cope + paste

do i love my anxiety? Valuing my time

Sometimes I wonder if living with anxiety means that the only time I really feel alive is when I feel like something is trying to kill me.

Not in a "daredevil" kind of way - I'm actually extremely risk-averse in basically most areas of my life. But in a "if I can't feel my anxiety, how do I know I'm still breathing?" kind of way.

Living with anxiety sucks. It means that at any moment you can be totally blindsided and overcome by the absolute certainty that you are going to die. (Which, I guess, we're all going to die, eventually, so. It's not... wrong?) But usually the "oh god I'm going to die" feeling is more immediate than the general understanding that all life must end, in time.

But I'm thinking about this mostly in terms of deadlines and my general work-life (im)balance. I like working because it makes me feel like I have a goal, a purpose I'm working towards. At some point as an "adult" I realized that in "real life" (unlike school) you're being graded on the world's most insane rubric:

In school there are hard deadlines and grading rubrics and the sense that there is a right answer if only you can figure out what it is. (Which generally requires being able to reproduce the personal thoughts and feelings of the professor, so YMMV.)

But in Real Life® ... Your boss wants things done on their schedule; so you just have to figure out which tone of voice means "Do this RIGHT NOW" and which tone of voice means "Gee, it would be really cool if..."

Then there's the question of how what you do is actually evaluated.

I don't build things. Not really. So you can't look at my work and say, "Well, it doesn't open a yellow box when I click on it, so therefore it doesn't work."

I tell stories. I've determined that the through-line of my expertise is narrative. I want to make the world make sense so that people can make informed decisions. Whether I do that via journalism, design, or accounting is just a question of style, rather than purpose.

Stories are a lot harder to evaluate. They certainly aren't usually susceptible to immediate rejection unless you really screwed it up. To find a flaw in information, you need to study it, interrogate it, dissect it.

The funny thing about working as a freelancer, now, is that I don't know how to measure my effectiveness based on the time I have. Because I'm running the clock backwards.

When I think about traditional work hours -- the idea that for a certain period of time you are in a specific place at the beck and call of a specific person, persons, or organization, the question is "how much can I get done out of the assigned labor within the time permitted".

That algorithm works out one of two ways:

If you have too much assigned work compared to the amount of time you have available, you're playing the shitty game of maxing out your intellectual/emotional resources trying to keep up.

If you don't have enough assigned work compared to the amount of time you have available, you have to find ways to either stretch the work out in a way that won't leave you bored, sit around waiting for things to happen if you get it all done, or find new/additional tasks to perform to fill the empty time.

I feel very strongly that if you have an expectation of people being "full time employees" (9-to-5, in an office, etc), then part of what you're paying for is a reservation fee of my time. I am not actually obligated to fill the time with the work available or find new work to do, because I'm sitting at that desk so that the boss/organization/etc has the option of calling upon me to perform at a moment's notice. As long as I'm performing the tasks assigned to me to satisfaction, if I want to sit at my desk and stare at the wall because I finished everything, then that is my right.

This goes double if you're paying someone to work in a retail environment, because you are LITERALLY paying them to "mind the store" while you're gone. You are paying them to stand there and wait for customers to show up. If you want more than a kind of bare minimum of adequate customer service and functional cashiering, you better be paying extra or provide serious perks.

All this is to say that I am now the master of my own time. I have only a certain number of hours I can give to any given employer/project/task. Beyond the boundaries of linear existence and the physical limitations of the human body, some of my employers can only afford me for a certain number of hours a week.

Suddenly I'm doing a more complex bit of algebra because I want to provide the maximum amount of value to my clients (so they'll keep paying me) - which means I need to be sure I'm getting all the work done to spec AND I need to keep an eye on the time limits I have.

If someone can only pay me for 15 hrs a week, I need to make sure I'm delivering the maximum possible value for that time interval. Or if not a "maximum" then at the very, very least, a "meaningful" or "significant" or "substantial" amount of value, because otherwise they'll find someone else.

Having spent the last three years in an office environment, and the seven years before that in a retail one, I can really appreciate the security of "they're paying me to stand/sit here." I understand the appeal.

But good god do I find it difficult to live it, day-in, day-out.

I get BORED. And then I either take on more work than is fair or reasonable. I become over-invested in my employment, in weird ways I can't even really explain, justify, or describe.

But this freelance thing, so far, makes me feel physically ill, in the sense that I have no idea if I'm doing "enough" and if I'm doing it "right" and if I'm going to "have money". But I'm never bored. And even if I feel guilty when I take time to do something that isn't "my work" - at least I can take the time.

Sitting at a desk, in an office, on a computer managed by the company...? I turn off every single part of myself that isn't related to getting the job done. And that person is fine, but that person is really very dull. (And that's probably where the over-investment comes in.)

Today, I worked for six hours completing an important thing and then several tasks that were spontaneously assigned to me. Then I did some research into the local LLM stuff that's still piquing my interest. And then I wrote this blog post.

I also took a break and laid down on my back on the floor and it was so good, gotta schedule more floor time.

I feel guilty because I have progress I want to make on the stuff I'm working on for my OTHER client, especially because I think I just had a data-related breakthrough. But that's O.K.

Anyway, tell me what your favorite time management approaches are for structuring unstructured time. I can always be flexible with my timing, but I want to make sure I have a structure that I can use to support my more free-form, workaholic tendencies.

Stay wicked out there.