Category Archives: Being the boss

This is about work from the managing side. Freelancing, entrepreneuring, consulting: having to make the decisions as the person in charge. In charge of your work, in charge of your life — so work-life balance factors in, too.

Structured vs. Freeform Work

Posted on 08.09.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Paymo et la Technique Pomodoro me sont super utiles pour être productive et faire ce que j'ai à faire. Malheureusement, ces deux outils ont complètement changé ma façon de travailler, et je crois que j'ai perdu quelque chose en route: me laisser porter par mes impulsions du moment, passer d'une chose à l'autre librement... un liberté que j'aimais dans mon travail, somme toute.

Solution? Un mix des deux. Travailler "librement" le matin (j'ai créé un client "divers" dans Paymo exprès pour ça) et faire des tomates l'après-midi pour m'assurer que les choses importantes avancent.

Et vous, vous travaillez plutôt de façon très structurée ou libre/improvisée?

[en]

Thanks to the endless “how we work” discussions my friend Steph and I have, I’ve understood that more than simply hanging out online less, one of the things I’ve done since I started trying to be more productive and focused with my work (through Paymo and the Pomodoro Technique) is turn everything I do for work into “must do” tasks.

I’m somebody who has impulses to do things — I’ve mentioned it in passing about blogging, but it’s valid for other things. I suddenly feel it’s important to prepare this or that document, or get back to such-and-such, or clean my desk. And — this is the important bit — I think I enjoy doing things more when they are born of an impulse or an urge rather than because they are on the list of things I must do today.

I’ve learned (with my failed experiment at having readers vote on what they wanted me to write about) that I can turn something I really want to do into something I really don’t want to do by simply putting it on a to-do list or planning a time to do it. It sucks, and in an ideal world I would function differently, but that’s obviously how it works for me. I can kill my enthusiasm by turning something into a task.

So, what to do?

I’d like to make it quite clear I don’t blame Paymo or the Pomodoro Technique. If anything, what has happened to me shows how useful these two tools are at focusing on stuff that must get done.

The problem is that I have reduced my work to “stuff that must get done”. I need to find a balance. Balance! I keep saying that. My big quest of the year seems to be balance.

Paymo is really useful for me to know where my time goes, but its negative side-effect is that it prevents me from freely drifting from one thing to another, and just following my impulse of the moment. What I’ve done for the moment is created another “client” in my list (“various”) which only has one project (“freeform”).

This allows me to put myself in “freeform work mode”, set the timer so I still have an idea of how many work hours I put in each week/day/month, but not have to worry about what I’m doing. I’m going to lose track to some extent of how much time I spend doing certain things, but at this stage I think it’s more important that I find more pleasure in work again.

The Pomodoro Technique is great for knocking down tasks, or making sure I do “maintenance work” on long-term projects where nothing is urgent right now, so I don’t fall behind. It’s great for fighting procrastination. It’s great of doing what really has to be done. But it’s too structured for me to spend my whole work time using it.

So what I’m going to try doing is work freeform in the morning — do what I feel like doing, without obsessing about productivity — and do tomatoes in the afternoon to make sure the important stuff does get done.

I’ll try to remember to report back after a few days.

Do you have any experiences or thoughts to share on working in a structured vs. freeform way? Do you need both, or favour one style? I’m interested in hearing from you about this.

Hanging out Online: Why it’s Important for me

Posted on 08.09.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Aux abonnés absents: le temps passé à trainer en ligne sans but précis. La faute à trop de travail, peut-être, à trop de structure dans mon travail, et à une fuite de l'ordinateur lorsque je cherche à me détendre. Il y a un équilibre à retrouver -- parce que trainer en ligne, c'est quand même fun, et c'est ce qui m'a amené à faire le métier que je fais!

[en]

One thing I realized shortly after writing my article on downtime is that I have stopped “hanging out online”. And I think that “downtime” activity plays a more important role in my life balance than I’d realized until now.

I think two or three things led to this.

First, I’ve had lots of work this spring (nothing new, but I like to keep repeating it). I managed to preserve most of my “off the computer” downtime, and I realize now that what I sacrificed was the aimless tinkering-chatting-reading-writing-hanging-out online.

