15 days until Christmas, and Hanukkah is almost over! Can you feel the stress revving up? Places to go, parties to attend, shopping to do, all while keeping up with the already packed schedule, whew! I’m determined to enjoy the holidays, and stress is a real joy killer. For me the key question is to ask myself, “What’s the point?” It helps keep my perspective clear and the end goal in focus. There are so many expectations around this time of the year, it’s also important for me to remember that good? Is good enough.

This year was the first year our Christmas picture wasn’t a hassle. Getting three kids to sit still, look at the camera, and smile– it’s a little like giving ferrets crack, and then teaching them how to eat with a fork. It usually ends up with about 18,000 unusable photos and me yelling SMILE G*D DAMMIT! Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too. But this year was different. The point of the Christmas picture is to have a good memory, and to get the darn thing done. So we dressed the kids up, went to the mall where they give carriage rides, I yelled smile (in a nice way) and snapped a few pics. No, they’re not great photos, but the goal was accomplished. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we’ve cut the amount of TV our kids are watching to one show a day. So far this has been a boon to our family, except for one problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a friend and I were talking about getting our careers off the ground. She was telling me what her dreams were, and asked me,

“What are your career dreams?”

“Hmm,” I replied. “I don’t think I really have any.”

“But when you have some time just to think about the future, what do you fantasize about?

“I don’t fantasize.”

“Never?” She asked, aghast.

“Not really.”

“I guess you analyze, instead right?”

“Yeah, that’s more on par with my temperament, I guess.”

I don’t know about other cultures, but in the US, having a dream is an integral part of being an American, as baseball. From the pioneers to Pinocchio, we’re inundated with having a dream and making that dream come true. We’re told that we can make our dreams happen, and that hanging onto that dream can help us in times of adversity.

I was reading an article over at Freelance Switch about 8 practices of a long term freelancer, and number 6 is “practice your dream.” Yep, there’s that concept again. It’s something every self help book, and business success guru promotes: purusing your vision, following your dream, forecast your future.

From the perspective of someone who barely has a drop of visionary blood in her veins, it’s an interesting concept to ponder. Maybe I just define it differently. In other words, maybe I have dreams, but they’re sort of disguised in a different format. I have things I want, of course, but I don’t know that they’d qualify as “dreams.” But it’s an idea I’m fascinated by.

So, let’s talk about it in the comments. What does the word “dream” mean to you? Can you recommend any books that have helped you target your dreams? What are your dreams– career or otherwise? How did you find them? Do you pick dreams you know are attainable, or do you let your imagination soar? I’d love to hear them.

I promised to let you know what the results were regarding how much leisure time I’m spending on the internet. Every time I paused in the midst of work, or spent time in my off hours surfing the internet, I timed it. My results weren’t exactly accurate, because I’d get up to do something else and leave the timer running for an two hours, or press “stop” instead of pause, and erase time accrued, but! As near as I can tell I spend about 2.5 hours a day on the net for leisure. Not too bad ( I can partially justify it because I so rarely watch TV), but not great either.

But I realized this week, it’s not just me. As a family, we spend more time with technology than we do with each other. Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. If I’m not on the computer, my kids are. Or Aaron’s working on his laptop. If the kids aren’t watching TV, then Aaron is. And if it’s not the TV or the computer, it’s the iPod, or the Gameboy, ad infinitum. I don’t mean we spend all our time in front of something that requires electricity; we are a one-TV, one-computer family (excluding Aaron’s work laptop). We love to read, my kids have tons of friends in the neighborhood, but we do spend more time than is… optimal, I think.

