Category: time

career, choices, decision-making, friendship, time

Beginning: In Your Job Search, What’s Your Single Most Important Ask?

Christa Avampato

“The only universal resource is time.”

I’ve recently had separate conversations with 2 friends that followed the exact same path. Like me, Amy and Michael are putting financial plans in place to assure that in the future they work on the projects that mean the most to them. They don’t want to retire early in the traditional sense. They absolutely want to keep working throughout their lives. They just want the option to work on their own personal passions.

This is a different way of thinking about work and savings. The 3 of us have jobs that satisfy certain requirements, though none of us would call them the ideal roles for us. Truthfully, the only ideal roles for us are the ones we create ourselves, for ourselves. So what has been our search criteria for work? Time. Our #1 requirement in our job searches has been to have jobs that provide us with the time and flexibility to work on our own personal projects, the projects that feed our souls. And to use our jobs to build up our savings to make more of those projects possible.

Another friend of mine recently criticized this view of my job. “You are really wasting your time,” she said. “It’s really a shame that you don’t have a job that challenges you more.” What I thought was shameful is that she lives for her job for a very large company that really has no sense of loyalty to her. If anything, this recession has shown me that your top priority needs to be you and the people whose lives you personally and professionally effect. I have plenty of challenge in my life – I challenge myself with all of my creative projects that happen outside of my office building. They are the projects that truly mean something to me and to the world. They are the accomplishments I am most proud of.

To be clear, I appreciate the skills I’ve built and experiences I’ve had at my company. It’s provided me with a good living and a manageable schedule to make my yoga, writing, and personal life rich and meaningful. It’s helped me look at the world in a new way. It’s given me numerous opportunities to give back to my community, donating time and money to worthy causes. It serves a tremendous purpose, even at the times that it frustrates me.

If you’re searching for a new job, or even just contemplating leaving your current role, be very clear about your situation. What are you leaving, what are you looking for, and what needs to be there for you in the next pasture?

routine, time, to-do lists, work

Step 336: Balance Over Time

Christa Avampato

In business school a friend of mine famously said, “I think you can have it all, you just can’t have it all, all the time.” We beat the heck out of ourselves when it comes to work life balance. We make ourselves crazy by wanting balance every day, at every moment, and if we can’t get ourselves there we assume there’s something wrong with us, that we are somehow inept. The General Counsel of my company talked at a recent lunch about the idea of attaining balance over time, not balance all the time.

Some days, some week are just going to be packed to the gills. That’s life. Projects ramp up, the holidays come around, guests are in town. Certain times in our lives can just be crazy. Crazy fun or crazy not-so-fun. If that crazy happens over a long, sustained period of time, then yes, we do have a problem that we need to quickly remedy. But just because life is not as balance as we’d like it to be for a few days doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It just means we’ve got active lives.

This idea calmed me down, and it was a message I needed this week. Work has consumed more of my time than it usually does and I was cursing it a bit. Reflecting on the idea of balance over time reminded me to be grateful. I’m ridiculously lucky to have a job that interesting most of the time, that pays well, and doesn’t consume much of my time after 5:30. This week I’ve had a few late nights. I’m getting some new projects up on their feet and it’s taking more time than the typical 9-5 day allows. Thanks to the idea of balance over time, I took the extra time crunch in stride. And when the lull hits, which will inevitably happen, I’ll remember to offer my thanks for peace and quiet.

change, time

Step 311: An Extra Hour

Christa Avampato

“All my possessions for a moment of time.” ~ Elizabeth I

I never believed it would happen, that life would go by faster as I got older. This year has flown by for me, and the holidays are just around the corner. So many of my friends have talked recently about the passage of time, how one day falls into the next and before we know it too many days have gone before we’ve all gotten together again. I know every second of every day passes by at the exact same length as every second that came before it and everyone that will come after it.

I think times goes by more quickly once we fully realize just how fleeting it all is. When we see the lines start to creep around our eyes, when we see our parents start to grow older, and when we have to start checking the next demographic box on market surveys we realize time doesn’t have to ask for our permission to pass by and it doesn’t care about whether or not we accept it’s passing. It has a stubborn mind of its own. It will go on, with or without us.

