Thank you to the person who sent me this game originally. As promised, I sat down and played it a few times, but still have to strongly disagree with you on its premise of poverty (at least in the west) being completely outside of an individual's control.
Every time I play this game, I end up in profit.
If the point of this game is to highlight how difficult it is for an individual in low paid work to survive (or even save money), then it fails spectacularly. In fact, to me it only emphasises the effects of an individual's bad choices. Sorry, not sorry.
Some of the scenarios it includes just forgo any basic common sense:
"Your family pet is sick and won’t get better without treatment. What do you want to do?"
Who on earth has pets while on low paid, insecure work? Especially when you already have a child to take care of (also a stupid decision to make if you can't afford to look after them). I didn't think of getting another cat or dog until I was on a decent salary, with enough savings to cover long term unemployment, had secure housing, and knew I could afford to take care of said animal even if my financial situation dramatically changed for the worse. I certainly couldn't have afforded to raise a child. You plan ahead for these things or simply don't do them. Having a pet or a child is not a necessity in life. You may really reeeeeally want one (I would have loved to come home to a cute, furry creature after a hard day at work), but adults are supposed to have this thing called self control that stops them acting like self entitled brats after puberty ends! If you can barely afford to take care of yourself, you have no right to be demanding that another living creature be dependent on you.
"Your child’s sneakers are falling apart and it’s time to buy new ones. Name brands are important, but they don’t come cheap."
Why the hell are "name brands" important? Even if I was a super rich parent, I would refuse to waste money on fashion labels. I have money to waste on fashion labels now and still don't. You teach your child how advertising works, how and why so many things are over-priced junk, and why they should save their money for more important things in life than impressing shallow idiots.
"Your credit card kept you afloat while you were trying to hold onto your
home. But even though the house is gone, the balance isn’t."
If you over-leveraged yourself on a house purchase (a stupid thing to do in the first place), you should have downsized the moment you realised you were struggling to pay the bills rather than dragging it out and using credit cards to continue living a lifestyle above your means.
"Your payment of $500 for your car loan is due..."
Why on earth do you have a car loan that is a third of your take home pay? Why on earth do you have a car loan at all? If you're broke, you either get up earlier in the morning and take the bus/train (yeah it's rubbish to do, but most of us had to at some point) and/or save up cash for a low end second hand car. And even if you do earn enough money to easily cover a $500 a month car loan, it's far more sensible to just pay in cash so you don't have a debt hanging over you if your situation changes. You certainly don't waste money that's not even yours just to get something 'nicer'. "Oh my god, the stupid, it burns!"
"Everyone is pitching in for a lottery pool. What do you want to do?"
Point out the odds of ever winning a significant amount on the lottery are even less than the odds of becoming a movie star or death by falling out of bed. Basically, too low to worry about.
"A bunch of friends are going to a free concert tonight, and you want to go – but you’ve got a kid to worry about."
Yeah, it's not fun being a parent when you didn't bother to consider if you could actually afford to raise a child. Maybe avoid doing that again and make sure you teach your son/daughter to think about the long term impact of their behaviour.
"Your stress level is through the roof these days. A friend who hears you venting offers you a cigarette to take the edge off. What do you want to do?"
(facepalm)
"Your new apartment is too small for your stuff. Do you want to spend $45 to rent a storage unit?"
Yeah, why the hell not. Fill it with those $100 shoes, lottery tickets, cigarettes and cute outfits for your dog (because you probably waste money on those too)!