Aaron and I were talking about it this weekend. As our kids get older they’re going to have more stuff to do and more places to go. That’s great, but I want to make sure we stay connected. So we decided that Saturday is going to technology free. I’ll try to plan a craft or something fun to do at home. We’ll read, play games, go sight seeing, and we’ll shut technology out for a day. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be very much fun for any of us in the beginning. It’s a discipline not to have instant information, instant communication, instant entertainment. But I do think that once we get used to it, we’ll really have fun together. I’ll let you know how it goes. I tend to start with a bang and end with a whimper, but even if it’s only a temporary thing I’m interested to see who I am, who we are, without HBO and AOL. At least for one day a week.

A while ago I wrote about my dilemma concerning Will not wanting to go to school full time. I ended up drastically reducing his school time, and now he goes to school three mornings a week. Two of those mornings I go to class, and one morning I volunteer in my daughers’ classes. Leaving me exactly zero minutes sans kid to get work done, or canvas for work. Needless to say, this isn’t what I imagined when I decided to freelance.

Next year he’ll be going to school half days, everyday, which doesn’t give me a whole heck of a lot more time to work on developing a client base, or to take all the money I’m making, spread out on the bed, and roll around in it, as I imagined I’d be doing in a year. Okay, maybe I’m a little more realistic than that, but I did think that I would have more than 9 freaking hours a week to devote to work, without hearing SpongBob in the background.

I don’t really know what to do. I’m sort of an all or nothing person, and it’s hard for me to say, sure, maybe I won’t have much time to devote to getting a business going this year, and maybe not much more time next year, but boy, come 2010, I’m all over it! I suppose I could think of it as a part time gig. There’s no shame in that, right? The reality is, that’s what it’s shaping up to be, no matter what delusions of grandeur I had in the beginning. When I first started out, I thought I’d start work right after the girls got on the bus at 7:00, and Aaron could get Will dressed and take him to school, so I’d have 7.5 beautiful, pristine, uninterrupted hours to work. I’d make 60 cold calls a week, heck, in a couple of years, I could be pulling in as much as my husband. Or not.

Maybe I need to look into hiring a mother’s helper. Can anyone give me any tips on websites or other resources I can use in finding some in home care? And how well does in home care really work, if mom is in the next room? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Thanks for all the kind comments last week! I pulled it together, made it through, and I’m back in the groove this week.

Today is Blog Action Day, so I thought I’d talk about going green at the office. There are some fabulous companies out there who go beyond what’s required of them, and corporations can implement many eco-friendly ways and means, but what can we do this week, right now, to go green at work? These suggestions aren’t new, but not everyone is practicing them. I’ve worked places where there was a paper tidal wave, and no recycle bin. I hope your office fares better.

Let’s start in the breakroom. Buy a sugar cannister, and re-useable cups and spoons, or switch to cups that are biodegradable. According to Tree Hugger, “…in 2005, Americans used and discarded 14.4 billion disposable paper cups for hot beverages. If put end-to-end, those cups would circle the earth 55 times. Based on anticipated growth of specialty coffees, that number will grow to 23 billion by 2010—enough to circle the globe 88 times.” Wow, maybe we should give Starbucks a call, and ask them to switch too. What an impact that would make!

And what about what we put in those cups? Buying fair trade coffee and teas not only helps the communities that grow them, but also helps the environment. Fair Trade farmers generally aren’t clearing forests, or using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They don’t have the capital, first of all, and secondly they’re generally very concerned about the environment, since they have a much more cause/effect relationship with the earth than we do. Not only that, but companies like Green Mountain Coffee and Newman’s Own have a track record of helping coffee-growing areas hard hit by natural disasters.

Paper and printer cartridges are two items that can have a huge impact on the environment. Do you use the front and back of paper, when you can? Do you use scrap paper, instead of buying those cute printed list pads, and notebooks (I’m a sucker for cute paper, so this is an area where I could stand some improvement). Is your office using recycled paper? 100% recycled? No, it’s not a quest for the holy grail, you can buy it at Staples, for corn sake. So even if no one else in your office switches, you can. I hope wherever you’re working you have a recycle bin. If not, just grab an empty box, and voila, you’re greener already. I admit, I don’t refill my own printer cartridges, but I do buy refurbished ones. I use ASAP, who I’m happy with (I’m also cheap, so there). In many areas you can donate your old cartridges to charity, earning you two gold stars.

