Well, it’s not entirely a new thing. It’s just a thing that I haven’t tried in a very long time. I mean, the opportunity has always been there; I just never really thought to seize it. Maybe this was spurred on because I decided to end the vlog last month. In fact, it was shortly after the last vlog went up that someone (perhaps half-jokingly) asked me what I was going to do with “all that free time.”

But of course, as you already know, there really is no such thing as “free time.” There is only how you choose to spend your time. And to that end, I decided to take the weekend off. Two weekends off in a row, actually.

Everybody’s Working for the Weekend

To most people, that might not sound like a very big deal. Because it shouldn’t be a very big deal. But it is a very big deal for someone like me. I’ve said this so many times before and I feel like I’m going to keep saying it for a long time to come: Because I can work at any time, I feel like I should work all the time.

That’s the life I chose for myself as a freelance writer, with all the benefits and frustrations that accompany such a decision. There is always something that needs to be done. Yet there is never enough time to do it.

The Return of “Live” Blogging?

Take this blog post, for example. For the most part, I’ll write and schedule posts ahead of time, usually a day or two in advance. That gives me a little bit of breathing room, as well as the opportunity to reflect in case I want to make any changes. Since I took the weekend off (and missed Friday’s post entirely), I didn’t have “the chance” to write this post until now.

It’s almost noon on Monday when I’ve been striving to publish new posts no later that 10 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. I missed my self-imposed deadline again, but probably no one is going to notice except me… well, aside from the fact that I’ve now pointed it out.

Even so, I’m trying a new thing.

The New Thing Isn’t New

And it’s not like my struggle with work-life balance is anything new. I wrote about evenings and weekends as a freelancer fully ten years ago. The circumstances have changed now, of course, and I find myself trying to fit work into my life schedule more than ever.

Rather than trying to shoehorn in some work over the weekend, we went out for lunch. We went to the mall and Addie read some books at Chapters. We played some video games, watched a movie, and tried to relax. Oh, and we decided to brave Costco on a Sunday afternoon for some inexplicable reason. Now I remember why I prefer doing my shopping on a weekday.

But I digress.

They say you cannot serve from an empty vessel. That you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. They also say that procrastination simply compounds on itself. Maybe that’s true too. For now, though, I’m trying to a new thing.

Let’s see how it works out.