I thought a lot about time yesterday as we got an hour of it back. The end of Daylight savings time is the one day when we get that 25th hour we so desperately crave. And you know what? It didn’t really matter that much, just like it doesn’t really matter if we have a little more money or a little more luck. We are remarkable creatures of adaption. If suddenly days shrunk to 23 hours, we’d find a way to still get everything done. We’d flex. We always do.

meditation, time, wellness, yoga

Step 304: Souls and Grocery Stores

Christa Avampato

“What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.” ~ Ray Charles

It’s easier to know the soul of others than it is to know our own. We can look at other people’s actions, the people they surround themselves with, and the issues that ignite their energy and understand where their souls are rooted. The difficulty of knowing our own souls is akin to being able to rise up above our lives and observe from an outsider perspective. It is tough work.

We can, and often do, run through life. We fill up our schedules, load up our to-do lists, and dart from place to place, hoping that somewhere along the way we’ll find the path we’re supposed to be on. What I’m finding in my meditation practice is that the only way to know our souls, our light, is to sit still, close the eyes, and breath. We won’t find our souls, our purpose, out there. We will gather ideas from the world, options, and possibilities. But the only way to know which path is the right one for us is to look around inside. If we’re looking inside and moving about, chances are we’ll get a blurry image just like a camera gets when it’s shaken while snapping a photo. The image becomes clear in the stillness.

I will be the first to admit that I hate to sit still. I run through all the things I should be doing, rather than just sitting there. I feel like I’m losing time. And then I think about the grocery store. If I sit down and make a list of what I need to get, my trip is faster and more efficient. If I just run out the door without a list, I find I wander around the store for far too long, all because taking the time to make a list felt like time wasted. The journey to know our souls is the same as our journey around Whole Foods. Take some time to be still and collect our thoughts, and it becomes an easier process to get where and what we want. Below is my favorite meditation, the one that actually expands the time in my day and the knowledge of who I am and who I mean to be.

My favorite still meditation:
Sit in a comfortable cross-legged position
Deepen the breath
Lengthen the spine
Imagine with each inhale we grow a little taller and with each exhale we grow a little wider
Relax the face and jaw
Smile slightly and envision a tiny light right in the middle of the chest that gets a little brighter with every breath cycle. It’s that small light that will reveal our souls as it strengthens

The photo above can be found here.

time, to-do lists, work

Step 226: More Free Time This Fall

Christa Avampato

My summer was not the relaxing break I hoped for a few months ago. Trips that didn’t go the way I planned, travel delays and cancellations for a variety of scary reasons, and work that took a turn for the insane. In general I felt off. About a week ago, I saw some of the fog start to lift, and then it plunged right back down for another round of crazy. I was feeling worn out, but still laughing, which is always a good sign.

Last weekend I took a hard look at my Fall schedule and saw the work mounting. I made some tough decisions about which pieces had to take a backseat for the time being. This afternoon I got an email from LIM College saying my social media class couldn’t be offered this Fall. I was disappointed to say the least, but nothing is as good as it seems or as bad as it seems. To their credit, LIM offered me the opportunity to teach several other classes this Fall that are more central to their curriculum (mine was very much an elective) but either the schedule didn’t fit with mine or the topic wasn’t my area of expertise.

The unfortunate aspects of not teaching at LIM College this Fall:
1.) I spent a lot of time and effort on the class building it from scratch

2.) I was looking forward to getting into college-level teaching much earlier in my career than I anticipated

3.) Missed income since I now won’t be paid this Fall for class or the work I’ve put into it to-date

And the upside:
1.) If the scheduling works out, mine and LIM’s, there is the possibility that I could teach the class at LIM in the Spring which would mean that the work I did would not go to waste

2.) I met Dudley Blossom, the Chair of the Marketing Department, at LIM. He is even more disappointed than I am that the class won’t be offered. His guidance as I built the curriculum was an incredible experience for me and I am confident that we will do some work together somewhere down the line

3.) I now have time for some of the projects that I put off in order to teach at LIM:
– Working on Innovation Station and a variety of other public education projects
– Spending more time on my yoga teaching through Compass Yoga
– Taking additional freelance writing assignments
– Working on my book idea that uses yoga principles as the basis for personal financial management
– Getting and training a dog
– Spending more time at the gym

4.) Now that I do have a curriculum created and I fully own it, I can shop it around to other schools who may be interested

5.) I learned a very valuable lesson – I will never again do freelance work for anyone without a contract

6.) I can take a couple of weekend trips I had originally decided to cancel this Fall

7.) My normal working hours won’t be divided between this class and my job, meaning that I won’t need to take up any of my personal free time to attend to work duties

8.) Fall is my favorite time of year, and honestly it’s always a better set of months for me than summer. Now I will get to enjoy more of it outside

