Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

The Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair is this weekend! Roll down to the List of Clubs for more on that, and let me know if you’re trying to go. Tomorrow is on track to be a beautiful day here, and I intend to get a poster about it.

Today, we’re getting into one of the trickiest tasks of all: work-life balance, when your work is what you want to do with your life. Yes, there’s a way. Let’s get into it!

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The Great Cheat Code

There is a curious dilemma that tends to ensue whenever a creative idea becomes profitable enough to be full-time work:

How do you make sure to keep your personal life intact?

I mean, I get it. There’s a certain level of euphoria that comes from realizing that something you spend your non-working hours on - or something you enjoy so much that it consumes your thoughts - can be what you do for work. That tends to make you overcommit your time. And understandably! When you feel you’ve found “your calling,” what is sleep, really?

I’m not a huge fan of The Smiths like I know quite a few of you reading this are, but I always think back to one of their more clever punchlines: “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job / And heaven knows I’m miserable now.” 

I’ve worked with enough entrepreneurs and professional artists over the years that this becomes a common refrain. The process goes kind of like this:

First, you’re trying to achieve enough revenue to do your creative work full-time. 

Then, you’re doing it! You’ve been able to do it for long enough that it’s not a fluke, and you have a repeatable process. Other work becomes less important. This is what you’re doing now. It’s hard to say anything other than yes to this, which becomes a problem when...

…You hit severe overwork levels. You’re doing way too much. What you loved doing is now a ball-and-chain, around your ankle on a good day and around your neck on a bad one. You don’t have time or mental space to pursue other leads, so when a revenue source dries up, you struggle to rebound.

It’s OK, you know. I’ve been you. I’ve seen it from so many angles I’ve lost count, at this point.

How do you avoid this?

It’s going to be tough, but: this is the formula.

If you’re trying to do full-time work as yourself and want to know freedom, do everything you can to make your work week functionally closer to 30 hours than the typical 40.

This is a cheat code for life. And if you already know how hard you end up working anyway as a business owner or free-standing creator, you’ll see very quickly why it works.

The 40-hour work week is a construct dating back to the Great Depression, where labor advocacy helped get it forced as a cap on full-time employment in the US to both soften unemployment and stop companies from normalizing 50-60+ hour work weeks. The classic “9 to 5” is based on this. If you work more than 40 hours a week in an hourly position in the US, your employer is required to pay you overtime wages. Salaried jobs are based on this today, although the US still has a severe culture of overwork to contend with. (That’s part of why there’s a push to move to a 4-day work week now, which is closer to what was initially proposed by worker advocates back then.)

But as many of you with email jobs and experience in office culture know, this 40 hours is often not used as “40 hours of focused time.” Fridays are also famously pretty chill in many 9-to-5 workplaces, except when they aren’t. Some salaried gigs might have 12-hour days regularly in the buildup to a big project, and then have extended break time or easy Fridays afterward.

Good employers recognize the importance of balancing out overwork culture where they can.

And the thing nobody really warns you about is: if you think it’s rare to find a good employer, it’s even harder to be a good employer to yourself.

When you’re in business as yourself, hours count in a different way. Freelancing, entrepreneurship, and co-ownership all lend themselves to a temptation to never clock out. Maybe you don’t really ever unplug, or know quite how to do it. This creates a serious burnout risk, even if you think you’re wired for this. When you’re always a little on, it’s easy to slowly drift to always being a little off - or, if you’re always really on and hit a wall, you’ll hit it at full speed. What goes up must eventually come down. No one avoids this forever.

So you have two tasks to keep that from happening:

Protect your time.

And then, reclaim your time.

When you protect your time, you take note of where you have flexibility and where you are pushing a boundary for yourself.

Easier said than done in the “do it now” world of project-based design work or music work, I realize. But to protect your time, you count hours spent on specific tasks, where you can. You recognize when a call is going too long, and you give yourself time to get off the phone and reflect on the meeting you had.

When someone asks you to go the extra mile for them, you keep a running tally in your head about what’s an extra mile versus what’s way farther than that - and then, you ask yourself whether the person asking knows they’re getting something from you that you can’t just give to everyone. You have to have powerful, years-of-therapy-grade boundaries, and be prepared to not break them.

