The question this week is: “Is getting ahead a little more fun?”
Sure, it seemed that doing a lot more work and making more money this week would be a great experiment for me. To give you a little background, at this stage of our lives, my husband brings in the majority of our income as I spend a good amount of time working on our assorted “projects”. Projects like getting our books off the ground, designing our Web sites and doing the hundreds of other things that are behind the scenes to owning and operating three corporations. It generally keeps me busy for 12 hours a day, but I get to work from home, I can take a nap during the day, and I can stop work whenever I want. But this last week I have taken on an increase in customers for web consulting or design, and these particular jobs required that I do a bit more driving with face-to-face meetings.
So I got an inside look at what Jim does every day as a mobile computer technician. Going to places I’d never been before, rushing out of the house to be somewhere on time, and on more than one occasion, trying to solve a problem on the fly that I didn’t fully understand yet. On top of all of that I was using other people’s computers, PCs, which made me feel like a two year old, frustrated because I didn’t know how to do anything. Oh, how much I appreciated my reunion with my iMac and my Magic Mouse!
So was it worth it to take on more jobs, to bring in more income, to “get ahead”? I’m really not sure. Of course we’d like to save up some extra money, but at what daily cost? This week my husband and I were more like roommates than spouses, seeing each other in passing as one of us ran out of the house to do another job. We didn’t have as much time to work on our writing projects in the morning because of the demand of the extra jobs, and we didn’t stop and watch the sunset at night.
Sure a week or two isn’t going to kill anyone, but it seems like this “getting ahead” thing could be addictive and hard to break free of because there will always be something that you are trying to save a little bit more for. But at the end of your life, all you might remember is working, and not being with the people you love, doing the things you love most. So I’m going to try to remember that and keep a little better balance in my life.
