Photo by Helio/Flickr
How do you juggle work and home life? It’s a question we’ll take up at the next WordCount Last Wednesday Twitter chat on Wednesday, Feb. 29, at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Use hashtag #wclw to join the conversation.
Yesterday, my friend and fellow business journalist Laura Vanderkam led an online discussion over at the Wall Street Journal‘s The Juggle blog on the value of leisure time and how to build enough of it into your schedule so you don’t feel constantly overwhelmed with work.
It’s a great subject. Feeling overwhelmed is a constant for many people who are self employed – including freelance writers. Show me a freelancer who’s never gotten up early, stayed up late or worked weekends to get caught up and I’ll show you someone who’s not serious about what they do.
But burn the candle at both ends too long and the only thing you get is burnt out. Add family, a house, pets, volunteering and other obligations to the picture and you could find yourself wondering whether it’s all worth it.
Juggling is the key: finding the right trade off between work and everything else.
The tricky part is determining the right balance for you, and how to accomplish what you need to accomplish – at work, at home, for fun – without giving short shrift to the other parts of your life.
We’ll look at all of that during the #wclw chat.
I should add that the idea for this chat topic bubbled up during last month’s #wclw chat, when long-time freelancer and new mom Sara Lancaster and freelancer and mom-to-be Andrea Altenburg started sharing about working with babies. Thanks for the inspiration ladies!
For the 60-minute chat, we’ll start with introductions, move to some pre-set questions and leave time at the end for other questions.
Questions for Feb. 29 #wclw chat
Here are the pre-set questions:
- Q1: How many hours a week do you work?
- Q2: What creative – or crazy – things do you do to juggle work and life?
- Q3: What secrets have you discovered for keeping your work and life in balance?
- What’s your biggest time waster – and how do you rein it in?
Joining the #wclw chat
It’s possible to use the standard Twitter interface for the chat, but you might find it easier to follow along with an add-on application such as TweetGrid, TweetChat or HootSuite. Of those three, my favorite is TweetChat, which you can log into using your Twitter account. You might want to alert followers that you’ll be tweeting more than usual during the chat, and suggest they use Muuter.com to temporarily mute you if they don’t want to tune into the conversation.
If you’re unable to join us, I’ll post highlights from the chat in an upcoming post.
Got an idea for a future #wclw chat? Would you like to participate as a guest speaker? Send your idea or bio to me at wordcountfreelance@gmail.com.
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With me it seems less like juggling and more like professional wrestling – only it’s not really all that professional. Interesting post.