New years, like birthdays, are popular times to look at the year ahead and take stock at the year past, and I certainly join in as well. One topic that’s come up with several friends and acquaintances both online and off for the past few weeks has been job satisfaction as well as what to do with one’s life. My current main breadwinning gig, project and program management, has nothing to do with what I…
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about work-life balance, but it does feel that, in 2025, more people have the assumption that WORK has won and the imbalance is fine. We know it. We’ve felt it. I’m sure some researchers have excellent terms for it, but I’m thinking of it these days as overproductivity. And it succeeds because we have zealots, who probably get up at 4am, who push for overproductivity. And when they,…
There have been a bunch of articles about “The Great Resignation” over the past year or so, but this piece by Maggie Mertens for The Atlantic feels especially on point. I’ve written a decent amount about job satisfaction, often referencing the concept of “ikigai,” and this article gets at some of those notions in the context of said job re-alignment.
Hobbies, those interests to pursue without it being a “side gig” and often without the need to be at all expert at them, were something I started focusing on, ironically, in the Before Times. I believed (and still believe), it’s very healthy to have some pursuit that is not monetized, potentially not judged and evaluated like job performance might, and perhaps free of some of the wacky things outside of your control that one can’t…
Not for the first time and not for the last, my dayjob is undergoing a re-organization. That means that, not only have I had many conversations with people who are changing jobs or looking for new ones, but it’s an opportune time to examine what the heck I’m doing — and invariably here in the U.S., that seems to bring up questions of “the dream job.” I’ve written about this multiple times on this site,…
I’ve had several posts over the years about people finding their purpose in life, several posts about hobbies, and also just generally about motivation. Especially as so many of us are about to re-enter “normal” work locations and schedules, it’s an opportune time to consider what you want to be doing — and for those of us who have the luxury of considering what to do beyond “anything that pays the bills NOW,” there’s often…
Back on March 1st, 2015, I re-entered the web world with a personal website, something I really hadn’t had since the 90s, which in Internet terms is ancient history. Perhaps because March 1st doesn’t correspond with any other anniversaries in my life, I keep on meaning to do an annual retrospective about posts and such on the blog, but keep on forgetting. This year, however, I made sure to set a reminder for myself. As…
Moving on from trying to make hobbies conspicuously unproductive, there’s the notion on not waiting on one’s creative aspirations and making things. I wrote a longer post a couple years ago about this need to do and complete creative works, in part referencing the column above. Time is finite for us mere mortals, so you need to figure out where to feed your creative side while life happens. Maybe it’s on the job, maybe it’s…
I began this year advocating creating art as a hobby and I tried to practice what I preached shortly thereafter. Most people who know me generally observe I’m pretty darn busy which is one of the reasons that I feel the need to carve out time that is entirely not productive. It’s hard in today’s “make every job a gig and make every gig a hustle” economy — and heaven help you if you want…
Continuing this week’s series of video posts, I came across this video from The Atlantic that touches back to an earlier article I linked to about work becoming people’s faith. I’ve long been interested in work-life balance and finding joy or at least satisfaction in work, perhaps because, as mentioned in the video below, conventional wisdom is no longer satisfied with jobs or, to a certain extent, no longer even satisfied with careers. No, it…