How Do I Do It?!

To the casual observer, this blog no doubt seems like a sputtering, nonsensical jumble of letters well-oiled machine. A word-spilling force of nature. A content-spewing juggernaut.

Perfectly reasonable conclusions. 

In reality, it’s kept a-tickin’ by a team of ornery, ill-paid gnomes your impressively lazy and dim-witted humble blogger. And one of the major responsibilities the gnomes I take most seriously is responding to our reader’s readers’ comments.

My last post, titled “What Did I Do?!,” covered what I did in my first post-FIREing year—e.g., working in part-time and side gigs, and volunteering. Reader ryangibsonclever queried about the nitty gritty of my (side) gigs and day-to-day life. Sensible, given that the post sorta kinda made it sound like I was working or volunteering full time, or more. 

Given our my hyperfocus on responding to reader inquiries, this blog post is dedicated to addressing those subjects.

One, two, three, four, I don’t want a little more . . . 

In the last post, I detailed several “work”-related activities that I’m engaged in, as well as some volunteering that I’ve started. This in addition to more cooking and cleaning that I’m doing post-FIREing. 

I didn’t realize it, but to anyone reading the post, this could seem like a lot going on. And *gasp!* like a full-time schedule with no time for rest and play! 

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. 

For my part-time gig, I work just a few days a week, and far less than a full working day each day I go in. What’s more, I work a mid-day schedule. I not only need not wake up early, but I do as I please in the morning and late-afternoon and leisurely get dinner on the table most days that I work.

I also carried over two side gig-app gigs into post-FIREing life. One entails time-limited activities. The number of gigs I get from this in any given week ebbs and flows. Often, I get/take no gigs. On rare occasions, I get/take 5-10. As it’s turned out, in the weeks that I had/chose to take gigs, I’d average about two hours’ worth of “work.” And that included time commuting. As I almost always commute by bike, I consider this part of my exercise regimen, too. Even in my busiest weeks for this gig, I was only “working” for about seven or eight hours a week.

The other gig-app gig entails projects that aren’t time-limited. But the work is right in my wheelhouse and I typically can knock it out in a few hours. The pay for each project is decent, but I rarely get gigs. And in 2022, because of user error, I got none. As I tolerate the work rather than love it, I consider that no great loss.

I also unexpectedly got and accepted another opportunity in 2022 to do work that I did in my professional career. I have a pretty low cap on the number of hours per week that I’ll work. In weeks that I do this work, the aggregate amount of time I spend on it is low. 

My volunteering essentially is time-limited, too. Each engagement involves weekly in-person sessions of about two hours, including travel time. Aside from that, there’s a bit more that I do as part of my volunteering. But the time required for that is low. 

So, while I have several work and volunteer engagements, even in the aggregate they don’t come close to taking up all my time. If I had to guess, my “busiest” weeks had me “busy” for about 25-30 hours/week. And the number of weeks with that much going on I could count on one or two hands.

Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share

I need to add another point of context to all this, too. My part-time job and the time-limited gig—which, together account for the vast majority of my working hours—both are pretty fun. I wouldn’t necessarily do either for no pay, but I certainly don’t dread them. In fact, I often look forward to each and, in the case of the part-time job, seeing and interacting with my coworkers. 

That’s a far cry from my professional career. In it, I felt as tho I was always “on.” That’s because I sorta kinda was. An “after-hours” or weekend email might require my immediate attention. Sometimes even that I drop everything to complete or make headway on a project. 

That was bad enough. Worse was that the mere possibility of this happening hung constantly over me like the sword of Damocles. Even though such emails were very rare, I constantly anticipated them. I also thought about work all the time, even outside the workday. 

The net effect was that my brain never really checked out of work. Evenings, weekends, holidays, and vacations were compromised because of this. My ability to experience full, unadulterated relaxation and enjoyment was strangled in its crib. Year after year after year. For decades.

What’s more, I felt guilty for even feeling this way. I mean, even at my ripe old age, my hands are laughably soft. And in the later years of my career, I was quite well compensated to boot. So, I’d think of all the people who do (back-breaking) manual labor and/or who toil long hours for meager wages with little or no control of their schedules and wince mightily at having the temerity to be stressed and mentally drained. Grateful and humble? You’re darn tootin’ I am. 

Ultimately, I extended some grace to myself. I concluded that while manual labor is infinitely tougher on the body than the work I did, and low-wage, low-control workers can feel like their soul is being sucked dry far more than I did, it’s not all sunshine and roses for white-collar workers like me. We labor in highly brain-intensive activities with highly demanding customers. And while technology can make tasks easier, it almost always simultaneously results in that saved time being reallocated to higher value work. That often is equal to or greater in mental taxation as the work outsourced to tech. Let’s just say, the quiet-quitting phenomenon of 2022 intuitively made sense to me.

The remains of the days

My other side gig and the project work I took on (and may yet again) involve the work I did in my professional career. But it’s a far cry from my professional career. 

For one thing, I take on opportunities at my complete discretion. In my full-time job, I for all intents and purposes had to complete all projects thrown my way. Whether I liked the work or not.

For another thing, the number of hours I devote to this work now is small. Often nothing at all. In any event, that’s mostly within my full control, too. While there is a little “always-on” element to this work, it, too, is fairly limited. Because I take on few projects, that feeling can take hold of me only so much. While this sensation that I experience isn’t fun, it’s nothing like when I was working full time. It’s also likely just a legacy feeling from the old days that my brain hasn’t yet fully shaken. In time I may scrap this work altogether and avoid the sensation entirely. For now, I’m willing to endure small doses of it for the revenues the work generates.

And in the end . . . 

So, there you have it. Whereas once all my time was someone else’s (or at least it felt as much), now, time is on my side. Yes, it is.