Recommit to Healthy Work Boundaries

Have you ever fallen into a rut working so many hours on the job that you exhaust all of your available energy to follow your true dreams and interests? Do you ever feel like a drone living someone else’s life? For the last year, I sure have. This last year tested some boundaries that I am ashamed to admit. But why start there, Let’s go back to the beginning. 

When the pandemic started I took a promotion that I knew would suck but would certainly offer great job security. Of the last four people that held the position, I don’t think one of them lasted more than a year. I was the sixth member to join the small team and was told during the interview that they would continue to hire until the team reached eight souls.

Two weeks later my company announced a hiring freeze. Attrition over the last year knocked my team down to just four. None of these positions were backfilled. Our work is long-cycle and none of the business went away through COVID. On the contrary, it ticked up quite a bit due to the nature of this business. This was difficult because instead of a team of eight we were a team of four with even more work than the steady-state pre-pandemic days. As you can imagine, this was a stressful role.

Boundaries

One of the boundaries that I am not proud of is that I just absorbed all this work and with it, extremely long work hours. Meanwhile, with almost one in six Americans unemployed, I considered myself to be lucky that I had a job. Several of my friends were getting laid off at this time.

I started to get burnt out again. A boundary that I notoriously don’t yield to as often as I should. With so much of the world shut down, I didn’t really feel like I was missing out on anything so I just kept working, and working, and working. Until I realized that I was logging 62 hours weeks for a salaried position with no bonus.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, I have been laid off before so I am alert to the signs that lead to layoffs at my day job. I know I don’t talk about my day job much here and that is because it does not bring me much joy and it won’t be sticking around too much longer with financial independence on the horizon. So I don’t spend much time on what is not positive in my life. However, it is important to know that fact to understand where I am at in my journey to financial independence.

Reality Check

The reality is that I am well above what JL Collins refers to as “F-you money.” In other words, if I lost my job I could live off my assets for three or more years with no felt impact on my spending habits. The reality is that I have more power than I thought. I have enough financial security to take a stance with my employer on the fact that the contract was for 40 hours a week not 62 and if that was the expectation they simply can terminate me.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a very simple concept but a hard one to internalize. And even harder to live out. While I know a few people that have been unemployed for the last year, my reality is that I have many other opportunities to focus on and career paths that I could peruse to finish the last seven years of my working career. To be honest I am far less worried about my financial security at this stage and far more disgruntled about potentially adding a couple of years to my retirement date.

The reality is if I focused 40 hours a week on entrepreneurship perhaps I could cut that timeline in half? or perhaps I could find something I love doing so much I don’t consider it work I consider it a hobby…. Kinda like writing this article, for this blog, on the topic of money and all topics that orbit it. See I told you I had other opportunities. 😉

The Voice Inside

I let my job and the oppressive workload that came with it suck up not only all my productive awake hours, but also my energy, mantel capacity, and desire to achieve. Reflecting back, I realize the opportunity cost of all of that is far greater than the paycheck I received.

For this reason, I have not posted as often as I did pre-pandemic. I let the circumstances shape my outcome, not my commitments. That violates my constitution. That violates my values. That violates the voice deep inside of me. As I have said many times before:

Strong men are defined by their commitments, weak men are defined by their circumstances.

Recommit

I need to return to my commitments. I need to honor the calling I hear from the voice inside to pursue the things that I love in an environment that fits my values around people that I enjoy and care to spend my time with. These crazy hours have to STOP! I have to return to my values! I have to be who God created me to be. I have to stay focus on my internal mission. Otherwise, the mission of my boss, company, or the world around me will overtake my defenses, plan a mission for me, and conquer my soul. I need to stop donating ALL of my productive time to soul-sucking, meaningless work for people that don’t appreciate me, in an environment of opposing corporate values.

I need to recommit to the writing I love and sharing the financial strategies that I know will set others free from their soul-sucking work. I need to get out of this rut! I need to return to the mission I truly believe in. I need to find an expert in breaking free from a rut and get them on the blog to guest post. If I need it there is a good chance followers of this blog need it too.

Where to Start

Ok I know what I have to start with, I have penned thousands of words on the subject and spent hours on stage teaching others about it. If I can do that, perhaps I can teach myself too. It is time for some of my own medicine. One thing that I would like to change, is to take my own advice and break down a big objective into smaller bit size goals. In fact, I gave a speech on that very thing this year at Camp FI South East.


Over the past three years, I have preferred to write longer format articles that I felt were more comprehensive on certain topics. One thing that I learned from my seven article series (so far) on How to Teach Kids About Money, Saving & Investing is that I enjoy shorter format writing and the regularity of posting frequent content. I can certainly make that change going forward.

Life is Messy, Be Messy

The second change I want to make is to be more real, more authentic, and share more. I have gotten some positive feedback on that. One year at FinCon I was telling Mr. 1500 my back story that lead me headlong into FIRE. He encouraged me to post my story and I did. It has become one of my most-read articles to date.

I have to admit, I was terrified of exposing so many personal details and failures to all of my readers and the world wide web but after writing it I felt like a had gotten a lot off my chest. I learned that I can expose myself and not suffer crippling reactions, and rejections, and criticisms. I realized that others can relate to my failures perhaps even more than my successes.

This realization helped me become more personal on my blog. Since then, I have shared more pictures and allowed some personal flavor to overcome the sterile nature of personal finance literature. As you have probably already realized this article is more about my thought process and less about the practical tactical nuts and bolts that are critical to Financial Independence. Don’t get me wrong, there are still thousands of those articles coming, I just am at a point where I don’t care if there are sterilized. I don’t care to avoid flavoring them with my personal styles and struggles anymore. After all, who’s freaking blog is this?

Welcome to the Reintroduction

So in conclusion, welcome! I am reintroducing the more resilient post-pandemic me, along with all the lessons I have learned through the trying times to recommit to my passions and not let my soul get sucked out for the false comfort of job security which I don’t need in the first place thanks to my applications of the financial concepts I have written about over the years right here on this site.

See you soon my friends. Keep the FIRE burning.

P.S. See what I did there, I even changed up my sign-off.