For anyone who wants to try for themselves, the game is at: www.playspent.org
Showing posts with label broke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label broke. Show all posts
27 Jul 2019
23 May 2018
Another Redundancy
I haven't posted in a while as I was hit with yet another redundancy last autumn after my company was bought out and half of our jobs offshored. It hit me pretty hard, as I honestly thought I'd left the crazy up and down swings of employment behind after the recession ended and was planning on several years of playing catch up for all that missed salary in my 20s.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. So in late October I began job hunting yet again (something I'm getting quite good at now). I managed to score a couple of short term contracts over the winter and early spring, but since the last one ended I've been struggling to find another temporary or permanent role within commuting distance. I was lucky enough to be offered voluntary redundancy, so I had a bit of money to tide me over and avoided having to borrow anything to pay the rent. But it seems all of the junior level roles in my industry are based miles away from where I live, and I've invested a large amount of money into my current accommodation and can't just up sticks and move right now. I've also paid upfront for a block of classes at a nearby school and can't get any refund.
So I'm having to make a decision of whether to remain unemployed for another few months and try to live off my savings until I can move home OR change career path yet again and just take any local job I can get my hands on to tide me over.
In the meantime, I've decided to just freeze all of my portfolio where it is and once I have money coming in again I can hopefully catch up to my last total and continue from there.
Sometimes life seems to be a succession of three steps forwards, two steps back!
I'm honestly pretty tired of spending as much time unemployed and job hunting as I do in employment, so while I continue to apply for a new job I'm also looking at starting my own business. It's an incredibly risky thing to do, as I don't have any real experience in entrepreneurship (I even struggle to spell the word) and have no spare money to use as start up capital. The vast majority of new businesses fail, which is a bit scary. I therefore need to start small and look at what I can do without any initial funds. I've worked in both finance and IT, so can at least deal with the book-keeping and technical side of things. I'm not great at thinking up new viable products and don't have a home so I have no space to store other people's products to ship to clients. It will therefore need to be some sort of digital service. An ex colleague suggested I become a Youtube vlogger since everyone seems to be getting rich off Youtube these days, but I lack the social skill to talk incessantly for the length of a video (which is why I have a written blog instead).
I'm still very much in the brainstorming stage, so feel free to send any useful suggestions my way! Any general business start up advice from those who have succeeded on this path would also be very much appreciated!
Unfortunately, it was not to be. So in late October I began job hunting yet again (something I'm getting quite good at now). I managed to score a couple of short term contracts over the winter and early spring, but since the last one ended I've been struggling to find another temporary or permanent role within commuting distance. I was lucky enough to be offered voluntary redundancy, so I had a bit of money to tide me over and avoided having to borrow anything to pay the rent. But it seems all of the junior level roles in my industry are based miles away from where I live, and I've invested a large amount of money into my current accommodation and can't just up sticks and move right now. I've also paid upfront for a block of classes at a nearby school and can't get any refund.
So I'm having to make a decision of whether to remain unemployed for another few months and try to live off my savings until I can move home OR change career path yet again and just take any local job I can get my hands on to tide me over.
In the meantime, I've decided to just freeze all of my portfolio where it is and once I have money coming in again I can hopefully catch up to my last total and continue from there.
Sometimes life seems to be a succession of three steps forwards, two steps back!
I'm honestly pretty tired of spending as much time unemployed and job hunting as I do in employment, so while I continue to apply for a new job I'm also looking at starting my own business. It's an incredibly risky thing to do, as I don't have any real experience in entrepreneurship (I even struggle to spell the word) and have no spare money to use as start up capital. The vast majority of new businesses fail, which is a bit scary. I therefore need to start small and look at what I can do without any initial funds. I've worked in both finance and IT, so can at least deal with the book-keeping and technical side of things. I'm not great at thinking up new viable products and don't have a home so I have no space to store other people's products to ship to clients. It will therefore need to be some sort of digital service. An ex colleague suggested I become a Youtube vlogger since everyone seems to be getting rich off Youtube these days, but I lack the social skill to talk incessantly for the length of a video (which is why I have a written blog instead).
I'm still very much in the brainstorming stage, so feel free to send any useful suggestions my way! Any general business start up advice from those who have succeeded on this path would also be very much appreciated!
