When Drowning in Overtime Hours, Here's How to Stay Afloat

A good friend from college days told me about a recent dilemma. She's being offered so much overtime at her job in retail management that she's had to pull back on what she considers her real work, designing & creating hassle-free baby clothes. She'd just begun to experience some success in her new side business, selling at her local farmers' market, when an unexpected repair bill upset the balance. She feels like she should accept the extra hours but at the same time, resents the time they'd take away from her fledgling business.

The question of whether to work overtime (if there's a choice in the matter) always poses problems for those of us who have serious side businesses or activities. I haven't met anyone who's never felt the need for more money at some point. At times I've put in extra hours, often more than I've wanted, in order to pay off a bill or buy a big-expense item like a new computer. For some of my friends the "opportunity" for overtime never ends.

How do you set limits? And how do you keep slogging onward when you're discouraged because it seems like all you do is work, you miss practicing your art and worst of all, it feels like this particular stretch will never end?

Many years ago when I worked for an educational agency full-time while getting my freelance business off the ground, this was how I approached overtime:

• First, I decided to take extra hours only if I needed extra money for something specific. My regular earnings were enough to live on if I made thrifty choices. I'd noticed from observing friends in more highly paid industries that always having a lot of money didn't solve anything; high earners got used to certain amenities which then became necessities.
  
• When an actual need (such as new tires) or a justifiable expense (plane fare for family reunion or a desktop publishing program that would cut project times in half) came up, I calculated the amount I'd need to pay for it, then figure out how many extra hours I'd need to work for it. From there I could decide how many extra hours to accept.
• During overtime episodes I found it helpful to daily remind myself why I was doing this. A visual reminder such as a picture of what I was working for made it seem more real. And when the extra work was especially onerous, I'd count down the hours by crossing them off one by one in my calendar.
  
• After each spurt of overtime finished I immediately got the rest of my life, including writing & editing, back on track.
• If extra work came up when I didn't need the money or had a lot of freelance assignments, I turned it down. Among other things, this let my bosses and co-workers know that I was willing to go the extra mile some of the time but not every time. It insured that I didn't become the unofficial go-to person every time the office stayed open for an evening event. Precedents and expectations can be extremely difficult to change once they're in place.
• I always tried to keep the big picture in mind: while my day job provided an important service to the people who came to our agency, it was still only one part of life. The work I did at home provided an equally important service to my customers. I found that it helped to think of the job as one component of what some vocational counselors call Life Work. All the components need to work together.
  

It doesn't matter what you do during your off hours; if you're emotionally invested in it, it's important. Approaching overtime or extra-hours requests in a thoughtful way and using overtime earnings for a premeditated purpose may be the best way to show respect for yourself, your time and your work - all your work.

Breathe!

Here are a few visualizing exercises I've found helpful during stressful times. When I began experimenting with them I was skeptical (a familiar condition for me) but have found that practicing them on a regular basis has made a difference in how I respond to certain situations and people.

Guarding against negative stress: a self-protection exercise

• Get into a comfortable position and relax in whatever way works best for you.
• Visualize yourself being surrounded by a globe of light. You can make this light whatever color you want but make it clear, so that you can see through it.
  
• Give it a flexible but definite boundary, one that will screen out the harmful effects of negative interactions.

This is an especially good exercise if you're feeling the effects of others' emotions or energy, such as happens in a job with high public contact.

Grounding yourself: an exercise for when you feel overwhelmed

• Relax in whatever way works for you.
• Visualize yourself as a sort of human tree. Make your trunk as solid as possible, extend your roots downward and anchor them into the ground. Send your branches upward.
• Just sit for several minutes, holding the image of being rooted firmly in the ground.

This exercise is especially helpful when life feels like it's getting out of hand, you feel spacey or you'll be dealing with someone who always tries to knock you off-center.

Heart Breath: an exercise for practicing neutral compassion

• Take slow deep breaths but imagine your breath is coming from your heart area. As you inhale, imagine compassion for yourself filling you up. As you exhale, imagine that compassion flowing out of you into the world.

I've found this exercise especially helpful in developing an attitude of neutral attention so that you can help others in a way that doesn't drain you.

Finally, a mindfulness exercise I learned from a Zen meditation instructor: every hour on the hour, simply stop what you're doing, take three deep breaths and say to yourself "Here I am." It's a great way to train yourself to stay in the present rather than drifting off into the past or future.

Call it "Work.," Change Your Life

When I first began resurrecting my part-time writing & editing career three years ago after being out of the game for more than a decade, I tried to accommodate this plus all the other activities in my life. These activities included a job (first PT, then FT), everything at home and matters that came up with friends and family. Do I need to mention that this tactic failed miserably and that I ended up with a lot of half-finished projects?

Looking back, I think that even though I've made a secondary income via freelancing for most of my adult life, I'd never treated it as work or given it the same serious attention I gave to jobs working for someone else. This was partly due to my own perception and that of everyone in my life that writing isn't "real" work even if it makes money.

