You know how I’m always saying that I have so many back-burner projects that I don’t have time for? And how I wish I had a little time here or there to work on any one of them to the point that they could surface to at least see if they would sink or float?
Berta recently had her yearly review at work, and she’s going to be making a little more money. Not a whole lot, but enough to keep pace with inflation and eating out at restaurants. I jokingly asked her if I could quit my job, and of course she told me she wasn’t making that much more. “Maybe we should play the lottery,” she says. Well, the Lottery idea never really worked well in the past, but I have been toying with the possibility of quitting my job anyway.
Don’t get me wrong- I don’t dislike my job. But you must admit if you are a working person that your job probably gets in the way of a ton of productive things that you would rather be doing. I’m not talking about “Getting a tan” or “Watching BayWatch re-runs”. I’m talking about honest-to-goodness productive, well, “work”.
Here are just a handful of projects I’d complete if I wasn’t working 8-16 hours a day:
- Habari
- Stonepath
- RedAlt redesign/rebuild
- WishListLive
- Indoor Astronomy
- The book I'm writing with Abby
- I could even use the time to finish school.
I wonder what the time commitment would be to finish all of them, defining “finished” as a state where I was happy enough with them to the point of not having to involve myself obsessively with them daily. Would that ever happen? Is it likely that I would be “satisfied” with, for example, Habari to the point where I could take a regular job again and let Habari return to the background?
I know of some stories of people who just had enough of the daily grind and quit to make their own way and become successful at their new endeavors. I know plenty of people who would go on retreats to Louisiana to help with disaster recovery. I know some people who did just that - quit their jobs to go help. I don’t think that’s for me, but I bet that with a change of lifestyle as significant as quitting work on purpose, I might reconsider that position.
Where would the money come from? I guess that’s the primary concern. If I could work out how not to work for the amount of time it would take to finish all of these things, would I? Getting back into the work force would be another concern.
I’d like to say that this is just a passing idea. But I had that discussion with Berta a couple of days ago. I think that my mind will spend a few cycles every day thinking about it until it figures out a way to pull it off - if that’s even possible - and then it’ll work out how to sell the idea to the stakeholders.
What would you do? If you could take a year off of paid work to do something else productive, what would you do?