5 Jun 2017
When Everyone Decides To Gets Married
I began Monday morning by looking over my accounts for the last few years and congratulating myself on managing to pay off all my debts and save £18k during the worst economic period since the great depression, while on minimum wage (or no wage) jobs, and with zero help. That was an excellent learning experience to have at the very start of my working life and something that will likely influence my financial behaviour for decades to come.
Ok, so I'm miles away from my millionaire goal after a decade of living like a Dickensian pauper, but I know of at least two of my peers that are no longer with us due to the toll that the recession took on my generation. So in comparison I think I'm in a pretty good place and can't complain. There were many times where I came incredibly close to joining them, so I'm glad to at least be alive today.
However, since that morning of congratulation I have received invites or notifications of not one, not two, but six major events (so far) that will undo a lot of that hard work. First of all, my sister got married last November. I was just getting back on my feet after another short period of unemployment between contracts (trying to start a proper career at 30 after a series of McJobs is difficult) and it took a while to repay the favours I had to get from family to attend. Following that, I had two 30th birthdays of close relatives, an 80th, and a 21st (all requiring big gifts - my family love big events and presents). Fortunately, since January I've had a break from using up gift money so I've had time to restock my gift account (yep, I have a savings account just for presents). I have another big wedding in the summer for my cousin, which I've had time to plan for. However, I've now discovered that I need funds for two more weddings, a new baby, a 21st, as well as a 30th and two 60th birthdays. And these are all close family members (yay for huge dynasties), so I can't avoid the parties and gifts without being a social pariah forevermore.
But having so many big events so close together is going to hammer my bank account! I don't earn much above minimum wage, so it takes forever to save up. And my family all earn significantly more than me (or have married wealth), and have homes, cars, all the basics already covered (unlike me). So keeping up with them is incredibly difficult yet expected by everyone. I can't count the number of times I've got into rows over non-attendance at 'important' events or have been accused of being cheap because I couldn't afford to go to some party or dinner. It's a difficult balancing act. I'm hoping after the next 18 months is up, that will be it for weddings, babies and milestone birthdays. Either that or I'll have to emigrate!
13 Mar 2014
What I Learned From Being Unemployed
I'm in the last few months of my degree and things are getting manic!
I can see the finish line now, so all my energy is going towards not
tripping over before I reach it. I'm doing a full time degree (do not
recommend), a full time job, and a fortnightly weekend job. As a result,
I'm not able to add new posts every single month. However, I did get a
few minutes of down time last week while stuck in bed with some weird
gunky infection disease thing (think that was my brain exploding), and
managed to type out some wordage in my drugged-up state. Reading back,
most of it makes sense. So I'm going to post it here.
In 2007 I was doing pretty well. I had a nice office job working for a property management firm that was only half an hour walk from my house. The pay wasn't terrible for a junior role, and I was only 21 so hadn't yet figured out what I wanted or could do career-wise. The only things I loved were writing books, maths and painting, all of which I was steered away from at school. My previous summer/gap year jobs had mostly involved finance, so getting a permanent role as an accounts clerk was fairly easy. I remember thinking how great it was that my office had a free vending machine where I could get tea, and the library was only a short stroll across the road.
In 2010 the big boss announced that our jobs would now be moving over to India. That summer I was out of work. Just in time for the recession to really hit.
Lesson 1: Ego. Remove.
I collected over 200 rejection emails/letters/calls that year (that doesn't include all the companies that never replied). At 24, to be told unanimously that you are basically crap and unemployable isn't a great feeling. I was barely out of the awkward I-hate-my-face teenager stage. After a few months I had run out of savings, so had to drag my pathetic behind into the job centre and beg for mercy (an experience I hope never to repeat).
It quickly destroyed any preconceptions I had about my own worth and any leftover grammar-school bred entitledness. These days I don't take myself so seriously and never expect automatic favours. I work hard, do the best I can, and have learned not to take it personally if other people don't always respond in a positive way. It has toughened me up. I'm like Lara bloody Croft now (okay, maybe without the humongous bank account and holographic personal butler - although I do have a crazy tech-genius brother and one day I will have that indoor bungee rope. One day!)