More importantly, I started using Paymo in April to give myself an idea of how much time I’ve been spending on what — and how many hours of actual work I was doing. It’s been really useful and has helped me gather precious info on my work, but it has had a side effect: I have started thinking more about what I spend my time on, and being more “monotask” in the way I work.

When I know I have the timer running on preparing my SAWI course, for example, or working on LeWeb blogger accreditations, I don’t feel free to drift off into something else, or read an article or check out Tumblr while I’m working. This is kind of twisted, because the only person who cares how much time I spend on something in this case is me.

So, I’ve changed the way I work, and I’m not sure it’s entirely a good thing. I think I’ve lost my balance.

Using the Pomodoro Technique has made it “worse”. I mean, it has accentuated this trend. It’s been really good for my productivity, it’s been really good to help me be less stressed, and it’s been really good to help me beat my procrastinative tendancies. But I think it hasn’t been good for my overall satisfaction about my work. Something is missing — that’s what I’ve been telling people all these last months. Everything is fine with my work, I have enough of it (more than enough!), it’s interesting, but something is not quite right.

And I think that part of this “not quite right” is that I’ve become too focused on just getting the “work work” done (the one that pays), and I’ve neglected the fun part of work, which is my interest for the online world and the people who inhabit it. I also suspect this can have something to do with my lack of blogging — there hasn’t been much to feed that part of me recently.

So, maybe I have to come back in part to how I was working before. Find a balance. This is not a new preoccupation of mine: for a few years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’m not managing to set aside enough time to tinker online, write, do research. But I think it’s become more extreme since I started focusing more exclusively on my client work.

Maybe what I need to do is do tomatoes in the morning, and work more “loosely” in the afternoon (or the opposite). Tinker, get stuff done, write, whatever I feel like doing (including dealing with emergencies or “too much work” if I feel the daily rythm of morning tomatoes isn’t cutting it). Maybe I need to have “tomato days” and “non-tomato days”. Maybe I need to watch less TV (haha!) in the evening and spend more time hanging out online on Google+. Maybe I need to find a way to allow myself to multitask more (!) when I’m working. I’m not sure what the answer is yet.

What hanging out online does for me is the following, as far as I can make out:

gives my brain time to wander around (cf. Downtime post)
allows me to keep in touch with what’s going on in the social media world, and the people who are part of it
gives me food for thought a something to do with those thoughts (if all I do is work and consume fiction, chances are I won’t have much to blog about, right?)
it’s a space to tinker with tech and new toys (something I like doing per se)

And more importantly (this is something I think I’ve already written about somewhere regarding blogging and its relation to my work), “online” is a space I enjoy. I like being there. It’s part of the reason I made my job about it. So, just as it is a warning light if my job prevents me from blogging, it’s a warning light if the way I organize my work life prevents me from hanging out online.

Now, as I’ve already said: it’s all a question of balance. Spending my whole life tinkering online and working does not work either.

But these last months (and maybe years), the balance has been off. And right now, I think I’m starting to get unstuck, and am on my way to finding (building?) more balance.

Trying to Get Organized (Again)

Posted on 17.07.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Je m'organise: pas de nouveaux mandats de formation ou de conférences avant mi-mars 2012 (priorité à mes engagements existants, l'agenda est plein!), utiliser la Technique Pomodoro sur la semaine pour mieux évaluer la charge de travail que représente les affaires courantes et mes mandats existants, et travaillers sur des conférences et formations "standard" plutôt que de tout faire à partir de zéro à chaque fois!

[en]

I’m trying to figure out how to get organized over the next six months to do everything I need/want to do without working myself into the ground. Or behind the sofa, cowering.

This is part of the ongoing “how to improve the way I run my business” thinking.

One thing I have clearly pinpointed is the following:

almost all the work I do (including training and talks) is bespoke
when the financial means of my clients are limited (e.g. many schools and small companies) I need to find a more rational way of using my time

This means I need to get to work on the dirty little secret of successful businesses and freelancers: reduce, recycle, reuse (thanks for that one, Suw). I need to work on preparing a certain number of “standard” talks and training sessions, rather than doing everything from scratch each time.