And how about that pain in the neck otherwise known as carpooling. Yes, I know, you have to give up the comfort of your own car, and if your an introvert like me, you must suffer the ghastly practice of making conversation (makes me shudder just to think of it). Not to mention, you have to arrive and leave at the same time, so you give up some convenience. But come on, if you carpool just once a week, you’ve already reduced your emissions by 20%! Baby steps.

So there you have it, a few simple, easy (my two favorite words) ways to make the world a better place, and your kids’ world too.

Hi! And welcome back to Let’s Choose A Job, the game show that’s sweeping the nation! I’m your host Monty Hall, and here are the jobs!

Behind door #1 is a job with a stable, larger company where there would be opportunities to advance. They don’t work a lot of hours, and the benefits are terrific, as is so often true with large corporations. We’d be living in a great city. The downside: because of the cost of living in the new city, our standard of living wouldn’t improve, and might even have to come down a smidge.

Behind door #2 is a job with a small company, it would pay quite a bit more than we make now, and we could stay in our neighborhood, and oh, how I love and adore this neighborhood. The downside: they work more hours, expect faster turnaround time for prototypes, and the benefits aren’t quite as good.

Honestly, we’re very fortunate to be in a position to choose from these options. We’re in a very good position, and either job is going to be good, so there’s really no wrong choice. What it comes down to is the equation that’s going to bring the most job satisfaction to Aaron. Which got me to thinking about the equation of job satisfaction.

What criterion do you use to decide if a job is right for you? There are so many variables. Is it a larger paycheck, being challenged, or a friendly working environment? How important is loving what you do, and being good at it? (Aaron loves his work, they could pay him in T-shirts and pizza, and he’d be happy as a lark.) How do the number of hours you work impact your job satisfaction? Do you balk at having to put in extra time at the office? What about having autonomy, good corporate culture, a short commute? Free cookies? Come on that’s got to be in the top ten.

So tell me, what ranks high in your list of priorities for job satisfaction? And let’s play Let’s Choose A Job in the comments. Will you choose door #1, door #2, or the “mystery prize” behind door #3? (Psst, it’s litter of puppies, but keep it under your hat.)

(Edited to add: He took the job behind door #2. Whew, that was tough. I would’ve been happy either way, for different reasons. Right now, I’m just glad we’re through hashing it out six ways to Sunday!)

Aaron, my husband is looking for a new job. He has a few offers on the table right now, one of which is in our town, and the others are out of state. Changing jobs is hard, even though it’s not my job!

Aaron is a hardware-design engineer, and there’s not a lot of that type of industry in our area. In Aaron’s line of work, people don’t generally stay with a company more than 8 years, unless they’re planning on staying until retirement. I really don’t want to move, but it’s almost inevitable that we’re going to have to, it’s just a matter of when.

Financially we’re probably better off to stay here, if he can wrangle a commensurate salary. The out of state jobs include a moving allowance in their offer, but we’d have a second mortgage, deposits for a rental, the expenses of moving after we buy a home, and all those other costs I tend to forget about until my VISA bill is staring me in the face.

Plus we’ve only been here 3 years, in some ways I feel like I’m just getting settled. There is a certain kind of currency earned when you’re a part of a community. You have a reliable mechanic, doctors you know and like, you know your way around town, you have people you can call up for dinner, or trade baby sitting with. All that is worth a lot. Imagine “a lot” in 40pt red letters.

The advantage of moving is that the companies are larger, and more stable than the in-state offers. There’s more opportunity for growth, and a lot more industry in the area, so hopefully we could settle for good someplace. One major concern we have is the kids. Is it better to pull them out of an amazing neighborhood, with tons of kids, so our eldest child doesn’t have to make a move during middle school?