Lesson 2: Your parents and teachers are not always right.
Doing well at school, studying hard, getting good grades and regular work experience does NOT guarantee you a job later on. There is no magic formula. Don't be surprised when you discover most of your competitors have all of the above. You need to find a niche. Something you can do better than the majority of your peers.
Lesson 3: Networking.
A term I didn't discover until I got hold of my own computer and started Googling career sites until the early hours of the morning. It's 90% who you know rather than what you know. With most roles not requiring a PhD or equivalent, you can learn the specifics of the job once you're through the door. You just need to get someone on the inside to open the door for you. Which leads me to...
Lesson 4: Self-promotion.
Again, this was new terminology. I hated salesmen. I remember going to a car showroom with a friend as a teenager and getting more and more wound up by the second as this guy in an oddly coloured suit tried to convince my acquaintance to part with his cash for a set of wheels that was far over his budget. And I mostly avoided watching TV due to the annoying commercials that seemed to jump out and smack you in the brain at full volume. I'm a pretty cold, logical sort of person at heart - a bit like a friendly computer. I can very easily switch into character and be the life and soul of the party, but I generally like to be given the facts, when I ask for them, and then left alone to make a decision. Supermarkets irritate the hell out of me with all their epilepsy-inducing strip lights and bright yellow 'HALF PRICE, MOTHER FUCKER' signs everywhere, and that god-awful background music (I'm getting edgy just typing this). That was my idea of sales. I didn't want to be the cause of someone else's misery. Especially not my friends and family. Even the thought of handing someone my CV to pass onto their boss was nauseating.
Basically, I was being too considerate. The harsh truth is that there are billions of people on this planet battling out an existence. You can be friendly and give back to society once you have something to give back. Until then, you do everything you can to pay the bills, get food, and keep a roof over your head so that you aren't dependant on other people's taxes. Most people are too busy with their own lives to consider helping you (bar people like Oprah and Branson, who have clearly made it to the top of the food chain and can now relax occasionally and think about distributing their spare change whilst sipping a G&T). So if you need help then you have to ask for it. I'm now in a position where I can begin to help other people. However, I'm completely wrapped up in my ridiculously busy life and struggle to notice whether I've remembered to eat, let alone who is and isn't happily employed. If someone wants my help then they need to get in my face (literally - I'm fixated on a screen or running chores on auto-pilot most of the day). I'm more than happy to hand copies of CVs to my boss or give someone a fabulous reference, but if someone wants my help then they need to distract me and ask.
Self-promotion also means treating yourself like a business. Advertise your skills and knowledge everywhere you go. Look for places to go. Get yourself to events, gatherings, groups of like-minded people that you can collaborate with, sign up to trade circles and professional forums where you can talk to and learn from people higher up the ladder than you (or perhaps on a different ladder entirely if you want to jump over into a related field). Many of these events have free booze/munchies and the other attendees are generally clever, talented, awesome people! You can't lose.
Lesson 5: The biggest discovery I made - Understanding how and why I work.
Firstly, I am someone who requires routine. Not everyone does. I hadn't realised this until being forced to spend month after month by myself. Without a routine, I go a bit nut-nut. A payroll job forces you to turn up at a fixed location at a set time every day. Everything else in your life gets scheduled around the edges. Because you're in the office until 6pm, the gym has to wait until 6:30pm. Which means you don't eat dinner until 7pm. Then the housework and shopping have to be squeezed into either your lunch break (if you get one) or before work. Which leaves you an hour or so in the evening to study. Add on commuting if you don't live next door. You don't have time to stop and worry about what you should do next. You just attempt to cram in as much as possible when you get the chance. There is a constantly growing 'To-Do List' that never gets completed. You consider yourself lucky if you manage to book a GP or dentist appointment during the week (why do they all seem to be closed outside of office hours?), and you silently curse when someone decides to get married or keel over and die because it means trying to haggle time off during the exact week that all of your colleagues decide to jet off to Majorca. There is no flexibility. High-school and college were pretty much the same. Other people set the schedule and stole the best hours of the day, so you had to fit everything else in the best you could.
