Thinking About Work and Being In Between

Being self employed gets inside your head. It pervades your thoughts and decisions. There is this constant awareness of time, that time not spent on business tasks equals income that won’t arrive. The correlation is not one to one, hours are not created equal. Some hours and tasks are more profitable than others. Unfortunately which hours and tasks are the profitable ones can often only be seen in retrospect. Work is survival, and that gets repeatedly pressed upon the mind of a self employed person.

I’m thinking about this as Howard and I are currently living an in-between space. We’ve left home for a two week trip, which puts us outside our regular business and leisure activities, and we’ve not yet fully entered the conference or recording sessions, both of which are another set of familiar business and leisure activities. We found ourselves with five hours to fill and nothing routine to put into them. It is in such spaces that we unfold our thoughts and have conversations we otherwise would not have. Those conversations are part of why taking trips together is so valuable. We have to remember who we are when we aren’t working, and sometimes the only way for us to not be working is to enter a space where work isn’t possible. Even though being unable to work is inherently anxious for us.

The other reason I’m thinking about the pervasiveness of work, is that the our websites are down this morning. (I’m actually typing this offline and will only be able to post it once the sites are back up.) It is no doubt a small problem, easily fixed once our web guy (who lives in New Zealand) wakes up and checks his email. Outage used to send us into panic. Lack of update felt like imminent doom, the inevitable death of our business. Back then we weren’t able to interrogate our anxieties as well as we do now. Also, we now have years of evidence that an outage blip isn’t going to do long term damage. We aren’t panicked and yet there is still anxiety, this ambient sense that if we don’t properly serve our audience, that audience will vanish and all our resources along with it. Our most common antidote to anxiety is to get back to work…which is difficult when we reside in the between space where we’ve deliberately made work hard to do.

In the between spaces, I ask myself questions about why I’m doing the work that I do and whether I like doing it. I ponder what work I would choose to do if money were not an issue. Where would I spend my efforts if I knew that the bills would always be paid. These are useful questions, not to make me dissatisfied with the life I have now, but to remember what small adjustment I should make in my daily efforts so that at future times when I enter an in between space, I can be glad about the changes I see.