It’s so difficult to know what’s the best choice for our family’s future. How do you make decisions that effect your family?

This weekend I read an article about home-based business in the New York Times. Essentially the article encourages people who run home-based businesses to be transparent, and represent themselves accurately. If you run your business out of your kitchen, say so. If you’re self employed, don’t pretend you’re a “we” when you’re really an “I.” Pretending to be something your not isn’t going to gain you respect in any meaningful way, and may eventually backfire on you. (This is precisely why I don’t have “CEO” or some other title on my business card. I don’t need a title, it’s just me and my shadow running the show.)

But something tangential occurred to me as I read this article, and that is how “female” business has become. I’m a newcomer to the business world, and my expertise on feminism doesn’t extend much beyond a few Women Studies classes at Smith College, so I may not articulate this very well, but it seems to me that the win/lose, zero sum, black-and-white, either/or male model of business is a dying breed. It’s exciting to look around and see the transformation business is undergoing, and I think the much of the credit is largely due to women, or at least a more feminine way of looking at the world.

The article I referenced states that 50% of business are home based, and their earnings are half a trillion dollars. There are so many non-traditional business models: coworking, freelancing, web-based business, mompreneurs, and more. Within corporate business, flex-time, on site daycare, casual Friday, and yes even bringing pets to work, and the ubiquitous lava lamps, and large rubber balls, are changing the flavor of business.

And it’s not just business modes and methods, it’s our interaction with careers that have changed as well. According to the Labor Department, “the average person born in the later years of the baby boom held 10.5 jobs from age 18 to 40.” In 2006, the most recent year for which there are statistics, 54 million Americans, or 40 percent of the work force, left their jobs. If people aren’t changing jobs they’re likely to be specializing in different areas, or acquiring additional vocations– no one, it seems has only one job, every one is a lawyer/writer/life coach. The slash has become an indispensable mark of puncutation. Along with Americans changing jobs, or adding to the jobs they already have, there is (for better or for worse) the inevitable blurring of work and home life.

I can’t help but think (although my opinion isn’t based on any hard evidence) that these revolutionary changes in business are largely derived from the contributions and (though I hate to use such a woo-woo term) energy of women in the workplace. What do you think?

Yesterday Mir posted about severing ties with a client, and a while ago she wrote about evaluating which clients to take on. These posts got me thinking; even though I’m just starting out, it’s probably a good idea to have parameters in place for the type of jobs I want.

Of course, freelancers don’t typically blog about turning down work, but after perusing the internet, I found some guidelines. Don’t pick up clients who are difficult to work for, or people who have burned you in the past. Don’t do pro-bono work, unless it will lead to future opportunity, or other non-monetary reward. That’s pretty much common sense, but what kind of work should a freelancer pursue?

The consensus seems to be you should commit to projects you feel enthusiastic about. Pamela Slim, who writes at Escape from Cubicle Nation says that even when times were lean, or she could have made substantially more money, she still turned down work she didn’t feel passionate about.

Be ruthless in defining the kind of people you want to work with and the kind of work you want to do. If anything seems inappropriate, unethical or is not a good fit, run screaming! Go after business you do want with a vengeance.

Steve Pavlina believes that it pays to be discerning about your clients, and that one of the most common mistakes made by the newly self-employed is casting too wide a net in the client pool. He’s another successful business person who declines any offer which doesn’t inspire him. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If your pumped-up about your work, that enthusiasm carries a lot of momentum to help propel you through problems. It’ll give you a sense of confidence, which may in turn, increase your competence. And generally the things we feel passion for are the things we value, which, according to Steve Pavlina, is what business is all about.

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the real purpose of a business is to create value. While it’s possible to make money in the short run without creating much value, in the long run it’s unsustainable.”

Not only that, but lets face it, if you like your job it’s a lot more fun to go to work every day. Even if work is in your dining room.