I learned that should I ever be in the position to work for myself, my first task will be to plan the year, the month, the week and the day. I'll invest in one of those phones that shouts at you drill Sargent stylee when anything needs doing. If I can get it to yell like the guy in Full Metal Jacket, even better! I will try to schedule the work into the hours where I am most productive (morning/evening) and make sure I can actually get to dentist and GP appointments (my teeth are full of holes and there are several medical things that could have been treated a lot more easily had they not been left to get worse). I had time to catch up with things like that while I was unemployed, but lacked the finances to get things properly fixed, and this has come back to haunt me (surgery is not fun). Routine is my friend. But a routine that I have control over. I now have a routine that benefits my employer. I get a hell of a lot done, but they profit from my work. This needs to change.
The planning thing also applies to the work itself. It bugs me that I'm not able to organise my actual work during office hours. I get there early in a futile attempt at damage control. I start the day with several hundred bits of work that no one in the team has had time to do (through no one's fault - we are just drastically short on staff). I plan to get some of those completed to minimize the number of shouty clients on the phone. There are 23 people in the team and usually 4 of us taking calls. My boss walks in and hands me 3 projects that will take an hour each to complete if I spend all my time on that one task. After an hour, she gives me another project that will take 2 hours minimum to complete. Every few minutes I have calls from angry clients threatening legal/media action if I don't drop everything and sort out their problem. We've been told to prioritise these calls. I also have multiple email accounts that get filled by the minute and other employees walking over to ask questions that I have to stop and answer. Every day the post comes in with hundreds more of the previously mentioned bits of regular work. Around lunchtime my boss will ask if the projects have been done. They rarely are.
The work that does get completed is generally rushed, and I get really irritated at mistakes. I work with money and it needs to be accurate. Some of the work involves very large sums and requires focus. We never get to focus. Constant mega multi-tasking means that errors are constantly made by everyone, which leads to more angry clients. The office needs someone dedicated to just taking calls, but they won't do this. As a result, work either isn't done or is done inaccurately, nothing is organised so we can't give clients any time-lines (which leads to more calls), and everyone is exhausted and getting ill. Staff keep quitting, so we are constantly re-training rather than catching up on the growing backlog of work. Occasionally there will be a meeting where we all sit down, politely freak out over the situation, come up with strategies that take up even more time than the work itself, avoid the major issues of under-staffing and misplacement of existing staff, and start the whole process all over again. So... I've learned that either employed or otherwise, I prefer to have my day at least partly organised in advance if I want to get anything accomplished!
Another related discovery is that my productivity increases in correlation with the amount of guilt I feel about potentially letting people down. I need some sort of outside pressure to really push myself. If self-employed, I would make use of shared office space (or working lunches - I've seen these advertised near by) and join groups where other people hold me accountable for my work. I tested this recently with a few sole traders in my town. We meet up online roughly every fortnight and it makes me want to work harder so that I have something to show them and talk about. There is an additional social benefit to this. I hated being by myself all the time while unemployed. I had no money to go out and no one to talk to at home. The one thing I appreciate about my payroll job is the team itself. I've always been lucky to work with fantastic colleagues, and I would miss the banter. My job changed drastically at the end of last year, so I don't get to socialise much now (except getting yelled at on the phone), but it beats being completely isolated.
Lesson 6: Think outside of the box.