Until the end of the year, I already have a significant amount of commitments (or commitments-in-the-making, because we’re still hashing out details or agreeing on a formal proposal). The good news around this is that I’m not too worried about paying my bills (I still have a way to go before I can relax completely about finances, though… but who can?). The bad news is that looking at my calendar for September/October/November is already making me feel stressed. (That’s the calendar including future and probable gigs, though, it’s not that bad.)

The other thing is that (probably overcompensating for too many years with almost no holidays) I am actually taking a large number of weeks off this year. I’ve counted, and I will not release the number, because it is somewhat indecent. It makes me feel a little better about being overworked when I’m here, though. And it does bring to my attention the fact I probably need to seek a little more balance between my “working time” and “holiday time”.

Holidays play two roles for me:

allow me time off from work to recuperate
allow me to see people I love and who don’t live in Lausanne or nearby

The first type of holiday clearly requires no working while I’m away. The second doesn’t. There’s no reason I can’t go and spend a week in London with Suw and Steph, work while I’m there and hang out with them. This would also have the advantage of giving me a week clear of meetings and phone calls and visits, where I can concentrate on “office work”. So, I’m going to plan some of those for 2012.

So, all that considered, if I look at my calendar now it’s pretty clear to me I don’t really have space for new speaking/training engagements until mid-March 2012 (except if they’re paid well enough to make me happy to sacrifice my week-ends — never say never).

That’s the wide-angle view for the year ahead.

On a more micro level, I’ve mentioned elsewhere (and in another language) that I’ve been using the Pomodoro Technique recently and it’s really helping me. Here’s how it helps:

it gives me a clear amount of time to put my head down (like my “dashes” do)
it makes me take breaks
as I write down my Pomodoros, it helps me plan what I’m going to get done in the day/morning and adjust my expectations

The last bit is crucial. Specially when I have lots to do that is not deadly urgent, I have trouble setting priorities and get frustrated at how slowly I make progress. Now, if I know that during a 9-12 morning session I can do 5 pomodoros (= 5 times 25 minutes of actual work), it allows me to plan what I’m going to use them for. I might use one to make progress in my accounting backlog, one to make progress in a report I really don’t want to write, two to write a blog post, and one to deal with some e-mail, get back to people, and plan the next day.

Used this way, the Pomodoro Technique is a very simple planning tool that takes a lot of stress away from me and allows me to put my energy in actually working.

There is less overhead than Getting Things Done, too: even if you want to do things well, reading the free ebook that explains the Pomodoro Technique takes about an hour. And you can dive right in: just get a timer, set it on 25 minutes, work non-stop on something, then take a five-minute break, and start again. It’s deadly simple and is designed to be implemented in progressive steps (instead of degrading gracefully it upgrades gracefully). Check out the cheat sheet if you’re impatient.

I should be able to fit 12 Pomodoros in a full day of work, but to play it safe, I’m counting on 10 right now. That means I have 50 Pomodoros available on a five-day week. The Pomodoro is a unit of time that my brain can work with, specially after a few days of working in Pomodoro-length bursts. It’s much simpler than the hour, which is (a) longer and (b) divisible. (There is a rule that says “The Pomodoro is indivisible.”)

This is helping me see what I can get done in a day, and therefore, a week. For example, I might estimate that I need on average one Pomodoro a day to get organized, do my accounting/invoicing, pay bills, sort through e-mails. Not the same mix every day, but roughly one a day. Right, five a week.

Then, I estimate that on one of the projects I’m working on, I need 3 Pomodoros a week. On another, two. Another might take up a day of my time each week, which means my weeks actually have closer to 40 Pomodoros than 50.

If you do project planning, you’re familiar with this. It’s nothing new. But in my case, the ability to think “in Pomodoros” has been the key to allowing my brain to do this kind of exercise. As I write down my Pomodoros in advance and check them off as they’re done, within a few weeks I’ll be easily able to see if my estimates are off and adjust them.

