How will you make time work for you?
I think I accidentally answered this one yesterday – which is helpful, because I’m not sure I’m up to a very detailed post today. How to reconcile making a decent fist of the day job and doing all the other things I want to do. How to not end up, the first day of holiday when I don’t actually have to do anything, spending most of the day in bed with an epic sore throat and no energy.
I talked about the nine-day fortnight yesterday: one day off every two weeks, with the house to myself. The downside to that arrangement is of course that each work day is forty-five minutes longer.
I’ve also mentioned the advantages of a long commute: reading time and writing time. I do at least reclaim a little bit of my day that way.
I would like my day to start a tiny bit later. Say half an hour. Say I were to aim for the 0745 rather than the 0715. That would mean getting up at 0615, which would probably leave me feeling a little bit more human. Start work at 0855. Half an hour for lunch (except on Pilates days, when it’s an hour) would mean finishing at 1625 and the 1645 train home. If I were to add forty-five minutes onto the end of the day I’d finish at 1710 and get the 1745 train home. That would get me home at about seven o’clock. That’s later than I want to be. Hmm. Need to think about that. There isn’t enough work at the moment anyway.
Oh yes, and the other thing I was going to do when Pilates stopped being on a Wednesday was to go to the lunchtime communion service at the church over the road. That’s going to kick in mid-September. It will help with the thing where I reclaim lunchtimes for myself, too. I wouldn’t mind cutting lunchtimes the rest of the week down to ‘twenty minutes with a book and a sandwich’.
I wonder if what I really want to do is go part-time. It would be a heck of a financial hit, particularly in terms of travel cost, since I’d still need an annual season ticket, and I feel that it’s probably not an option at the moment. Would I want to, if it were and I could afford it? Probably. Well, that’s a thing to think about.
Kathleen Jowitt 