In fact, run far far away from the box. When the obvious option is moved out of your reach, you are forced to reconsider the problem and look elsewhere for answers. During my 'empty year', I took on any job I could to earn extra money - private tutoring, story-boarding for a small production company, offering my Excel skills and sorting out a local business owner's finances (which I could have charged a lot more for in hindsight). I picked up some very useful skills in the process, and discovered there are other ways to earn money outside of a regular payroll job. I went about finding these jobs in completely the wrong way, and wasted a lot of time and energy as a result. But if I lost my job tomorrow then I could probably survive as a freelancer or start my own company if I could get the funding. In fact, I am tempted to do this at some point in the future anyway.
There are still areas that I am aware I need to develop. Sales and marketing is still not my strong point. I am happy being loud and opinionated in certain environments, but I need to expand on this and build my confidence in any environment. Perhaps I should take up a weekend job as a door to door salesman or join a theatre troupe? I need to develop more ways of walking up to total strangers and telling them 'this thing I can create or do is epic! You need this in your life! Give me money and I will make it happen!' And I need to specialise more. I have a few general areas that I am good at (two of which I love and cannot live without, another that I don't mind, and one that I've learned through necessity) and lots of things I can do fairly well if required. They sort of overlap in places. I need to perfect those skills and focus on maybe a couple that I can throw all my energy into and profit from.
I now regard my unemployed year as having been a wonderful opportunity to test out my ability as a potential business owner! At the time it was one of the worst experiences of my life, but looking back I think it did me a lot of good. When things go wrong, there is always something to learn from the experience.
In 2007 I was doing pretty well. I had a nice office job working for a property management firm that was only half an hour walk from my house. The pay wasn't terrible for a junior role, and I was only 21 so hadn't yet figured out what I wanted or could do career-wise. The only things I loved were writing books, maths and painting, all of which I was steered away from at school. My previous summer/gap year jobs had mostly involved finance, so getting a permanent role as an accounts clerk was fairly easy. I remember thinking how great it was that my office had a free vending machine where I could get tea, and the library was only a short stroll across the road.
In 2010 the big boss announced that our jobs would now be moving over to India. That summer I was out of work. Just in time for the recession to really hit.
Lesson 1: Ego. Remove.
I collected over 200 rejection emails/letters/calls that year (that doesn't include all the companies that never replied). At 24, to be told unanimously that you are basically crap and unemployable isn't a great feeling. I was barely out of the awkward I-hate-my-face teenager stage. After a few months I had run out of savings, so had to drag my pathetic behind into the job centre and beg for mercy (an experience I hope never to repeat).
It quickly destroyed any preconceptions I had about my own worth and any leftover grammar-school bred entitledness. These days I don't take myself so seriously and never expect automatic favours. I work hard, do the best I can, and have learned not to take it personally if other people don't always respond in a positive way. It has toughened me up. I'm like Lara bloody Croft now (okay, maybe without the humongous bank account and holographic personal butler - although I do have a crazy tech-genius brother and one day I will have that indoor bungee rope. One day!)
Lesson 2: Your parents and teachers are not always right.
Doing well at school, studying hard, getting good grades and regular work experience does NOT guarantee you a job later on. There is no magic formula. Don't be surprised when you discover most of your competitors have all of the above. You need to find a niche. Something you can do better than the majority of your peers.
Lesson 3: Networking.
A term I didn't discover until I got hold of my own computer and started Googling career sites until the early hours of the morning. It's 90% who you know rather than what you know. With most roles not requiring a PhD or equivalent, you can learn the specifics of the job once you're through the door. You just need to get someone on the inside to open the door for you. Which leads me to...
Lesson 4: Self-promotion.
Again, this was new terminology. I hated salesmen. I remember going to a car showroom with a friend as a teenager and getting more and more wound up by the second as this guy in an oddly coloured suit tried to convince my acquaintance to part with his cash for a set of wheels that was far over his budget. And I mostly avoided watching TV due to the annoying commercials that seemed to jump out and smack you in the brain at full volume. I'm a pretty cold, logical sort of person at heart - a bit like a friendly computer. I can very easily switch into character and be the life and soul of the party, but I generally like to be given the facts, when I ask for them, and then left alone to make a decision. Supermarkets irritate the hell out of me with all their epilepsy-inducing strip lights and bright yellow 'HALF PRICE, MOTHER FUCKER' signs everywhere, and that god-awful background music (I'm getting edgy just typing this). That was my idea of sales. I didn't want to be the cause of someone else's misery. Especially not my friends and family. Even the thought of handing someone my CV to pass onto their boss was nauseating.
