February 1st, 2024 paycheck

Created:

All right, I’m starting to feel a bit more normal about continuing to write these despite not having “normal” employment or a paycheck provider.

Time: Mastering the Mundane is now available for purchase. It’s still being published incrementally and is available up to Part 5.

I was hoping to say someone bought a copy and also bought a copy of the first edition of Triumph over Time. But it looks like they immediately returned them both. The former made me feel pretty good, and the latter was a bit of a bummer. That said, we have a long way to go; hopefully, it helps someone.

The guardrails I’ve set for myself are that if the short-term assets in my portfolio drop to 6 percent, I’ll ramp up more on looking for a steady-income gig. If it drops to 3 percent, that will be all I focus my time on.

The lower the short-term assets, the higher the priority becomes to find a steady-income gig.

I don’t do well with time-based constraints. #TimeLordProblems

Right now, we’re still at about 7 percent, which is good. That said, it’s down from 9 percent in two or three months, which has me a little concerned.

I don’t recall how much I’ve talked about my routine since becoming fully self-employed for the time being, so we’ll give some highlights here.

Step 1: Mourn the loss of the relationship

Section titled Step 1: Mourn the loss of the relationship

The first piece of advice I give to folks who find themselves in a situation where they don’t have a standard “working for someone else” routine is to take time to mourn the loss of the relationship. Don’t wrap yourself in a blanket of distractions.

Even if the relationship was toxic and abusive (not saying this one was), it was still a relationship. No matter how much you may think you were emotionally divested or disinterested, there was still reciprocity and cooperation in some form. Reciprocity and cooperation are drivers of connection within our species.

You don’t think those shops in the food court give out “free samples” just because, do you? Car dealerships with “free” coffee and donuts. Employers with cafeterias, concierge services, and so on. I’m not saying it’s malicious intent or anything. It’s just tapping into our humanity and how we form and build relationships.

All that to say, the loss of that connection will most likely hit you on a physical, mental, and emotional level at some point.

This looks different for everyone.

For me, I usually take a day or two and meditate. Sitting in the stillness of being on “my clock.” This, I find, is the most anxiety-laden time and realization. It’s “my clock.” Whatever routine and interactions I had with this entity on the other end of my “relationship with” them is gone. It will not happen again or more often.

Who breaks up with whom and how usually determines how long this initial mourning period will be.

I’m pretty loyal, and it takes a lot of exploration and questioning for me to decide to bail. Not necessarily a lot of time, but a lot of impact and reflecting on that impact. Therefore, if I leave, I’ve said a lot of things to try to make sure the path being taken that I don’t want to travel won’t change for the other person or entity, and the mourning period started while I explored that with diligence.

If the other party breaks up with me, and we’ve been trying to “work things out.” Again, the mourning has already started, but it usually takes longer after the break up.

If the other party bails when I thought everything was fine, that usually takes the longest.

Back to meditating.

For me, when I say a day or two of meditating, I’m mainly focused on two things:

  1. Experiencing the washing away of the previous relationship.
  2. Deciding on my next step to take without that relationship.

For the first part, thoughts come in the form of:

  1. “I wonder how they’re doing,” and reassuring myself it’s no longer my business or right to know.
  2. “The problem we have…” and reassuring myself there is no “we” anymore and that’s okay.

For the second part, I’m not deciding what my next 12 months will look like. It’s not jumping on as many “dating” apps as I can and “putting myself out there.” No one should be or feel like a rebound relationship.

Step 2: Setting “my clock”

Section titled Step 2: Setting “my clock”

I’ve been broken up with and have broken up with enough employers (and people, frankly) that I can usually get to a space of looking ahead pretty quickly. (Also, my inner goth-punk kid still has an “interesting” relationship with death, but that’s for another time and place.)

I find there are two ways to set “your clock” in situations like this. The first is to turn off all the alarms in the house, and go to bed whenever you feel like it and don’t try to artificially wake yourself up. The second is to maintain a “regular work schedule.”

I usually go with the second option because I’ve done the first option enough times to know that my most creative and energetic time is from about 2200 until about 0200. However, if I go to sleep before hitting that time, it doesn’t mess me up. That said, when I’m on “my clock,” I don’t try to force myself to maintain “normal hours” as much.

As I’m writing this, it’s 2122, which means in about 40 minutes, we’ll be in my most creative time zone.

