I am swamped at my day job. I am the kind of busy where I am days behind on all of my projects, I accomplishing my daily tasks at an almost feverish pace, and my office is a mess because cleaning stuff up as I go takes too long. (I realize I will likely have to spend two hours cleaning it at the end of the month, but it will be two hours well-spent, let me tell you.) Then I grab the kiddo from school and try to give him my full attention til dinnertime, and then it’s back to work on Tiny Dino Studios.
While I am sure I have mentioned it before, I am trying to spend as much time on my yarn business as I do on my day job. It’s a lot easier to quantify the day job as 30 hours a week, because I am scheduled to be there. This yarn thing is another story. When a so-called hobby overlaps so closely with work, it can sometimes be difficult to draw the line between work and play. I think about it this way: if I am knitting a sock for myself out of yarn I dyed, that is not work. If I am photographing pictures of said sock and yarn for the blog, that is work. If I am designing a sock, any time I touch it anything to do with it, it’s work. I have never quite reached 30 hours a week yet, I am averaging closer to 20. Since I never seem to make it 30, I always feel like I am not doing enough. I could always be doing more, and I feel guilty for taking some time off.
This is stupid, and I am trying to stop.
I have a pretty full schedule most of the time. Yesterday, for instance was day job from 8-3, doing yarny work on my lunch break, picking Athrun up from school, Athrun time for two hours, Athrun off to his dad’s so I can go write at the coffee shop for an hour and a half and then I spent two hours teaching a knitting class. Then home for a glass of wine and bed.
It’s no wonder I’m tired today. In 13 hours, I had a two hour break with my kiddo–and while writing and knitting classes are all totally and completely fun for me to do, they are still work.
Today, I feel like sitting on the sofa and doing nothing–but I have put in 6 hours of day job and 3 1/2 hours of knitting job so far, and I feel like I should keep going. To admit that I just don’t have it in me is a battle I don’t usually win. Normally when I feel like this, I tell myself I am going to relax and do something not work related after dinner, I get through an hour before I start to feel lazy and pick up something work related to do.
The thing is, I have no reason to feel guilty or lazy.
So tonight, I am going to revel in my non-working, and congratulate myself on everything I have accomplished over the last couple of days. (And eat some damn ice cream.)