I’m inspired by Etsy’s Quit Your Day Job series to make transparent some of my own struggles with maintaining my day job, as it were.
I’ve written before about how much I love my day job. It’s a really awesome place to work; I get to help people do their jobs better, and in the process, nurture my own helpful and caring personality. Plus, I get to be geeky and tech-savvy in ways I never imagined I’d love being. Long story short: I have no intentions of “quitting my day job.” I just want to sew and create, too.
Maybe this is why I’m so fascinated by the seller’s stories featured on Etsy’s series. As someone who loves and is fulfilled by her work-a-day life, but who also loves creating, I’m intrigued by the stories of folks who made the decision to go solely for the crafting side. People make decisions about their priorities all the time. Many times, the story is quite different from the ones in the Quit Your Day Job series: people make a decision to shuck their creative side to do the “right” or “correct” thing with their lives, or do do what’s necessary to make ends meet. And that’s one of the points of this series… to show others that it is possible to make ends meet AND delve into creativity full time.
So perhaps I am lucky. But holding on to and loving my day-job presents some interesting challenges:
Working weekends / nights
It may seem like a simple thing, but working 40 hours a week (plus about 2 hours daily commute on the trains) takes up a lot of your waking hours! And especially when the winter months mean shorter days, it can be easy to want to turn in as soon as you get home, and use precious weekend daylight hours for other activities (houses get messy and food needs to be replenished, after all).
This is when creativity starts to feel more like a chore and less like creativity. Best advice: small chunks. It’s easier to do 30 minutes’ worth of work on a project a night than try to cram it in all at once. But don’t fret; yours truly has pulled some all nighters for sewing projects before.
Maintaining email contact with customers
This may not seem like a big deal (especially when your full-time job is at a tech company, and you’re expected to be accessible via email all day), but it’s surprisingly challenging to stay on top of emails and Esty messages with clients when your full time work requires constant email communication, too. This is in large part due to my desire to keep my full-time work separate from my crafting work.
To combat this, I keep a dedicated browser for full-time work items, and a separate browser for crafting work items. My Etsy shop, recent conversations, and any USPS tracking info resides in one browser. I can minimize it (or shuffle it to a different “space” on my screen) and only come to it during lunch. Then, everything is already open and ready to act on.
Now, if I can only remember to take my USPS receipts with me to work… Many is the time I’ve had to follow up from a morning USPS shipment that evening because the tracking number was left in my car at the train station.
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