9.) Having this class on my schedule made me re-sign my lease on my current apartment and not have to worry about moving; for that I’m very grateful

3 negatives, 9 positives. By sheer number, that’s about as much lemonade as I can make. The real bonus for me comes from knowing that all these types of things happen for a reason. There must be something else this Fall that really needs my attention, and now whatever that thing is, I’ll have more time for it. The unexpected can set us back a bit, but it brings with it a lot of excitement, too. I wonder what’s around the bend…

family, time, travel

Step 205: Choosing to Board, or Not

Christa Avampato

Delta sent me a message this morning that read “time to check-in” and my immediate reaction was “no”. I’ve been having a blast with my family, especially my little nieces, and I’m not ready for the fun to end tomorrow morning at 6am. I love my life in NYC – my friends, my neighborhood, and my projects that are coming up in the Fall. Some parts of my life need sprucing up.

1.) Dating for the summer has been fun, actually dating for the past year has been fun, and now I’m ready to be in a relationship again. I wasn’t sure this day was going to arrive, but here it is. To read more on the topic of relationships, check out my Owning Pink blog.

2.) More than anything, I need more flexibility with my time, mostly from a geographic stand-point. This trip to Florida showed me that I need to watch my nieces grow up. I need to travel even more than I do. There are conferences and events all over the country (and globe for that matter) that I want to attend. My work, at least a portion of it, needs to be wherever I am.

Those two areas are heavy ones for me, each with plenty of sprucing needed. They’ll be getting some focus and attention, long overdue, in the weeks ahead.

family, happiness, harmony, sunshine, thankful, time

Step 202: Making Moments

Christa Avampato

Yesterday, the fam and I headed out to New Smyrna Beach, Florida. We splashed around in the salty surf, hung out on the sand in our sun dome – so much better than an umbrella, collected seashells, and looked for jellies washed in by the waves (my niece, Lorelei’s, favorite beach activity). Perfect temperatures, both air and water, made for a relaxing, care-free afternoon.

My sister, Weez, snapped pictures of us and as I looked at those photos I was reminded of how special days and moments like these will be treasured for many years to come. My nieces are growing fast. I imagined how we’d think about these days when the girls are older, how we’d long for these very moments as life trolls on. I was glad and grateful to appreciate them in real-time, for what they are now and what they will mean in the days ahead.

That awareness is something I’m working to harness. We have special moments all the time; we just don’t always know they were special until they’ve passed. I’d like to catch them by the tail as they whiz by, in the hopes that I can hang on to them for just a little bit longer.

The image above is a picture of New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

schedule, time, writing

Step 188: Routines and Rituals

Christa Avampato

For most of my life, I have fought routine. I thought routine would make me boring. I thought routines were a waste of time and lacked creativity. That changed when I started writing every day about 3 years ago. I’ve liked writing stories since I was a little kid, but I never really made a routine out of it. I just wrote when the inspiration hit me.

Later in life, I realized that practice makes better. Even with natural talent, practice is a necessity for mastery. And I wanted to be a master writer, so I set myself on the path to writing every day no matter how tired or uninspired I felt. I went to the screen or the notebook, and recorded some thought. Like a physical muscle, my writing chops improved considerably. I look back at some of my early blog posts and laugh at how bad they were. I think this is healthy – laughter and the realization that practice does indeed help.

I noticed a marked change in my writing about two years ago. I could write more quickly and with greater clarity. My mind started making connections and developing deeper insights. My readership started growing too, because I was promoting my writing and also because my content improved considerably with daily practice. My writing routine crossed the line into ritual, becoming not a chore, but a pleasure I looked forward to. And writing made my life easier because it helped me make sense of even the most complicated, messy situations.

This morning on my way to work, I began to consider other routines that I could develop into rituals with more practice. I’ve started taking a nicer route to my office. I meditate every day. I do at least 10 minutes of yoga every day, even if that means just a few sun salutations or seated postures. I love to watch CBS Sunday morning with my coffee and the paper. I’m thinking of finally getting a dog in New York, and that care will develop a routine of its own.

Routine isn’t the boring, tired-out activity I once saw it as. It’s what gives our lives purpose and focus and very often, peace.

Do you have routines that have become rituals, or are you starting some new routines in your life? I’d love to hear about them!

