little too suddenly available and a good deal of my day was still spent in lethargic tears, plus the pressing need to catch up for real on years worth of undone books, my schedule was still pretty full. With the onset of winter this past weekend and the knowledge that my taxes are finally submitted and caught up (yes, my current year, too!), this week might be my first time really experiencing what "enough time to work on it" looks like.

And wow. I never realized it would be this hard.

Suddenly, a good chunk of my day is wide open. I can write, knit, photograph, cook, write some more, network, work on accounting, read, research, provide customer support, work on my website, write...

But the question is, “How much of each should I do?”

The answer is even harder to figure out when a goodly number of those activities are so fun for me that my brain categorizes them as goofing off—even though they are the very activities that create product, i.e. income.

The government might want you to pay taxes on what you earn from this activity, but 'playing with imaginary friends' is not a real job. Go find some accounting to do, for Pete's sake, so we can feel productive.

That Left Brain, she can be a real witch.

And I think that I have had to let her maintain such near-complete control for so long that she's gotten a little too big for her britches.

After all, I am finally at the point where I have a “dream job”. I write words. It’s fun. And people actually pay me to do it.

It’s the kind of job that makes my Right Brain bounce off the walls, while my Left Brain stands there like a lump thinking of all the really important stuff I should be doing instead.

I think the trick is that I need to get Left and Right working together on this. I’m going to have to get a little more organized, putting slotted times into my schedule for Right Brain activities (writing/creating/photographing/designing) so that my Left Brain feels like it has some control but isn't worried that the whole system will degenerate into chaos, while the Right Brain knows that it is going to get all the freedom it needs to run around if it can just be patient.

It’s like I’m giving my Left Brain a boundary—”No, this is creative time. You’ll get your turn later. Now go stand by that tree.”

My Left Brain is getting twitchy to go schedule something just from writing that. And my Right Brain is making this face:

Don’t worry, Righty. It’ll all be okay. Look, we made it through this blog post. That was fun, right? And now Lefty gets to go check something off.

You two are like a couple of toddlers. Fortunately, I’ve had those before, and discovered that even the Control Freak and the Free Spirit can make miracles happen on occasion.