Grant Lankard's Blog

Blog #4 October 14th, 2020

When your job is not your passion

For many years, I've sat in a cubicle, feeling like I'm in an endless rut. The worst thing is these day jobs I hate take time away from things I actually enjoy doing, such as drawing, making comics, playing music.

 

I'm guessing quite a few of you are in the same boat. So what do you do? I have a few tips.

1) Maximize time.
  Can you be thinking about what you want to do and be organizing ideas on your commute (I meant mentally. Please don't wreck your car).

  

Plan meals on what takes the least amount of time. Cook meals that are large enough that you can reheat them throughout the week. 

Organize your work area so that you can begin right away. If you need to spend 20 minutes finding your paintbrushes or 10 minutes finding a guitar tuner, that's time away from your passion. 

2) Delegating
If you don't have time to do everything perhaps you can find friends, family, or even people off of craigslist to help.

I suggest offering money upfront and even then keep your expectations low. It's been my experience that if there's not guaranteed money, most of the work that you're outsourcing will never get done.

3) Using free time while at work.
We all know you're constantly busy at work (wink wink) and would never spend half the day watching youtube videos but if you're being 100% honest, even the busiest of employees has a little downtime. Are you going to fill this with busy work (dust that cabinet... again), wastes of time (youtube, podcasts, mundane articles) or are you going to do something productive? 

In the liner notes for his 1977 masterpiece, My Aim is True, Elvis Costello said that he wrote most of the album while at a boring computer programming job.

If you're not able to actually work on a project for fear of getting in trouble, perhaps you can discretely work on the planning stages of it? 

So after reading this you're probably overwhelmed by how much free time you have now. No? Well, I never promised that this article was a miracle. Just keep your head up and continue working on projects!

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