By Kathryn Mykel
I’ve never been good at work-life balance. I
am, however, excellent at work-work balance.
When I need a break from writing, I quilt.
And when I need a break from quilting, I write. I can spend an entire Saturday
sewing and genuinely believe I’ve had a relaxing day off. Never mind that the
quilt I’m working on is a pattern I designed and the sample has a deadline. I
was sewing. Sewing is fun. Therefore, I was relaxing. Makes sense, right?
This logic works great when you have
absolutely no self-control.
Writing has its own version. I can decide I’m
done working for the night, close the laptop, and listen to an audiobook. That
sounds perfectly reasonable until I realize I’m paying attention to how the
author ended a chapter or repeated sentence starts. Or I’ll take the dog for a
walk and come home having figured out who killed someone and why it makes sense
to hide the body near the solar farm. My brain has a fairly loose
interpretation of “off the clock.”
There’s also the problem of rewards.
I wrote recently about using rewards to keep
myself motivated through more than fifty stories in five years. Finish the
book, earn a quilting day. Hit a goal, buy some fabric. Survive a launch, spend
the weekend sewing with friends. The only flaw in this system is that
eventually the reward starts looking suspiciously like more work.
I’m also surrounded by people who make this
behavior seem completely normal. My writing friends understand why I’m excited
to spend two hours on Zoom working silently beside them. My quilting friends
understand why buying fabric for a new project makes perfect sense when we
already have fabric for projects we haven’t finished.
Nobody in either group is likely to stage an
intervention. We’re all enablers, really.
My friends have joked for years that I get
more accomplished while procrastinating than most people do when they’re
actually working. I recently came across a quilter on YouTube who explained
that he finished a huge quilt project by working on it while procrastinating on
everything else.
I
immediately thought, Yes. That! Exactly.
When I spend a lot of time quilting, I start
thinking about writing again. If I spend a lot of time writing, I start itching
to quilt. Somewhere along the way, though, I seem to have confused switching
jobs with actually stopping work. I say, “I’m working,” and the familiar reply
from friends and family is, “You’re always working.”
This year, I’ve spent more time quilting and
less time writing. Before long, the quilting deadlines started multiplying, new
projects appeared on my sewing table, and my definition of “taking a break”
became questionable all over again.
Needless to say, I hadn’t had a real vacation
in many, let’s just say, years.
In my last post, I mentioned that I was
headed on an author-reader cruise. (Do you see the theme here?) Well, I’m back
from said cruise, and I tell you, I got some really great sleep done. If I
could have sat in a lounge chair on the deck of the boat for seven straight
days and done nothing but eat and sleep, I would’ve been in heaven.
Cruise Fun
I came home from the cruise rested, well-fed,
and ready to get back to my deadlines. Which sounds perfectly responsible until
you realize that most of those deadlines are self-imposed. Apparently, I’m both
the overworked employee complaining about the schedule and the unreasonable
boss who created it. Still, I wouldn’t trade any of it for a nine-to-five.
Balance looks different for everyone, and
these two pursuits provide a balance that works for me. I’ve managed to make
the two careers completely symbiotic. Each one fuels, rewards, and provides
procrastination from the other. I’ve essentially engineered all possible escape
routes out of my own life. Come to think of it, this may be less work-work
balance and more work-work-work balance.
So tell me: If you love what you do, how do
you know when you’re working and when you’re actually taking time off or
enjoying a hobby? And are you any better at work-life balance than I am?
Find Kathryn’s work here
www.authorkathrynmykel.com