One thing I’ve been terribly bad at this last year is protecting a sufficient number of “office days” where I’m not interrupted by errands and meetings.

So, in summary, what’s the plan?

plan “working abroad” visits for 2012 to reduce the number of non-working holidays while still seeing non-local friends and family
moratorium on new speaking/training engagements until mid-March 2012
continue working in Pomodoros and gain a better sense of how much time I need for my regular “ongoing” tasks and projects so that I have a “weekly framework of Pomodoros” to get organized from
work on standard talks and training offers (which will in the long run allow me to be more proactive and less reactive about finding clients)
block an “office day” per week (monthly average)

Off I go!

From All to Nothing Doesn’t Do it

Posted on 05.07.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Quand on a couru durant des mois, c'est une erreur de s'arrêter net, au risque de se retrouver complètement déséquilibré. Mieux vaut lever le pied et continuer à un rythme tranquille, comme je suis en train de le faire avec mon horaire d'été "9-12".

[en]

It’s a secret to nobody around me that I’ve been pretty insanely busy these last months. Now the summer is here, I have holidays planned, and I need to regain my balance.

When I came back from Paris (I spent a few days there with Solar Impulse for the blogger breakfast we held there) I was pretty much done with deadly rythm of late June. You know, when you have things piled up on top of one another and hardly any breathing space between them. Yes, there were a few crises.

Anyway, when I came back from Paris, I decided to rest. For three-four days, I didn’t work at all. I lounged around, caught up on all the appointments I needed to take (hairdresser, dentist, osteopath and the like), and left the computer behind.

Unfortunately I still felt as stressed and tired. I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t feeling well.

Sometime last week, I headed back to the office to get a few things done, ended up using the Pomodoro Technique and buddy-working with Steph to try and salvage my motivation.

I realized that I had made a mistake by stopping completely after my return from Paris. If you’ve been running like mad for two hours, and you reach the end of the race, you don’t lie down on the ground straight behind the finish line. You keep on going, gently, for a bit, walking. Once you’ve cooled down a bit you stop.

To make things worse, though I don’t have anything really terribly urgent to take care of (well, compared to what the last 3 weeks looked like), I have quite a lot of important stuff to move forward on. Making no progress at all was stressing me out.

I’ve therefore settled into my summer part-time schedule (from 9 to 12), maintaining the healthy mix of pomodoros and buddy working, and it’s doing wonders for my mood and my tiredness.

L’invitée du mois chez Lise Cardinal

Posted on 11.05.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

Lise Cardinal invited me to be her guest writer this month -- hence an article (in French) on how and when one can negociate online, as opposed to face-to-face.

[fr]

Je suis l’invitée du mois chez Lise Cardinal, avec un article intitulé “Mener et clore une négociation en ligne“.

Si vous ne connaissez pas cette grande dame du réseautage responsable francophone, avec qui j’ai eu la chance de partager une croque le mois passé lors de mon séjour à Montréal, je vous invite à y remédier de ce pas!

Technologie et indépendance professionnelle

Posted on 15.11.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

[fr]

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Ce matin, je me trouve à vouloir vous écrire une nouvelle chronique sur la vie d’indépendant. Pour moi, la vie d’indépendant et ce “monde connecté” qui est la thématique centrale de ma chronique vont de pair. Je vais essayer de vous expliquer pourquoi.

Je crois ne pas me tromper en disant que les petites structures sont plus mobiles et plus réactives que les grandes. Je crois que c’est valable tant en économie, société, que politique. Enfin, je ne suis ni économiste, ni sociologue, ni politicienne, donc je me trompe peut-être. Mais dans le business — comme dans la formation — ça me paraît un constat assez évident.

Le monde connecté, du réseau, des technologies de pointe, c’est un monde qui bouge vite. Il y a bientôt cinq ans, lorsque j’en ai fait mon métier, je n’avais pas d’autre choix que celui d’être indépendante professionnellement si je désirais exercer ce métier (c’était “consultante en blogs” à l’époque) que j’étais en train de créer de toutes pièces.