When you reclaim your time, you think of yourself as a client.

What do you need, from yourself, to do your work?

A friend of mine with two decades of freelancing experience talks a good bit about knowing your “unbillable” hours. This absolutely matters. For example: I do this newsletter for you, and also for me. Nobody makes me do it. Do I know how many hours it takes me to write one? Yes. I have to know that and block time for it, or it won’t happen.

Another example: how many hours does it take to have a meeting with yourself about everything you want to do in a week, a month, and the next 6 months? When do you do different levels of this?

You can’t bill someone for working out (unless you’re a trainer), but gym time also counts as unbillable hours. The client is you, yourself, and your wellness.

And instead of guilting yourself for when you start your working day, or when you take a big nap in the middle of one, this lets you budget time for that.

These ways of thinking - protecting, and reclaiming - are what entrepreneurs get educated to do. When people say “work smarter, not harder,” this is what that’s supposed to mean. Some take it to heart; some neglect it.

For me, I recognize that I will work my face off when I’m invested in a project or idea, and the chances I go over 40 hours a week without stopping myself are high. So I try to keep myself “on” for closer to 30 hours a week. When you can’t take sick days in the salaried gig sense, you have to make sure there’s room for them, because you will eventually need that. Will I work 40 in the end? Probably! But I don’t start there, which helps me avoid doing 60 hours every week and wondering why I chose this life.

And if you’re an artist trying to figure out how to professionalize: consider what portions are “fun” for you, and what portions are “work” for you. If you aren’t specifically capping the “work” parts, it can and will eat the rest of your life up. 

This takes practice. It’s an imperfect process. But don’t neglect it. 

One Thing You Can Use Today

All this talk of how much time to spend on work on average leads to a meta-question within it:

How do you pace your energy for creative work?

One old friend of mine used to say he tried to always keep himself at 80% when at a business conference. When you think about it, this is exactly the way to do it - in fact, I’d advocate for being at 80% all the time, in any discipline. And there are a few clear reasons why:

1.) If you get excited about something naturally, you are going to be at 100%. If you’re already at 100%, this excitement won’t have anywhere further up to go, and you’ll have a letdown somewhere else. Human physiology will inevitably correct to a mean, whether an hour from now or three years from now.

2.) You have to keep enough energy to both engage with other people in an authentic way, and also to follow up with them afterward.

3.) You don’t need to be all the way up to think creatively. In fact, being relaxed often helps.

I would further boil this down to five words:

On schedule, not always on.

Composure has a magnetic pull to it in creative work. So does enthusiasm, especially when tempered with competence. Don’t let those artists who are “power users” on social media fool you: as many of my clients have heard me say, you are better off being consistent in your interactions than you are in doing too much.

Keep your vision as clear as you can, and move forward deliberately. It doesn’t have to be a sprint every time. When it’s worth a sprint, you’ll have the reserves for it.

Track of the Week

Sweeping Promises - “Connoisseur of Salt”

One of the more established bands I saw at SXSW, the Kansas-based post-punk duo Sweeping Promises, was also a massively refreshing surprise to me. As the ominous positivity of their most recent album title Good Living Is Coming For You may suggest, they’re a party live, but also one that asks you to pay some damn attention. The whole record is worth your time (especially if you love early X and Gang of Four like I do), but “Connoisseur of Salt” has the sort of driving guitars and ruminations on limited space in life that make it a perfect entry point.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Now through Sunday, March 30 - Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair @ Powerhouse Arts
The poster art I’ve seen from people exhibiting at this is jaw-dropping. Each day has a $15 cover attached, and you’ll get your money’s worth quickly while also helping the artists and Powerhouse Arts keep doing their thing. If you’re even kinda into visual art, it’s a must-go.

Friday, March 28 (late show) - Tear Dungeon @ Alphaville
I saw this band early in the week during SXSW and thought to myself, “Huh. Didn’t expect to see a whole band in gimp masks this early.” And that’s far from the only reason to be watching them. Heavy, gnarly, and a correct choice for your 1:00am on a Friday night.

Monday, March 31 - Protest Fest @ Purgatory
How many shows can you go to that promise five top-tier local bands, a drag set, and tables for queer and trans community organizing all in one place? That’s a rarity for New York. I’ll see you there to celebrate it.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

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