In the previous paragraph you could substitute any passion for "writing" - photography, playing in a band, starting & running a foundation or community service, making & marketing handmade items, running an urban mini-farm - and you'd be dealing with the same perceptions. Those perceptions include the ideas that if it's fun, if it doesn't make much money, and if you're working on our own, it's not real work. You can tweak your office space, hold endless family meetings and incessantly experiment with scheduling but if you're not clear in your own mind that your passion is also serious work, all these measures will fail.

Some of my fellow writers haven't liked this idea because "work" is such a serious word. It connotes drudgery. All of us have days when we're just putting in the hours. Those who hold jobs with extremely repetitive tasks or have little self-determination & opportunity for exercising personal judgement might feel like work is all drudgery.

But it doesn't have to be that way merely by definition. Think of "work" as simply doing something useful, either for yourself or others. If you feel called to do a certain activity - you have a strong sense of purpose behind it - then calling it "work" is the first step. This will provide a reference point for making daily decisions that move you forward rather than keep you stuck.

For example, if you've planned to spend four hours this afternoon proofing copy or drafting a grant proposal, and a friend calls (knowing it's your day off from your job) asking you to help her cousin move, you can say, "Sorry, I'm working this afternoon." If you feel a smidgen of guilt even though you don't even know this friend's cousin, you can add, "I'll bring over some beer later."

My own writing life shifted dramatically when I began seeing it as part of a many-sided career that includes the job, freelancing and things for which I don't get paid at all but are part of the purpose I've defined for myself. It's becoming progressively easier to say "no" to activities that feel out of sync. I have fewer problems with prioritizing.

The most noticeable difference, however, is that the various things I do are finally feeding each other rather than fighting each other. I've seen this happen with other people as well; life starts to feel like a patchwork quilt with an actual pattern rather than a bunch of little fabric squares. A few of these people live seamlessly in a happy state where each relationship or project gives & receives energy from everything/everyone else.

I hope to reach that state someday. And I hope to see you there too.

When Encountering Turbulence, Just Bounce Along

Here's a bit of Zen wisdom I encountered years ago - it's saved my sanity on a number of occasions: if you expect some chaos during turbulent times, you're less likely to be thrown off-base when it arrives. To me this sounded refreshingly sensible after years of trying really hard to believe that positive thinking always produces positive results.

Great expectations have almost become a requirement in our culture. There's a real push to believe that it's possible to solve all problems quickly & painlessly, find a dream job or build a dream life, and have whatever our hearts desire. Acknowledging limitations is "negative." These beliefs have been around as long as I can remember but they've intensified during the last decade. Best-selling books like The Secret create entire programs to help readers manifest their wishes.

The positive-thinking push has given many of us the idea that it's wrong to feel discouraged, that if we don't get what we wish for, we've failed somehow, and that we have to press on no matter what we might be dealing with at the time. I call it fighting the turbulence.

I believe that expectations are important but sometimes keeping up a relentlessly forward-looking outlook is just too much work. During transitions, steep learning curves or rocky times, just staying afloat is a reasonable goal. It's okay to let big goals and projects lie fallow during these times.

I used to try to keep ahead of everything all the time, even when the house was burning down, figuratively speaking. These days I cut myself more slack. And I've found that bouncing with the turbulence is less strenuous than fighting it.

Dealing with Feelings: The Action/Feeling Logbook

What if you're working on a creative project, maybe even one with a deadline, and you're broadsided by a spate of severe self-doubt or a depressive slump? I'm not talking about the occasional mild blah feeling; I mean the sort of blues where it's hard to get out of bed.

In the short run, taking a day off to mope might work. However, if the day stretches into weeks, you'll quickly find yourself in a rut. And here's the killer: allowing yourself to slide into that rut will not only stall your creative life but the extended mope time won't help you feel any better.

Here's a tip from one of my favorite authors, Barbara Sher. Briefly acknowledge your feelings, tell them "We'll talk later," then get to work. After you're done for the day, note your accomplishments in an action/feeling logbook.

Buy a notebook (the spiral-bound ones work well) and keep a log of every action you take towards your dream or project each day. Then note how you felt that day. Chances are good that you'll find, as I have, that your productivity isn't as connected to your feelings as you'd initially thought. If you record your accomplishments regularly, you'll reinforce the fact that you don't have to feel great in order to produce good work. You might even end up feeling better anyway.

During the "wishcraft" groups I've led, I've found that this simple trick works especially well for people who by temperament tend to get bogged down in their own emotions. Participants who seemed to be Introverts and Feelers (Meyers-Briggs temperament indicator), Idealists or Dreamers (the Enneagram personality system) or "Blues" (the color personality system) benefit from following structured action plans and keeping accomplishment logs. Since feeling follows action, you have to act first in order to feel better.

Keeping a log takes only minutes a day but it can make a huge difference in your creative life.

Part-Time: hey, it's still work!

I know a lot of people who don't work 40-plus hours per week in a single place. Some work for pay part-time, by choice - maybe they're semi-retired, are homeschooling their kids or are extremely dedicated to a volunteer commitment. Others are piecing together several PT jobs because they need the money and are trying to make the best of it. Still others, including me, hold a PT job while running a side business. Many of those side businesses are in what's often called creative fields - graphic design, handcrafted items such as ceramics, copy writing or performing, for example.