Le monde de l’entreprise n’était simplement pas prêt à proposer des postes consacrés à ce domaine d’expertise émergeant.

Maintenant, les années ont passé, et les entreprises commencent à engager des “social media managers” et des “community managers” — sans forcément toujours savoir vraiment ce qu’elles font. Mais pour quelqu’un qui désire vivre de son expertise en matière de médias sociaux tout en étant employé, c’est maintenant possible.

Ce qui m’intéresse en fait dans ce “monde connecté” dont je parle ici, c’est sa réactivité. C’est la nouveauté. C’est les liens entre les gens et les formes d’organisation sortant de l’ordinaire. Si l’on est un précurseur, si l’on s’intéresse à ce qui bouge… il y a de fortes chances que l’indépendance professionnelle soit ce qui nous convient le mieux.

Voilà donc le lien. Ne vous étonnez donc pas si médias sociaux et indépendance professionnelle se côtoient ici dans les semaines à venir.

Prendre des vacances quand on est indépendant

Posted on 09.11.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

[fr]

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Comme beaucoup de gens gravitant autour de ce monde connecté dont je vous parle chaque semaine, je suis indépendante. Et quand on est indépendant, prendre des vacances pose un double problème — triple, presque:

il faut économiser de l’argent pour pouvoir payer ses vacances (comme tout le monde)
il faut économiser assez pour couvrir la manque à gagner puisqu’on ne gagne pas d’argent pendant qu’on est en vacances
il faut s’organiser pour pouvoir disposer du temps nécessaire à “être loin”.

L’argent, en somme, c’est un problème que tout le monde peut comprendre. L’indépendant doit simplement économiser plus que le salarié, vu que ses vacances sont des congés non payés.

Le temps, par contre, la plupart des employés n’y sont pas confrontés de façon aussi pressante. Certes, quand on revient au travail il y a une pile de dossiers sur la table, certes, le projet n’avance pas quand le chef de projet est en vadrouille (ou il doit s’organiser pour que ce soit le cas), mais l’entreprise ne ferme pas ses portes à chaque fois qu’un employé part en vacances.

Pour un indépendant, si. En vacances, tout s’arrête. Un indépendant ayant souvent bien plus d’un client ou projet en parallèle (c’est un peu ça qui le définit), cela fait pas mal à gérer pour pouvoir partir une semaine sur les pistes, ou sous les tropiques.

Aussi, suivant la nature du travail de l’indépendant, son calendrier d’activités dépend souvent de dates fixées par d’autres. Si on est libre, on finit vite par avoir un agenda ressemblant à un gruyère (ou à un emmental) ne permettant plus de s’éclipser les trois semaines nécessaires pour vraiment se ressourcer.

Moralité? L’indépendant doit bloquer ses dates de vacances très, très à l’avance. J’ai le nez dans les dates de 2012, là.

Et moi qui croyais que l’indépendance signifiait liberté et flexibilité!

The Freelancer and The Open-Ended Projects

Posted on 13.10.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Les projets à long terme et assez ouverts peuvent être un piège pour l'indépendant, quand la charge de travail augmente soudainement pour plusieurs projets menés en parallèle.

[en]

Business has been good this year. 2007-2008 was pretty disastrous, 2009 saw me get back on my feet, and 2010 is really taking off. I’m happy.

With business taking off come more challenges for the freelancer. One of them is open-ended projects, which are especially tricky for the time-management-challenged soloist.

Often, these projects are exciting in nature, having a wider scope than more time-limited projects like “give a talk” or “a day of training”. They’re also interesting financially because they allow the freelancer to secure larger sums of money with a single client, or offer a monthly retainer (something anybody with monthly bills can appreciate).

But they can contain a trap — trap I’ve found myself caught in. The trap is double.

They go on and on

By definition, open-ended projects are open. They might have an end, but if it’s many months in the future, they might as well not have one. This means there is always something to do. They don’t have the comforting “after date X in the near future (next week), this is over”. It’s not a bad thing as such, but it can be stress-inducing.

