I took this job thinking I had a good idea about how it would affect my schedule and routines, and now I’m really not sure.
At the interview my now-employer said that I’d most likely be scheduled to work three days a week (the same schedule every week). Yesterday he showed me the old schedule and talked about where his head was at with making the new weekly schedule. It was the end of my shift and I blanked on being able to ask/request anything to help make adding job hours to my schedule more manageable.
What I saw on the old schedule was a rough average of 25 hours a week spread over the whole week which now has my brain going “!!!” as I try to guess just how he plans on spreading my 20-25 hours over the week.
Am I looking at five 5-hour shifts? Three 8-hour shifts? Four 6-hour shifts? Six 4-hour shifts?
Will those shifts all start at 10 or 12 or 1? Will it be a combo?
I’ve already figured out my meal-/snack-plan for making sure I don’t get hangry at work. Now I’m just concerned — as a writer — how this will affect my writing time. Because I happened to notice yesterday morning that being scheduled to start a shift earlier than 1pm makes my Morning Writing time a wash in terms of trying to work on any of my priority projects.
I like my new job and my new co-workers and everything. I just also really like all the progress I’ve made in getting writing done on a regular schedule.
Chances are I’ll have to start spacing out my publication schedule a little more in order to compensate. I may also have to start building muscle-memory for a whole different daily writing live-stream accountability time slot.
Not ideal, but I’ve got bills to pay and things to replace. O! The glamorous life of a writer!
Also published on Medium.