“Blue skies, suns out, time to party,” is how I captioned this on Instagram (“closemondays” on the ‘gram), though lately partying for me is working sustainable hours and trying to run 20 miles per week.
Makes me think of ‘It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work,’ from the folks at Basecamp. I do lots of work, but I fight hard against Parkinson’s Law; “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” There’s a section in ‘Four Hour Work Week,’ too, about how if you had a heart attack and your doctor said you could only work two hours a day, you’d probably be able to figure that out.
So I’ve been using Toggl hardcore, making sure to track all my hours and not let too much time get away from me. Working from home / remotely makes it easy for those work hours to expand, so tracking my time as been crucial. I work a lot on retainer, so I have to make sure my hours match well with those monthly rates, or else my hourly rate goes down!
But I’ve been working remotely since 2013-ish, so I’m still learning. Finally here we are in 2019, some six years later, and things are coming together nicely. It was an uphill struggle for a long time, but I think making “time to party” was crucial, and for me that happened when I started running in 2016.