They have variable workload

The workload for open-ended projects is spread over weeks or months, but it is not always constant. It might be light for a few weeks, and then suddenly require 30 hours of work in a week. This can easily conflict with other work engagements, especially if they are also open-ended, unless the freelancer plans very carefully.

A third trap?

I almost want to add a third trap to these projects: they are often ill-defined and subject to scope creep. Again, careful planning can limit those problems, but is your typical freelancer in love with careful planning?

I’ve discovered that having one or two open-ended projects going on at the same time is roughly as much as I can handle. Maybe three, depending on the degree of open-endedness. At one point this year, I had five in parallel, and that was just impossible.

So, with more work opportunities comes the obligation to start choosing better, and managing a balance between regular gigs, which give some financial security, and short-term ones, which are usually more interesting from a return-on-time-invested perspective.

Idea: Working as a Freelance Researcher

Posted on 11.10.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Inspiration du jour: je songe à diversifier mes activités professionnelles dans le domaine de la recherche freelance (enfin, je ne suis pas sûre que c'est comme ça qu'on appelle ça en français).

Imaginons qu'une entreprise ait besoin que quelqu'un recueille des informations sur un certain sujet -- par exemple, une startup qui veut faire l'inventaire de la competition ou des services similaires (pas certaine que ce soit un bon exemple, mais pourquoi pas). J'adore depuis toujours explorer de nouveaux sujets, apprendre, comprendre tout ce qu'il y a à comprendre (dans le domaine du raisonnable!) sur quelque chose, et rendre compte de mes découvertes. J'apprends très vite, je sais chercher des informations de façon efficace en ligne et hors ligne, j'ai un super réseau... Il me semble que j'aurais le bon profil pour ce genre d'activité.

Maintenant, est-ce qu'il y a un marché pour ça? Comment l'atteindre? Vos réflexions sur le sujet m'intéressent.

[en]

I had planned taking today off, but as I’m up to my neck in work I decided to spend it in the office instead. Result (don’t mess with yourself when you promise yourself time off): I’ve spent most of my morning down the blog-hole — reading a ton of interesting things online, particularly on Penelope Trunk’s blog. (Yeah, I know not everybody likes her, but I do. More on that another day, maybe.)

So, as I was reading blogs, sharing snippets on Tumblr and links on Twitter, I was thinking to myself: actually, one thing I’m pretty good at (and love doing) is finding and reading interesting stuff, thinking about it, and sharing all that with other people. (For those of you familiar with StrengthsFinder: my #1 is Input and my #2 is Communication — more about that another day, too.)

I pinged Suw on IM to see if she had any ideas how to “monetize” (still hate the word) this kind of activity. She suggested working as a researcher.

I like the idea. Need your homework done on something? I love learning about new stuff, I know how to search online, I have a great network, I’m smart (let’s say it), and I know how to write stuff up. Think of it, a lot of my popular blog posts are the result of me taking the plunge into a topic, learning about it, and reporting back. And for anything related to social media, I have the huge advantage of already knowing a lot.

This doesn’t mean I’d be giving up my current activities. But I’m getting increasingly frustrated that I don’t have time anymore to fool around online, research stuff, read more books, learn about this space we inhabit — online and offline.

Do you know anybody who works as an online researcher? Would you hire me as a researcher? (Not asking if you need my services as of now, but more “do you think I have the profile?”) If I decide to provide this kind of service, how might I go about to (a) decide what to charge (b) find gigs?

This is a very fresh idea for me, and I’d gladly welcome any thoughts you may have on the subject. As for me, I’m off to do some research on… freelance researchers .

Les trois équilibres de l’indépendant

Posted on 18.09.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

I've identified three areas where the creative freelancer needs to find a balance:

lifestyle, week by week (having non-work time and respecting it, a life outside work, food/sleep/exercise, etc.)
proper breaks, to completely tune out from your work life, recharge your creativity batteries (I heard that 3 weeks is a minimum to really wind down)
paid-work and play-work, like research, writing, tinkering, reading -- generally keeping up-to-date and inspired, you know, what makes people hire you in the first place.

I'm not doing too bad on the first, getting the second under control, but still struggling with the third.

