The Candle at Both Ends
Balancing Creative Work and Work Work
Today’s Shelf Life is about trying to find balance between the pursuits that bring you joy and the pursuits that bring you enough money, hopefully, to purchase shelter and sustenance so you can live a comfortable life. It is a fitting topic because I’ve been working early mornings and late evenings this week due to (an expected) crunch time at work and, also, I started writing this Shelf Life really late because I was playing video games longer than I should have been.
When people say “burning the candle at both ends” they mean the candle is getting used up faster—twice as fast. This is the correct interpretation of the phrase. When I think about a candle burning at both ends, though, I also think of holding it in the middle of the candle, like a twirly baton, because both ends are burning. If you are burning a candle at both ends you cannot put it down without setting something on fire.
Most of us have to work to live, or had to at some point—hat tip to my now-retired parents, who are both somehow busier in retirement than they ever were during the working portion of their life. A lot of us have occupations that are not directly related to the creative activities we’d like to be pursuing. Some of us, like in my case, have a job that’s tangentially related. That is, I’m an editor and publications manager and I enjoy writing as a creative activity.
Then I have many friends and colleagues who are engaged in some variation of a creative activity as their day job. For instance, folks who do animation, illustration, graphic design, and writing to earn their living. Other stuff, too; like I know some working actual fine artists, which is really cool. When I went to school for art the first thing any of the art teachers wanted to tell us was we’d never make a living doing fine art. After all, they all studied art with the intention of being working fine artists, and they all ended up teaching art. There’s nothing wrong with teaching art, it’s just that it’s not so easy to earn your living making fine art and displaying and selling it. So I really admire people who do that.
Listen, I admire just about all jobs. There’s dignity in most human labor.
Something many people express to me (and I know I myself have expressed) is, “I wish I could engage in my creative pursuit as my day job.” When I was younger, adults (not my parents but adjacent adults) would cheerfully tell me to get a job doing something I love so I’d never work a day in my life.
This is why I got an English degree, actually. When I was looking through the catalog of majors I had no idea what I wanted to do after college. I just knew I didn’t want to go back to doing the thing I was doing before college, which was working on a publication at a nonprofit. Joke’s on me; guess what I do twenty-five years later.I had no preference about what I wanted to study, but I knew I was bad at math and most sciences and my mom had told me I could live at home for free if I went to college. I picked the English major because I like reading and I figured I’d do a lot of that in the course of the degree. Which I did.
What people don’t always get right is that when you make your creative passion into your day job, it becomes less of a fun, passionate activity than expected. Deadlines get attached, others get to have their critical say on your work, and you have to put in early mornings and late nights, sometimes, doing your creative pursuit when you’d rather be sleeping. And then after the paying work, you don’t always have creative energy left for the things you want to do. Even something you started out wanting to do can become a chore when it turns into your day job.
At the end of the day, many of us can’t or don’t want to spend our nine-to-five hours doing our creative pursuits on the clock, for a living.
I’m reminded of the young person who went viral on the clock tok app because she wanted a beautiful sweater she had seen in a store, but she was disgusted by how expensive it was (couple hundred dollars), so she got materials and learned to knit and made a very similar sweater herself. Her story became so popular that followers began requesting to buy the sweater and she agreed to sell them. She quickly realized that, first, the sweater she saw in the store was priced fairly based on the cost of materials and labor she was using to make its duplicate and, second, that making a cute sweater is not nearly as much fun when you have orders to fill and the clock is ticking.
I made mini cupcakes last week for a party. I made them from Dolly Parton’s Southern-Style Coconut Cake box mix, which is a box mix worth going to Walmart for (I hate Walmart). Making mini cupcakes is a great example of how something that would have been fun if you did it once or twice is not at all fun if you have to do it forty-eight times in a row.
Anyway, I say to my partner often that I wish I had time to write and I don’t do any writing because I never have time, and then he says, “Weird, I’m still getting Shelf Life in my inbox twice a week, who’s writing that if not you?” I mean he doesn’t say exactly that, but his point is I write an awful lot for a person who does it alongside a full-time (and sometimes more) day job.
Then I always say, “Shelf Life doesn’t count!” I don’t know why I feel like it doesn’t count, it definitely counts. All writing counts. All writing is real writing. When I am not at my actual day job or, like, playing a sport—in my solitary pursuits, I mean—I make the rules about what constitutes success. Nobody else makes the rules for me. I make all the rules.
I want to talk a bit about the techniques I use to find that balance, so I can still engage in all my favorite creative activities even though I work a normal amount for an adult human being.
First, though, I have to acknowledge a few caveats:
I work a normal amount but not a ridiculous amount. These strategies may well fall apart for people who work well beyond the number of hours I think of as “average.”
I don’t have caregiving responsibilities except to my dogs (no childcare or eldercare); although those responsibilities are often on top of, not instead of a day job, and this is advice for limiting the invasion of your day job into your non-day-job life, caregiving responsibilities may throw a wrench into these strategies as well for people who have them. I don’t know. I don’t have experience with that.
