Someone Else Owns My Schedule
And what I'm doing to take it back
A few days ago, Amazon told its employees to return to the office five days a week.
No exceptions:
Kids,
No kids,
Living close to the office,
Living far,
Having your team on-site,
Having it on the other side of the globe.
Now, a friend of mine works at Amazon.
In our conversations, he often praised the remote setup he benefits from—one of the many perks of working for the tech giant.
After the recent news, that same friend is now planning his way out.
All things considered, though, he’s not in a huge rush to leave: he doesn’t have kids and only needs to provide for himself.
However, he knows colleagues who are in a very different position:
Some have kids and will now need to scramble to find childcare options (and prepare to say goodbye to $$$ every month).
Some will have to relocate to the nearest Amazon office.
Others, like him, will be paradoxically required to go to the office five days a week while their entire team… is based on the other side of the world.
That is, of course, unless they decide to leave.
Core values as a guide to your lifestyle and career
I’ve talked before about how I came to understand my core values.
Some of them changed slightly over time or depending on different phases of life.
Others might change in their focus, but not in essence (read on to see what I mean).
I also mentioned before that my first core value is freedom (in case you hadn’t picked that up from the name of this newsletter! ), also known as independence or autonomy.
This value guides all my actions, especially in how I approach my lifestyle and plan my career.
So, a few days ago, I came across a doodle I had scribbled months ago while reflecting on my career and the elements that compose it:
I envisioned it as a Divine Comedy-style tower made of concentric circles, with each layer representing a combination of passion for the job and the need for independence or flexibility.
To comfort myself about the progress I was making, I decided to start from the very bottom: having NO job at all—an uncomfortable position many of us (myself included) experience at some point in life.
The top represents the ideal balance of passion and flexibility, which, for me, coincides with having a portfolio career.
The layers in between are made up of jobs under employers where, just like in the case of Amazon, your flexibility is entirely at their mercy and could suddenly change at any point.
When I mentioned above that some core values “might change in focus, but not in essence,” I meant that when I first realized that freedom was of utmost importance to me years ago, my focus was on obtaining as much as I could through remote employee jobs that allowed me to work from wherever.
Nowadays, while I still inhabit those in-between layers, my focus is evolving toward understanding how to achieve the top layer: a portfolio career.
The steps I’m taking to regain ownership of my schedule
This week, I spent a lot of time offline.
I attended four different networking events here in NYC.
Well, they weren’t the typical networking events where you swim in an ocean of random fish.
One was an in-person event for generalists like myself, another was a conference on topics I studied in my Master’s, the third was organized by an Italian community here in the City, and the last was related to an area I’m experimenting with to determine whether I want to pursue it further or not.
“That’s a whole lot of socializing!” you might think.
And you wouldn’t be wrong!
By Thursday, I had a bit of a sore throat from all the talking, and if that wasn’t enough, I had a weekend full of celebrations awaiting me for my 30th birthday! (30s, I don’t fear you!)
It was tiring, I admit, but at the same time incredibly energizing!
But what’s the point of all this?
Lately, I've come to realize that I'm nowhere near figuring out which skills I want to build my portfolio career—and ultimately, my future freedom—around.
This realization confirms what I began to suspect last year, during my six-month career break.
Therefore, I have now decided to undertake a “market research”-type of endeavor:
until the end of the year, my focus will be on talking to interesting people, understanding what they do, reflecting on how I would like that and whether it aligns with my strengths, and running small experiments—testing hypotheses to eliminate options and progressively narrow down my choices.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
And if you’re interested in staying updated on this pursuit or if you’re on a similar journey yourself, let me know in the comments!
Before we wrap up, here are some writers and articles that have served as reference points for me over the last few weeks:
- and, in particular, her article ‘Get comfortable operating in the grey’;
- who is on a journey similar to mine, but further along. I loved reading her reflections and following her progress, particularly in ‘Shaping My Portfolio Career’;
- and her inspiring approach to writing and ‘change’ in general, as outlined in ‘Goodbye, counting subscribers.’
That’s all from me this week. I’ll e-see you soon!
Yours,
Caterina
What amazing post, Caterina. "Regain ownership of my schedule", "Regain ownership of my schedule", "Regain ownership of my schedule", I will repeat it as a mantra until it happens. I definitely I am no the same now that I was before reading it.
Happy birthday! I look forward to you sharing your research :)