Your Skills: Use Them to Best Effect

If the best part of your day job involves the skills you use, are building or can learn OTJ, figure out how those skills can do double duty by benefiting your after-hours vocation as well. Here's a list of common bread-and-butter jobs and some of the job skills you can "borrow": 

Administrative Assistant, Office Assistant & other clerical work

• Organizing time, office space & information: who doesn't need to keep up with these tasks? 
• Bookkeeping or payroll: you'll really be thankful for these skills if you start making money selling your art!.
• Phone or in-person reception skills: channel your Inner Diplomat when negotiating with agents.
• Multitasking: you may hope to avoid this when writing but you never know when you'll need it.

Sales Associate

•  "People" skills, any & all: after a day of being inundated with temperamental customers, you might be hoping that your next big life as a full time author will be people-free; however, if you're successful you'll still have to deal with agents and publicists (traditional route) or vendors and customers (DiY publishing, indie music, etc).
• Marketing and sales skills: even if you end up nabbing the best agent in town, it's likely you'll still have to do much of your own promo. Working the floor can help you hone the gift of gab you may need to be successful at author events, art openings and so on.

Restaurant, Retail or Manufacturing

• Managing your energy: if you work on your feet all day, you've probably developed various ways to manage your physical and mental energy. Consciously practicing this and noting what works will give you an edge on any hectic day.
• Cultivating patience: even  if you have no plans to try selling your screenplay, getting a grant for your community project or finding paying gigs, this will come in handy. And if you do have plans, you'll need as much patience as you can muster since most projects take time to yield results.
• Dealing with boredom: when you plateau (and we all do at some point), being able to set aside the "This isn't fun anymore" feelings and plow through your rewrite/query list/edits/tedious technical work will eventually take you to the next level.

I've left out many job types such as are in the healthcare field because I'm not familiar enough with them to write knowledgeably. But trying to pinpoint even one skill that could be useful as you pursue your dream will provide motivation to keep moving on.

Time: Planning Yours

Many working artists I've met think that they need to get into a potsition where they can quit the day job before they can maximize creative time. However, I think that each of us has more available time than we initially believe.

One simple way to get an accurate picture involves tracking how you spend time for one week. Choose a method that works for you - on paper or digitally - and tally the number of hours you spend on your various activities, including any time-fillers such as watching TV or wandering through Facebook. Numerous sources can give you more detailed instructions for this exercise, including Wishcraft and Becoming a Master Student. If you've done it correctly, the end result should be a throrough picture of the amount of time you have and where those hours fall on your schedule.

Sher suggests choosing a block of free time that you find you often spend aimlessly- for example, 2:00-4:00 p.m. on Thursdays - then cut it in half, and use that half for your project. During the other half, you get to relax or goof off. Her reason for initially scheduling only half of that time is that we all need open-ended free time, and if you get into the flow while working on your project, you may find yourself wanting to continue working rather than turning on the TV anyway!

Rather than elaborate further on general use of time, I'll move on to specific suggestions for using time for your passion or vocation during the course of your work day:

• If you're a morning person and you don't have heavy family obligations or your kids are old enough to be fairly independent, block out 30+ minutes in the morning. Use your best time of day to steam ahead.
• Figure out a way to make your commute serve your goal. If you take public transportation to work, use train/bus time to listen to a relevant recording or watch an instructional video on your phone (with headphones, of course). If you manage to get a seat, you can use commute time to map out a project plan, break it down into smaller steps and schedule those steps into the weeks ahead. And if blocking out distractions is your superpower, you could even draft a chapter of the novel or make a few sketches. If you drive, listening to a pertinent audiobook or podcast may be your only option but as long as it doesn't hinder your ability to drive safely, it's still something. If you walk or bike, you can use the exercise to clear your mind as well as take note of places along your route that could be of interest to you, such as art supply shops.
• Pinpoint steps within your project that can be completed within 15 minutes and do one during lunch break. Doing this every work day will add up to more than an hour each week.
• If you're an evening person, work on the project for 15-20 minutes after family time is over for the night and kids are in bed. If you don't have any dependents you can devote more time. If you have a spouse or domestic partner, try designating a time when you both work on whatever gives you meaning - not working together on the same thing (although if that's what you're doing, go for it) but working side by side, sort of like preschoolers' parallel play.

If you've never tried any of these things, you may be surprised at how quickly small time increments add up. 

How Your Job Can Feed Your Vocation, Passion or Art - Introduction

Once you've taken the step of either making peace with your job or finding a different one, you can begin to explore how you might use your job to feed your dream. Briefly, here are some areas to look at. I'll go into each of them in more detail later:

• The skills you use OTJ.
• The people you meet and work with - your connections.
• Your schedule.
• The location of your workplace.
• Things you can buy at discount, or other material resources.
• Your commute.
• Opportunities you encounter.
• And whatever else you can find.

Most jobs won't have ideal or even good situations in all eight categories. Your task is to figure out where the strengths of your job situation lie and how to make the most of them.

Here's one benefit of holding a day job as long as it's a reasonably good one: it gets you out in the larger world and forces you to stay sharp. I've met people who lost jobs and were able to score up to two years of unemployment benefits that paid for their needs adequately (not all benefits do) but who accomplished almost nothing in terms of building a new life or working on a long-held dream during their unemployment. My theory is that once their lives lost the daily structure a job can provide, they weren't able to work without it.

If you want to do something badly enough, you'll find ways to do it while you're still employed. Let's start by looking at how the people we've been following could make use of the obvious and not so obvious benefits from their day jobs. 

Example - Molly's Dilemma

Although Molly mostly likes her position as a special education classroom assistant, she realizes that the income will never be quite adequate. With a growing sense of dismay, she's realizing that her husband has "settled" - he's not going to look for work with better pay and more responsibility. After getting the resentment out of her system by venting to her best friend, Molly realizes that the only person she can change is herself. She really needs to get herself into a better economic position.

She's reluctant to table plans for her beading business, but she decides that right now her best move for the long term is to learn the skills that could land her an administrative assistant position in the school system. Office positions pay several dollars more per hour than she's currently earning, plus the summer break is six weeks long rather than two months. In addition, if she were ever laid off (not unusual for schools), having office skills could probably insure that she wouldn't be unemployed for long.

Molly researches her options and finds out that the community college offers a certificate program that could be completed in a year if she took online or evening classes. Or she could sign up for free e-courses in basic office software such as spreadsheets via a program offered through her library's website. An informational interview with the principal's assistant at her own school could help her decide which route is best.

After thinking it over, Molly gives herself one year, starting this fall, to complete whatever skill-building she needs, after which she'll begin applying for front office positions within the school district. Having the deadline assures her that this is a temporary detour; when the year is over, she'll return to moving full speed ahead with her crafting business.

Meanwhile, she decides that she'll stay in touch with her entrepreneurial goals by rewarding herself with several hours every weekend for doing her beadwork, with an occasional all-afternoon bead binge during school vacations on days when her mom can watch the kids. This will keep her creative dreams from withering altogether.