The “normal hours” let me keep space and routine in my life to easily transition back to being on “someone else’s clock.” I won’t get used to sleeping in until noon, “partying hard” (and all day) on Tuesdays, and so on, only to have to upend my “new life” to fit with someone else’s “normal life.”

Note: If you haven’t worked for someone else in a while, I highly recommend shifting to “normal hours” for the job you want before seeking out that relationship.

I need to rein this back in.

During the meditation period, I decided I would split the day in half; this is normal for me. The first half would be for me, and the second half would be for others.

Let’s start with the me part. This is stuff I want to pursue or play with that may or may not bring me some kind of income. While meditating, poking around communities I’m part of or observe from the edges, 5 things came to mind for the “me game”:

  1. 8fold itself,
  2. individual productivity and life coaching (Mastering the Mundane),
  3. small business coaching and consulting (HnS Works),
  4. professional and community ranting and raving (The Irreverent Agilists), and
  5. the creative works of Alexander Midknight.

Given I’m an Agile Coach and part of my job is to help people with this sort of thing, I just apply what I know. In this case, it’s product and business development (though not sales and marketing).

So, how do I decide which of these 5 to prioritize?

I’m a very pull-based human. For setting up this game, I identified three different sources of pull:

  1. external monetary,
  2. external affirmation, and
  3. internal desire or drive (which covers both internal monetary and internal affirmation).

These basically give me a multiplier for things. The list is sorted by priority, but the multiplier is based on the number of items in the list in descending order. So, the first one is worth 3 because there are 3 items in the list. The second is worth 2, because that’s 3 - 1. The last is worth 1.

The “me game” is set up.

I wake up at my normal time, around 0430. I start my work day at the normal time, around 0800. I play the “me game” until about 1200. I shift to the “other people game” until about 1600.

The “other people game” is pretty normal. Update the résumé. Let people know I’m looking, that sort of thing.

Step 3: Continue playing the game

Section titled Step 3: Continue playing the game

I set up a way for people to support them financially using Open Collective, which facilitates external financial pull.

I took the 5 things and started telling people about them, which facilitates external affirmation.

In the beginning, there’s usually very little external pull, so it comes down to internal desire and drive, which allows me to continue channeling things into detoxifying from the past (depickling), maybe venting a bit, and reconciling my thoughts.

A lot of this early time was spent writing and thinking of various products and paths related to the “Big 5.” I also added some more folks to The Rotation. This helps me figure out my internal drive and desire. The conversations with others also help me get external affirmation while I wait for the Internet to do what it does.

After a few days, most of the external affirmation received focused on Mastering the Mundane. So, it comes to the top of the list, and the others get shifted using the multiplier. None of them have received (and kept) external financial support. Therefore, external affirmation, which is cheaper for that person, is the main decider right now. That said, there’s a bias there.

Most people don’t want to tell other people to stop pursuing whatever it is they’re pursuing (it’s that reciprocity thing). Further, just because someone is cheering you on from the sidelines doesn’t mean they’ll actually pay you for whatever you’re doing. In other words, “external affirmation,” as a multiplier, isn’t a “hard” 2, instead it’s probably more like some number between 1 and 2.

Step 4: Identify possibilities and return to step 3

Section titled Step 4: Identify possibilities and return to step 3

With Mastering the Mundane as the top priority. Within that umbrella, there are about 7 books and an individual coaching practice. I decided the first half of the day would be working on books (me things), the second quarter or so of the day would be setting things up to facilitate the individual coaching practice, and the last quarter of the day would be all things “working for someone” else related.

4 hours, 2 hours, and 2 hours. In that order of priority.

In the beginning, I decided to work on 3 of the 7 books for 60 minutes per day and one of the others for 30 minutes.

As I wrote the books, I would post quotes from the books online with links to the Open Collective and measure the reactions to the posts. Eventually, it seemed like Time: Mastering the Mundan was getting the most external affirmation, and it had the most internal drive and desire, so I doubled down.

120 minutes on Time: Mastering the Mundane, 60 minutes on the next highest priority book, and 30 minutes on one of the others.

And 3 months later, here we are.

If I start getting people contributing to the Open Collective crowdfunding things for a different book, it will be taken into account, and it might cause me to shift. For now, I think this is a pretty fair and flexible system. Still shifting and tweaking things here and there, but not drastically and mostly at the edges and on weekends.