Things just seem to go from bad to worse lately, and something’s got to give. I can feel the stress fractures forming and needs to change soon. Between the recent problems at my day job (which has taken up all too much of my attention) and the contract work I’ve been doing for myself, I’m exhausted. The work has taken over, leaving family and writing in the dust, and I’m not happy about that.
I enjoy my work at dito, and the contract work I’m doing is proving to be nothing but hassle. Working 4-5 hours a night after an already full day at Ditto is not fun. The original intent of Battleaxe Technologies, Inc. was to develop some web sites and commercially saleable software that I have either partially written or designed. So far, I haven’t been able to manage one bit of what I intended. Instead I took the road most easily travelled and accepted some contract work doing customizations of Postnuke, a Content Management System (CMS) that I now consider to be a vile and poorly implemented disaster waiting to happen.
So where do I go from here? My heart tells me to take the road less travelled, and follow my own desires. Doing contract work may be a financial success, but at the end of the day, if I had to choose between money and contentment, I’d choose contentment hands-down. I’d rather be spending my free time of my own accord, so what’s holding me back?
On top of all of this, I’m still trying to finish first draft edits on the short story I’ve been working on for the past two months. If I had more control of my free time, I might actually be able to follow the schedule I had set for myself. My desire to write has not waned, only the time available to do so.
The time for hard decisions is at hand.
Ah, the travails of the 9-to-5 versus waking up at 3 AM to write out a fiery, brilliant little piece of prose and being able to stay up the rest of the night without your attention span suffering through the 2 PM budget meeting.
I think it’s important to sit down with the people who love (your wife, your kids, et al) and lay out the cards—to tell them that you feel the daily grind wearing you down and that you are tired of life passing you by. Because while I support your decision in its entirety, I also shouldn’t have any say in it.
It’s a brave thing to chase happiness.
Hey Elle,
As much as I dream about it, the 9-5 job won’t go away for the forseeable future. I will, however, force that to be only 9-5, not the 9-5 + 24/7 on-call that frequently becomes a nearly 80 hour per week job.
The first victim will probably be the contract work I’ve been doing on the side. That alone should free up quite a bit of space.
Hmm. We’ll sit down with a beer or two this weekend and you can go further into depth on this. It seems like these still waters run deeper than previously thought.