1. Don’t Take Work Home
This might sound kind of silly considering I work at home but, since I began working at home, I have found it even more important to not take work home than when I was working from an office outside the home.
I try not to blur the line between work time and not work time, is what I mean. Keeping in mind that my job is the nine to five, Monday to Friday type—sometimes work time is more than the prescribed 8 hours a day; sometimes work time is on evenings or weekends or holidays. It’s just like that sometimes.
When I’m working, I don’t make a rule to never do personal stuff, either. I’ll take a break to walk the dogs or run an errand or whatever, if my schedule allows. Sometimes non-work-stuff intrudes on work time.
Work time never intrudes on non-work time. If I have to work additional time beyond my norm, that’s fine, that’s work time. But what I don’t ever do is just, you know, pick up a little work here and there on my personal time. I don’t let work bleed over into all the other parts of my life. I don’t get work emails on my cell phone. I don’t answer texts from colleagues when I’m not working, unless it’s urgent, in which case I end personal time and go back to work. I don’t answer texts from colleagues while I’m eating dinner, or watching a movie, or reading a book, or playing a video game—or writing Shelf Life.
Work is like a goldfish, or the contents of my handbag. It will grow to fill the space it has. Put it in a little bowl so it can’t turn into a huge carp.
2. Locate the Off Button
I believe everybody has a work “off button” but some people don’t know what their off button is. That is to say, I think everyone has—and if I’m wrong on this, I think everyone should have—something they can do to flip the work switch to off and take themself out of work mode.
Everyone can stop working; that’s not what I mean. Sometimes you stop working because it’s six or whatever and you go to make dinner and eat it and then sit down to knit or watch TV or whatever and your brain is still going on about work. Either because you have a lot going on at work and your brain wants extra time to manage it all or because something at work affected you emotionally and you can’t shut it down.
You can’t do item number one—leave work at work and not take it home—if you let it stay in the front of your brain after work is over.
I have discovered a handful of off switches for my brain of varying types. One of them is rollerskating, which I don’t do much anymore unfortunately. Several of my skating friends agreed with me that skating is an activity that can always turn your mind off something that is bothering you because you must pay attention to what your body is doing while you are skating, and not let your mind ruminate on work stuff or anything else that’s bothering you, or you will end up with a metal plate and nine screws in your wrist. Ask me how I know.
I don’t skate much or at all anymore, really, but I do have other activities that take up the same space in my brain that work stress takes up, and if I need to detach from work I can just go do that activity and it turns the work part of my brain off until I want (or need) to turn it back on again.
Some people seem to not know what this off switch might be for them, and they continue thinking about work and suffering with their work stress all the time, or until they naturally wind down. I do think they have an off switch somewhere, though. You have to find something that occupies the same part of your brain as work but leaves no room for work and teach yourself to focus on that until work packs up and goes home.
This is not medical advice and those who deal with anxiety thought spirals (which might be prompted by or related to work!) won’t be able to will the thoughts away. This is for those of us with garden-variety work-won’t-stop-poking-my-brain-itis.
3. Keep Work in Perspective
Work is an important part of most people’s life. It’s definitely a very important part of my life. I like my job, I enjoy working with my colleagues, the work I do is meaningful, I care about the mission and the projects, and it pays those pesky bills that keep showing up every month. Plus health insurance and retirement plan and all that jobby job stuff. I feel lucky to have a job this good and I very much want to do a good job at my job so I can keep doing this job until it’s time for me to retire.
However, a job’s a job. Work is a part of life but it’s not life itself. As much as I like my job, if I got let go, downsized, fired for cause, or anything else—I’d survive. I’d get another one. I had jobs I liked a lot before and I had to leave those jobs and I got new jobs and it’s stressful to leave your job (for whatever reason, usually) and find a new one but—there’s more jobs. Unemployment is low right now (not always the case) and the economy is growing.
Sometimes I get mildly stressed out by my job, like when we’ve got a lot of competing deadlines or big projects are coming due. I’ve had employees throughout my whole career come to me and express the same: I’m stressed out, I’ll never finish this on time, there’s too much work, I overlooked a mistake, everything’s a disaster, the sky is falling, and so on. I asked a junior staff member once, “Are you a brain surgeon?” And she said, “No,” and I said: “So what happens if you don’t get it done on time? Or miss a mistake? Is someone going to die?” (Obviously not.)
When you mess up at work, there are always consequences but you have to put those consequences in perspective. This dovetails with Tuesday’s On Mistakes—there are going to be misses. You can and should take accountability for them and learn from them and improve processes when possible so they don’t happen again—but there’s no reason to feel bad, dwell, or beat yourself up over it.
I would tell you what my brother says about feeling bad about things, but Shelf Life is a profanity-free zone.
If you work at a place where it’s expected that you feel bad about your mistakes and dwell on them, then your work environment sucks and you should get a new one if you can. The problem is not you; it’s definitely them.
If your workplace is a hospital because you are, in fact, a brain surgeon, I don’t know what to tell you. You should be giving me advice and not the other way round.
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