I found the above cartoon here.

health, time

Step 168: Doing Less

Christa Avampato

“It’s okay to do less.” ~ Jason Fried, Co-founder of 37 Signals

“Your energy levels could be low today, which could make you feel lethargic. Perhaps your body is sending you signals that you need to rest and take it easy in order to recharge. When we feel listless, it is often because we have over-taxed our bodies–we spend so much time running and so little time resting that our bodies simply crash. In order to heal, our bodies then create barriers that ultimately prevent us from recharging ourselves. Resting in relaxation pose, however, helps us to unwind enough so that we can release the blocks we have and let in the healing energy of the universe. By giving the gift of relaxation to yourself today, your body will soon recover, and you will be filled with the loving and bountiful energy of the universe.” ~ My horoscope on 6/16/10

I hate summer colds. I can’t remember the last time I had one. All week I’ve been fighting one, and to no avail. The cold beat my will. I had so many fun things planned this week, so many events with friends, and all of them have fallen through. I finally got to work on Wednesday and by the end of a long day felt wiped out. By 4:00, my fever had returned and I broke a sweat in my cube sitting at my computer.

While I know that biologically I have some type of virus that is causing me to sleep for 12 hours at a stretch, I also think the universe has a lesson in mind. I hate colds because they cause me to be wildly unproductive. You can find me this week on my couch, a jug of orange juice in one hand and a super-sized box of tissues in the other hand. A pathetic sight.

I read this quote by Jason Fried last week in an interview he did with Brian Clark, Founder of Lateral Action and author of Copyblogger. Upon reading it, I thought, “Yeah, right. Do less? In this economy? I don’t know anyone doing less.” And this type of reaction gets me into trouble with the universe. It tempers my strong-willed “give me a break” attitude quickly, this week with a cold. Just take a look at my horoscope.

So here I am on my couch, thinking, pen in hand. Maybe doing less isn’t such a bad thing, and maybe it’s even possible for me to accomplish. I’ll consider the possibility, that’s all I’m promising. I guess I can’t run myself down filling up every single moment of free time. That won’t benefit anyone. But universe, could you at least let me have my fun times out on the town with my friends? I promise to give up some other things in return. Really.

The image above depicts the mucus monster from the popular Mucinex ads.

happiness, time

Step 85: Choosing Where to Place Our Energy

Christa Avampato

“The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life?” ~ Louis Auchincloss

Today someone whom I volunteer with tried to give away my time. A month ago I had offered to help with an event this person is running and then, unbeknownst to me, she assigned me to run the entire event without asking me if I’d be willing to do that. Even worse, she sent around an email, buried the change in the minutes, and then never said a word about it to me until today when she needed something.

A younger me (and by younger I mean 6 months ago), would have taken on the job, even though I didn’t agree to it, because I would have felt obligated. I would have felt like I needed to take on the event because otherwise I would let this person down, even though this person gave away my time publicly without my consent. Mind you this person is overwhelmed at work (aren’t we all these days?) and the other people on her committee are not engaged (which I think she should take a hard look at and find out why that might be rather than playing the martyr). I am sure she didn’t intend to be sneaky and assign me to a responsibility I didn’t agree to. The trouble is she’s a poor leader, and I have no intention of ever following a poor leader again. I’ve been there thank you, and it’s not fun. Poor leadership sucks the life out of me.

So very professionally I paid tribute to my anger, made it clear that this person could not give away my time, and could not assign me to a responsibility that I didn’t accept, no matter how many smiley faces she puts in an email and no matter how much she complains about her life. I kindly told her that she would have to find someone else to take full responsibility for the event. Offering to help with an event and taking full-responsibility for it are two different things. Rather than feel guilt about this, as I could have in the past, I learned that I can have empathy for her situation without accepting a responsibility that I didn’t sign up for. If I had the time to fully take on the event by myself, I would help her out, but I don’t have the time and her behavior is unacceptable. So I took myself out of the game. She’ll have to look elsewhere for someone who’s willing to tolerate that treatment. The train I’m driving has left the station.

Life is about energy, and we need to seek out people, relationships, and activities that provide us with enjoyment to provide us with that energy. We can’t let others weigh us down. We can feel for them, have empathy for their situations (which most of the time they bring on themselves), and also preserve our own dignity and self-respect. (Now, I’m talking about people who are truly down on their luck and need our help because they actually can’t help themselves. I’m talking about people who make choices and then don’t accept the responsibilities that go along with those choices). It is a human right to enjoy our lives to the fullest, and the moment someone begins to treat us in a way that compromises that right, we can take our energies elsewhere. There are people out there who do appreciate our time and effort, and those are the people who deserve our attention.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.