Why you shouldn’t quit your day job to work on that big project

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The fact that you already have a full-time job may not be a good enough reason to delay working on your Big Thing. You really need to stop and determine whether you are pulling one over on yourself with that well-worn excuse.

Consider the following examples of people who managed to thrive creatively while holding down day jobs. Some needed the jobs for the money, and some didn’t. Some of the jobs were in similar fields as their creative work, some in completely different ones.

Franz Kafka worked full-time for an insurance company and wrote at night in his cramped apartment when the rest of his family was asleep. He had wanted to find a job that demanded as little as possible of his time and energy, but through overconscientiousness wound up taking his work more to heart than he had planned.

But that was not all bad. “Kafka’s job, while imposing an onerous routine, also provided a structure and status on which he came to depend for a large measure of identity and self-respect,” his biographer Ernst Pawel writes. His job also gave him firsthand exposure to the mindless bureaucracy that he explored with such brilliance in The Trial and The Castle.

For some reason, the insurance industry has attracted other creative giants. The poet Wallace Stevens worked at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company from the age of thirty-six until his death. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life.” It also meant he didn’t have to worry about money. The composer Charles Ives was also a high-earning executive in the insurance industry.

Albert Einstein worked in the Swiss Patent Office while coming up with the theory of relativity. The poet William Carlos Williams was a medical doctor. Joseph Heller worked in advertising. The list goes on.

Where did they find the time? Often by establishing a routine and also by exploiting the interstices in their lives. Anthony Trollope, author of forty-seven novels, wrote for three hours in the morning, starting at five thirty, while also holding down a demanding job as a surveyor for the post office. He had to travel extensively by rail for his job and at first spent that time reading, “but if I intended to make a profitable business out of my writing, and, at the same time, do my best for the Post Office, I must turn these hours more to account,” he wrote in his autobiography. He wrote most of Barchester Towers on the train: “My only objection to the practice came from the appearance of literary ostentation, to which I felt myself subject when going to work before four or five fellow passengers.”

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Trollope was no slouch at his day job. He worked hard to improve mail efficiency wherever he traveled or was stationed, and is credited with introducing the freestanding postbox to Britain. Still, it would be nice not to have to work. Think of how much time you could spend on what really matters. Then again, maybe not.

I finally started writing a book for real when I had a full-time job. Over and over, I heard from people that constraints were important to getting a Big Thing done. My day job performed that service for me. In my mind I saw the open spots in my day and my week, and I knew I had to work on the book during some of those times. Time constraints gave me energy and focus.

There were drawbacks, though. In the morning I got up and wrote words, and when I went to work I edited and wrote words, and sometimes I had to write my own words for work and then go home and write words or read them for the book. Words, words, words—it was too much!

At the same time, I had never written a nonfiction book before, and it was much harder and different than writing or editing an article. Some of my editorial work for the Times had been off-loaded to my brain’s habit circuits, but that was not the case for writing a book.

Wikimedia CommonsAs research has shown, we only have a limited amount of willpower, and it becomes depleted whether we use it on our day job or our Big Thing, or something else like family responsibilities.

When I worked on the book for two hours in the morning, I could get things done at my job if they were not too demanding. But if I had a particularly challenging day at the office—if I had to write an article or seriously rework a long article I was editing—I could feel my productivity suffer.

Similarly, if I hadn’t written at all in the morning (which was common enough) I seldom made up for it in the evening if I’d had a strenuous day at work.

As the final deadline approached, I was able to take one month off from my job—two weeks’ leave and two weeks’ vacation—to work solely on this book. I felt I needed a break from living so intensely in two worlds at once.

I had an image of how this would play out. I would get up, have my coffee, write or do interviews for two hours, take a lunch break, work for one hour, take a nap, then work for one more hour, and take the evening off as a reward. That seemed like a reasonable schedule that even I could follow. That, however, is not what happened.

It’s true that I did get up every morning and have my coffee, and I did take a nap almost every afternoon. And if I had made commitments to call or meet people, of course I followed through on those. But otherwise I almost never started working until about seven in the evening, and then I worked for two or maybe three hours. Before then I did things like read mysteries, watch The Young and the Restless after a ten-year hiatus (Victor was still up to his tricks), pace around the apartment, drink wine at 1 p.m., and go out for a late lunch or an early dinner.

So given my druthers, I learned, I prefer to work in the evening. It’s what I had already tended to do on the weekends. Nightfall, apparently, is a kind of deadline enforcer for me. I did get somewhat more work done when I was on my leave—and I had much more energy at night after a day spent lollygagging instead of working in the office. But the huge wads of time I now had oppressed me—more time to be lazy meant more time to feel guilty, too. By the end of my weeks off, I was craving the structure of the office. It was actually a relief to return to work and see that I had just a limited time in the morning, a limited time at night, and the weekends, to get my work done.

From THE BIG THING by Phyllis Korkki Copyright © 2016 by Phyllis Korkki. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

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