[fr]

Je pense que l’indépendant (créatif) a besoin de trouver un équilibre sur trois plans différents, histoire de ne pas se dessécher ni péter les plombs:

une “hygiène de vie” laissant suffisamment de place pour respirer semaine après semaine (avoir et respecter des plages de non-travail, prendre du temps pour soi, faire du sport, manger correctement, dormir, voir des amis, passer du temps avec sa famille…)
des coupures pour décrocher, week-ends prolongés mais aussi vraies vacances (on m’a dit que pour vraiment se ressourcer, il fallait compter minimum trois semaines!)
durant le temps de travail, assez de temps pour explorer, s’amuser, rechercher, bricoler — et ne pas passer tout son temps le nez plongé dans des mandats.

Pour ma part, le côté “hygiène de vie” fonctionne assez bien, pour les coupures, je suis en train de prendre des mesures, et concernant le temps de jeu/bricolage/recherche professionnel… ces temps, ce n’est pas du tout ça.

Hygiène de vie

Je défends jalousement mes soirées et mes week-ends, même quand le boulot s’empile, sauf quelques rares situations d’exception.
Je fais du sport, je vois des gens, je prends des moments pour moi, je ne mange pas trop mal. J’ai en fait pas mal d’activités “non-professionnelles” dans ma vie.
J’ai un lieu de travail séparé de mon lieu de vie.
Ça n’a pas été simple d’en arriver là, j’ai déjà écrit pas mal d’articles sur mon parcours, mais je n’ai pas le courage de les déterrer juste là.

Coupures

En 2008, j’ai commencé à prendre des week-ends prolongés à la montagne pour me ressourcer, et c’était une bonne chose. 2010, ça a passé à la trappe pour diverses raisons, mais il est temps de reprendre les choses en main.
Suite à des discussions que j’ai eues avec mes amis Laurent et Nicole, et sur leurs sages conseils, j’ai décidé de m’imposer au minimum un week-end prolongé (3 jours) par mois et une grosse bonne coupure (disons un mois, hop) par an.
Résultat des courses, j’ai établi un calendrier annuel de mes coupures. Ça ressemble à ça: je fais un break d’un mois en janvier (déjà un voyage prévu en Inde en 2011), en été, je pars une semaine en France comme ces deux dernières années, et en automne, je prévois une dizaine de jours en Angleterre pour voir amis et famille. En plus de ça, un mois sur deux je prends un simple week-end prolongé (lundi ou vendredi congé), et un mois sur deux en alternance, un plus long week-end prolongé (4-5 jours) avec option de partir quelque part.
J’ai posé toutes ces dates dans mon calendrier, jusqu’à début 2012.

Travail ludique

Je bloque un peu sur cette question: je dois prendre moins de mandats (clairement) mais du coup je crains pour le côté financier de l’affaire.
En fait, en regardant réalistement mes revenus (j’ai une grille sur la dernière année qui me les montre semaine par semaine) je me rends compte que je n’ai pas besoin d’avoir si peur que ça.
Une solution: moins de mandats qui paient relativement peu par rapport au temps/stress investi, plus de mandats mieux payés (je dis des choses logiques mais c’est pas si simple à mettre en pratique). Surtout, moins de mandats “open-ended” en parallèle, qui s’étalent sur la durée avec une charge de travail variable. (J’ai un billet en gestation là-dessus.)
Aussi, avoir confiance dans la dynamique qui me permet de vivre de ma passion: donner plus de priorité à sa passion attire les mandats.
Bref, avec mes petits calculs, je me suis rendu compte qu’en plus de mes mandats “réguliers” (annuels/mensuels), si j’avais une journée de “travail payé” (consulting, formation, coaching, conférence) par semaine je m’en tirais largement. Ça me laisse donc 3-4 jours, suivant la longueur de ma semaine, pour mes mandats courants, la gestion des clients, et ces fameuses “autres activités professionnelles pas payées” (dont ce blog fait partie).

Et vous, voyez-vous d’autres équilibres à maintenir? Avez-vous des solutions à partager pour ceux que j’ai identifiés?

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