A part-time patchwork life can work but it takes planning. Here are some issues I've had to work out, and tactics that have worked for me:

• If you work a PT job and have a sideline venture at home, be very clear with yourself that your at-home work is work, and treat it accordingly. I know writers who have thriving side businesses and writers who keep spinning their wheels. One enormous difference between the two is that the thriving writers regard their writing as a career, not a pastime they indulge in when they don't have to be at the office. If you take your venture seriously, you'll give it the time and attention it deserves, and potential clients or buyers will be more likely to respect you.
• Take time to plan your week. This is especially important if your job doesn't involve a set schedule or if your hours are flexible. If your job doesn't have predictable hours, you can still plan "office hours" for your side business; you'll just have to find a way to keep potential customers informed. Having a Facebook page for your business is probably the most flexible way to do this, since you can post your "available" times weekly.
• When you've scheduled yourself to work at whatever you're doing, work. The fact that you can edit copy at 3 a.m. and spend the evening (which was supposed to be spent editing) babysitting your niece doesn't mean you should - unless you want to, of course. If people know that you do some of your work at home, you might start hearing things like, "But you can always paint - after all, you work at home. An hour her and there won't throw you off." Practice saying "I'd like to help but I have to work."
  
• Accept that some people in your life, maybe including some FT co-workers, will refuse to take your contribution to your workplace seriously or will treat your side work like a trivial indulgence. Nearly a decade ago I worked PT at a local elementary school and ran a business on the side. Predictably every Friday afternoon, one of my FT co-workers would make an edgy remark about how lucky I was that my weekend lasted till Wednesday. Pointing out that I'd spend most of the supposed weekend making sales didn't have any effect. After I'd been at the school for several months I realized that this woman didn't like her job, regarded work itself as a curse and seemed to be chronically angry at anyone who wasn't in an office 40 hours a week.
  Just smile and change the subject.

Hopefully it'll work for you!

ReVitalize: Improv Your Act

Several summers ago I took a class called Improvisation for Theater and for Life. Maybe "life" came before "theater;" I don't remember. The class was taught by Clark College theater instructor Marci McReynolds. This wasn't like other theater classes I'd taken in the dim past. Everything we practiced related to what's sometimes called real life. I learned totally new (to me) things about myself. And I made a number of friends who are still close. For me the class, like my first few years with my writers' group or my experiences singing with other people, was a spiritual experience.

Maybe the most valuable thing I learned that summer is the importance of the art of improvisation. In my workaday life I make plans but if they fall through, I have to improvise. The previous 20 years, with kids & schools & earning a living & the money tightrope & all that stuff, one thing piled on top of another, made me feel like I was flying by the seat of my pants (I'll have to look up the origin of that expression) ninety percent of the time. This bugged me. Shouldn't I have gotten it "right" much sooner?

After taking this class I realized that a successful life doesn't require eliminating surprises. You can't! However, as theologian and amateur trapeze artist Sam Keen says in his book Learning to Fly, it requires knowing how to fall when you make a misstep. You will fall, but if you practice your falling skills, you won't get hurt badly. That's another subject for another time.

During that summer I came to realize that perfection is an illusion It's okay to not plan sometimes. Planning and spontaneity are two ends of a continuum. Sticking to either extreme causes problems. But if you're primarily one type, then dabbling in the other type's way of being can be revelatory.

I tried improvising on many occasions: when I didn't know where the plot to my story was leading; when I didn't know what to tell Noel after all his tactics towards solving a social problem at school didn't work; when I didn't know the answer to a customer's sticky question. On many occasions I felt like both I and the person I was trying to help were muddling through. But in the end, even though the results might not have been what I'd originally wanted, doors opened.

These days when I'm stuck, I stop trying to plan my way out of the bag. Instead, I improvise. This applies to writing articles, making music, finessing a difficult transaction on the job, working with a tricky weekly schedule or trying to help a friend. It took me awhile to build my set of life improv skills.

If you're not comfortable with improvising, start out slowly. Designate a half-day (maybe on your day off, to start) during which you'll wake up without a plan, ask yourself what feels right, and allow yourself to be led minute by minute. The leading might come from demands from people around you but it might also pop up in the form of inner urges, unexpected opportunities and serendipity. This is where the magic begins.

After awhile you can have improv days at work. You'll still be doing what you've always done OTJ but you'll give yourself permission to allow the unexpected to happen, and to deal with it as it happens.

Practice your flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants skills until you're able to designate an entire week for life improv. This doesn't mean you forget your kid's dentist appointment or fail to show up for work. Improv is not irresponsibility. It means that you don't micro-plan so that every second of the day is filled. It means that you leave plenty of room for happy accidents, as coach Barbara Sher calls them, to happen. It means that Spirit (or God or the universe or whoever) can finally whisper the answer to that vexing problem in your ear and you'll hear it because you're not yapping away to yourself.

Try it.