I’ve been flat out since the middle of March doing big translation projects, writing blogs for customers and other stuff that will surface on the Internet at some time or another. We all like to have loads of work to do but the downside is that I’m washed out. I’ve no doubt what I need is a work life balance but when we do things with passion work and life tend to merge into one.
Home offices are there to constantly nag at you. Even if you have them in another room in the house, you shut the door on a Sunday evening, that job you have to do on Monday still nags away. My office wants continual feeding and attention, sometimes I really hate it.
I love my job (well, most of the time), that’s why I spend so much time doing it. Even if the corporate world would have me, I could never go back there. But hey, we all get to saturation point where we have no space and no time. Every so often it’s good to kick out the jams, clear space and make time to make things better.
Working tidy makes me work better
Or at least it makes me feel better about myself. I often work in clutter, I never clear my desk at the end of the day like I did in the corporate world and sometimes find myself lunging from one crisis to another because I’m a useless time manager.
A regular clear out can be a cathartic experience. I found out yesterday that my desk was white and I had space on it for a laptop, a desktop and a printer. I could even find space to write with a pen and paper without moving some piece of equipment.
Taking time off makes me feel like a naughty boy
I had work to finish on Friday afternoon. It was a big translation project that I’d spent most of the week on. I discovered it needed some last minute layout work. Being Easter, I knew it wouldn’t get looked at for a few days so I rang the client to say I wasn’t going to finish it. Well, not actually in those terms, I did ask whether they really wanted it that afternoon or would it sit in an email box all weekend.
After getting permission to take the afternoon off, I went shopping (so rock ‘n’ roll I know). I felt like a kid who’d been let off school early! I felt so liberated that I went to buy a television.
I had a lie-in on Sunday morning
Just like normal people. I wrote a bit and read a novel. I haven’t touched a novel for a couple of weeks. I didn’t get up until 10 am (believe me, that’s late for me) but my body loved me for it.
A bit of self-indulgence is a great thing
As part of the great office clear out, I’ve been having a good look at my hardware. Even us writers need to good deal of screen real estate these days and I been using an old 17″ flat-screen monitor that I must have bought 10 years ago hitched on to my iMac. This has served me well over the years but the time has really come for something new.
So, flashing the cash yet again, I bought a 22″ HP 2201i which now sits proudly on my very white and clean desk. It’s a revelation. In 2 days it has already changed the way I work giving me far more freedom to organise windows how I like. None of this Windows 7 rubbish about fitting windows together on a screen here (they pinched the idea from Linux anyway). This screen makes for a better workflow and, far from being an additional screen, it’s becoming the main one.
Time and space and how they are organised and inter-relate are really important in a freelancer’s life. I work better for having more of both of them.
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