A few years ago when I was in between jobs, it was difficult to feel a sense of purpose and progress in the mundaneness of day to day life. To try and deal with this, I tried to come up with some kind of self-imposed deadline (ironic, since deadlines and work pressure had been something I was trying to get away from) as a way of effecting production. I set a target of starting and completing a new project every fortnight, imaginatively titled project-a-fortnight.
Did it work? Somewhat. It certainly helped to stymie the feeling of stagnation and skills fading away. Practically, I’d like to believe it helped land me my next job. Whether it helped with filling the gap of meaningful work was more suspect. One of the things I realised I missed in that career break was the collaboration and discussion with other people, working towards a common purpose. That energy and comradery wasn’t something I could get from working on a project for myself, behind closed doors.
As Martha and I emerge from the soul numbing miasma that is newborn parenting (Max is almost a year now!), we’ve started looking more closely at what else we want in the rest of our lives together. We’ve both got vague ideas about the kind of things we’d like or find meaningful, but it’s really when the rubber meets the road that we’re going to find out if it’s going to work for us.
So we’re going to be trying and thinking about different ideas every few weeks, not quite a project a fortnight, but more like exploring-an-idea-every-few-weeks. If at first you don’t find an idea you like, try and try again. And I’ve got the best comrade I could hope to have to discuss and collaborate with this time around.
How is this going to work practically? We’re going to take turns to write about the ideas we have and what we’re trying everyday. With random thoughts sprinkled throughout. Monday I’ll write about something, Tuesday Martha’ll write about something, and Wednesday it’ll be me again ad infinitum. We haven’t ever tried such an intense writing schedule together before so we’ll see what we come up with. As with all things in life it’s heavily subject to change.
Come join us and say hi! We’d love to have you along for the ride 😄