Basically, I was being too considerate. The harsh truth is that there are billions of people on this planet battling out an existence. You can be friendly and give back to society once you have something to give back. Until then, you do everything you can to pay the bills, get food, and keep a roof over your head so that you aren't dependant on other people's taxes. Most people are too busy with their own lives to consider helping you (bar people like Oprah and Branson, who have clearly made it to the top of the food chain and can now relax occasionally and think about distributing their spare change whilst sipping a G&T). So if you need help then you have to ask for it. I'm now in a position where I can begin to help other people. However, I'm completely wrapped up in my ridiculously busy life and struggle to notice whether I've remembered to eat, let alone who is and isn't happily employed. If someone wants my help then they need to get in my face (literally - I'm fixated on a screen or running chores on auto-pilot most of the day). I'm more than happy to hand copies of CVs to my boss or give someone a fabulous reference, but if someone wants my help then they need to distract me and ask.
Self-promotion also means treating yourself like a business. Advertise your skills and knowledge everywhere you go. Look for places to go. Get yourself to events, gatherings, groups of like-minded people that you can collaborate with, sign up to trade circles and professional forums where you can talk to and learn from people higher up the ladder than you (or perhaps on a different ladder entirely if you want to jump over into a related field). Many of these events have free booze/munchies and the other attendees are generally clever, talented, awesome people! You can't lose.
Lesson 5: The biggest discovery I made - Understanding how and why I work.
Firstly, I am someone who requires routine. Not everyone does. I hadn't realised this until being forced to spend month after month by myself. Without a routine, I go a bit nut-nut. A payroll job forces you to turn up at a fixed location at a set time every day. Everything else in your life gets scheduled around the edges. Because you're in the office until 6pm, the gym has to wait until 6:30pm. Which means you don't eat dinner until 7pm. Then the housework and shopping have to be squeezed into either your lunch break (if you get one) or before work. Which leaves you an hour or so in the evening to study. Add on commuting if you don't live next door. You don't have time to stop and worry about what you should do next. You just attempt to cram in as much as possible when you get the chance. There is a constantly growing 'To-Do List' that never gets completed. You consider yourself lucky if you manage to book a GP or dentist appointment during the week (why do they all seem to be closed outside of office hours?), and you silently curse when someone decides to get married or keel over and die because it means trying to haggle time off during the exact week that all of your colleagues decide to jet off to Majorca. There is no flexibility. High-school and college were pretty much the same. Other people set the schedule and stole the best hours of the day, so you had to fit everything else in the best you could.
I learned that should I ever be in the position to work for myself, my first task will be to plan the year, the month, the week and the day. I'll invest in one of those phones that shouts at you drill Sargent stylee when anything needs doing. If I can get it to yell like the guy in Full Metal Jacket, even better! I will try to schedule the work into the hours where I am most productive (morning/evening) and make sure I can actually get to dentist and GP appointments (my teeth are full of holes and there are several medical things that could have been treated a lot more easily had they not been left to get worse). I had time to catch up with things like that while I was unemployed, but lacked the finances to get things properly fixed, and this has come back to haunt me (surgery is not fun). Routine is my friend. But a routine that I have control over. I now have a routine that benefits my employer. I get a hell of a lot done, but they profit from my work. This needs to change.
