A few words about a kind and caring company

I’m really grateful that my company allows us to work from home more often. It’s so convenient to not have to worry about getting in to the office if I have an appointment or a lot of errands to run one day. Another aspect of working from home is having the opportunity to tie up loose ends if needed outside of regular work hours. This takes a lot of stress off of my shoulders, but doesn’t put unnecessary pressure on me to work during my free time at home.

One thing I worried about when I first started working for this company and began to take advantage of the work from home policy was that I’d feel obligated to complete tasks once I got home at the end of the day. I didn’t want to feel that I couldn’t leave work at work, and it hasn’t been a problem at all. I don’t feel any pressure to be working all the time; in fact, I feel more organized and comfortable with my job because I can be flexible with my hours, to an extent.

The reason I’m writing about this is because late last week, my family decided to put down my childhood dog. It was devastating. My extremely accommodating and understanding manager agreed that I could work from home for the morning on Friday. If my company didn’t have this policy, I would’ve taken the day off. But I was able to get some work done and also take my mind off of things for awhile. I can’t explain how appreciative I am of of my company.

I’m so lucky to be working at a job I enjoy with plenty of opportunities for growth and development, and with such caring managers. How about you, readers, do you work for a caring company?

A one year anniversary

Today I’m reflecting on a one year anniversary. On June 12, 2017 I became a full-time employee at my night job (although I had to pass a 30-day trial period). It’s amazing how quickly the year has flown by and how different my outlook has become. Prior to becoming full-time at work, I had never spent a long period of time working 40 hours or more per week. Those hours were often seasonal and tied to the holidays or summer. Periods right after the holidays and in the spring were often quite lean. To make up the gap in pay I often worked two jobs, sometimes with freelance work on the side. (That’s how I originally met Karen.) Until last year I began to doubt that I would ever work for a single company and bring home a sustainable wage.

Making the transition from part-time to full-time was actually more difficult than I imagined. First, I had to get used to not being able to leave early on some evenings. That meant balancing out my free time each day. Naturally, some days were more productive than others. Ultimately, the routine work schedule was a stabilizing force, as I knew when I had to be at the job and when I could expect to leave. The second hardest part was waiting for my vacation time to return. It is not easy to go from four weeks of vacation time to none for about a year. To fill in the gaps I took paid days off, which helped a lot.

More importantly than time off, was the fact that I had to play catch up on all the years I went without having a full-time wage. That meant saving extra money for retirement, filling up the savings accounts for emergencies, and paying off unnecessary debt. While I’m on the right track with savings, it will be a while before my unnecessary debts are paid off. Although doing so now is better than never getting started. Ultimately, I’m grateful for the opportunity to work full-time.

 

Have you ever been in a situation where you had given up hope on becoming a full-time employee?

Kalender 2018 mit Kugelstift und Laptop by Marco Verch of Flickr

Time to celebrate! (Almost)

Coming up next month is a big-to-me event: I’ll be turning 30! I went back and forth with myself about whether or not I would write a post about this big birthday milestone, but why not? I’ve talked to some people that said they dreaded turning 30 and others who celebrated it. I identify with the latter group; I’m so ready to be out of my 20s. I think because by the time I turned 28 and then 29, I felt like I was moving forward in different ways than I was in my 20s. I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’m really getting to know myself and what I like, don’t like, what my dreams are, and how I can work to achieve them. Someone recently told me that she believes a person really gets to know and understand themselves in their 30s, and I’m already starting to feel some of that.

I’ve always been pretty shy and quiet but within the past few years I’ve slowly been gaining more self-confidence and a sense of authority on some things. I don’t feel uncomfortable speaking up at my job anymore; I’ll have been here for 3 years in August (I can’t believe it!), so I feel that I have the right to speak from at least a little bit of experience! I’ve also been making new friends through work and through my other friends. I have a few close friends from growing up, high school, and college that I treasure, and I’m able to make friends with whole new and different groups of people. Not that I couldn’t do that in my early 20s, but I feel as though I’m cultivating deeper, longer lasting friendships now.

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed recently is that I’m completely comfortable with how I spend my time. Maybe one night I come home after work and want to do nothing–that’s okay! I can sit in my sweatpants, eat dinner, and stare at mindless TV all night if I want. Or, what if on Saturday I want to run around doing errands, hanging out with friends, and more from the minute I wake up until the minute I go to sleep? That’s okay too! I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything or trying to be someone I’m not. That feeling, probably more than any other, is so liberating: I’m becoming me.

I’m excited for what’s ahead and I can’t wait to start this next decade with all of you, dear readers!

Source.

Initiative and success

Nearly a month ago I wrote about wanting to finish some personal projects before taking my vacation in June. A huge goal of mine was to update my gaming blog by doing a lot of work on the back end. The work included updating the about pages, creating a small newsletter, auto-posting to the Twitter account, creating an inbox everyone could access, and opening up the Discord server to the public. Each step of the project came with surprise setbacks, but I was determined to stop procrastinating.

The first project was updating the about pages. It had been a process I put on the backburner for years—seven to be exact. Needless to say, the original bios that had been emailed to me were lost to time. Fortunately because we made the switch from staff e-mail chains to Discord, communicating my need for new or updated bios was incredibly easy. I also took suggestions on how to improve the pages (such as official titles) as I updated.

My biggest goal was to update the blog’s Twitter account. As it stood, the account was little more than an RSS feed that updated once a day. I sought out a way to push out older, but still relevant posts so they could be seen more than once. While many paid services could provide me with a content queue, it made no sense to implement on a venture that doesn’t generate income. Ultimately, I found a plugin called Revive Old Posts. The plugin originally didn’t work despite following the instructions and suggested solutions. Occasionally I could trigger a manual update. After fighting with it, I made some tweaks to the WordPress code the auto-updates started to flow. My persistence had finally paid off.

The rest of the updates (the newsletter and opening the Discord server to the public) fell into place pretty easily. All and all, it feels good to scratch a big to-do item off the list. If I keep this pace up my list will be mostly done before my vacation.

 

When was the last time you scratched a big item off your to-do list?

WordPress by Cristian Labarca of Flickr