The planning thing also applies to the work itself. It bugs me that I'm not able to organise my actual work during office hours. I get there early in a futile attempt at damage control. I start the day with several hundred bits of work that no one in the team has had time to do (through no one's fault - we are just drastically short on staff). I plan to get some of those completed to minimize the number of shouty clients on the phone. There are 23 people in the team and usually 4 of us taking calls. My boss walks in and hands me 3 projects that will take an hour each to complete if I spend all my time on that one task. After an hour, she gives me another project that will take 2 hours minimum to complete. Every few minutes I have calls from angry clients threatening legal/media action if I don't drop everything and sort out their problem. We've been told to prioritise these calls. I also have multiple email accounts that get filled by the minute and other employees walking over to ask questions that I have to stop and answer. Every day the post comes in with hundreds more of the previously mentioned bits of regular work. Around lunchtime my boss will ask if the projects have been done. They rarely are.
The work that does get completed is generally rushed, and I get really irritated at mistakes. I work with money and it needs to be accurate. Some of the work involves very large sums and requires focus. We never get to focus. Constant mega multi-tasking means that errors are constantly made by everyone, which leads to more angry clients. The office needs someone dedicated to just taking calls, but they won't do this. As a result, work either isn't done or is done inaccurately, nothing is organised so we can't give clients any time-lines (which leads to more calls), and everyone is exhausted and getting ill. Staff keep quitting, so we are constantly re-training rather than catching up on the growing backlog of work. Occasionally there will be a meeting where we all sit down, politely freak out over the situation, come up with strategies that take up even more time than the work itself, avoid the major issues of under-staffing and misplacement of existing staff, and start the whole process all over again. So... I've learned that either employed or otherwise, I prefer to have my day at least partly organised in advance if I want to get anything accomplished!
Another related discovery is that my productivity increases in correlation with the amount of guilt I feel about potentially letting people down. I need some sort of outside pressure to really push myself. If self-employed, I would make use of shared office space (or working lunches - I've seen these advertised near by) and join groups where other people hold me accountable for my work. I tested this recently with a few sole traders in my town. We meet up online roughly every fortnight and it makes me want to work harder so that I have something to show them and talk about. There is an additional social benefit to this. I hated being by myself all the time while unemployed. I had no money to go out and no one to talk to at home. The one thing I appreciate about my payroll job is the team itself. I've always been lucky to work with fantastic colleagues, and I would miss the banter. My job changed drastically at the end of last year, so I don't get to socialise much now (except getting yelled at on the phone), but it beats being completely isolated.
Lesson 6: Think outside of the box.
In fact, run far far away from the box. When the obvious option is moved out of your reach, you are forced to reconsider the problem and look elsewhere for answers. During my 'empty year', I took on any job I could to earn extra money - private tutoring, story-boarding for a small production company, offering my Excel skills and sorting out a local business owner's finances (which I could have charged a lot more for in hindsight). I picked up some very useful skills in the process, and discovered there are other ways to earn money outside of a regular payroll job. I went about finding these jobs in completely the wrong way, and wasted a lot of time and energy as a result. But if I lost my job tomorrow then I could probably survive as a freelancer or start my own company if I could get the funding. In fact, I am tempted to do this at some point in the future anyway.
There are still areas that I am aware I need to develop. Sales and marketing is still not my strong point. I am happy being loud and opinionated in certain environments, but I need to expand on this and build my confidence in any environment. Perhaps I should take up a weekend job as a door to door salesman or join a theatre troupe? I need to develop more ways of walking up to total strangers and telling them 'this thing I can create or do is epic! You need this in your life! Give me money and I will make it happen!' And I need to specialise more. I have a few general areas that I am good at (two of which I love and cannot live without, another that I don't mind, and one that I've learned through necessity) and lots of things I can do fairly well if required. They sort of overlap in places. I need to perfect those skills and focus on maybe a couple that I can throw all my energy into and profit from.
I now regard my unemployed year as having been a wonderful opportunity to test out my ability as a potential business owner! At the time it was one of the worst experiences of my life, but looking back I think it did me a lot of good. When things go wrong, there is always something to learn from the experience.
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