Time and Tide Wait for No One

As a human, time is our most precious, non-renewable, and valuable resource. How should we use it? How are we saving it, spending it, what do it cost me? How am I valuing it? I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned in the last decade; time plays a role in all.

Somehow in my adolescence I got mixed up with the kind of Christian books that made me sure I’d be a martyr before 20. I’m not quite so focused on certain death as I once was, but I know time, specifically as a limitation and along with death, are abstractions that imbue life with its value. With that happy thought in mind, some reflection on how and why I budget time as I have and do. (*Hopefully minus any sort of didactic tone or preachiness about how any reader who may happen upon these ideas should follow my lead. Any advice found here is completely by accident.)

Work I: Beginner

I love to work. I’ve been working since I was five. I set up an art show of studies in wax crayon and construction paper in the family driveway, telling my parents I was going to help them pay down the mortgage. I was a babysitting cottage industry in my teens, a hairdressing master in my 20s, a teacher in my 30s; I’ve balanced heavy academic loads with work schedules, such as teaching full-time while completing both a Master’s degree and a Diploma program; I love a side hustle, and I have at only rare intervals had a single job at a time; at least two and some contract work is my usual and my preference.

I didn’t know anything about money, and have never been great with math, along I’ve come a long way. As a teenage babysitter, I took what I was given. I usually made between five and ten dollars an hour. I booked appointments myself, usually through my family’s landline or by agreement at the end of a shift, until I received a Nokia cellphone in Grade 10 as a Christmas present. I bought minutes and could have three voicemail messages at a time. Sometimes I was so busy I had to hand off daytime hours or jobs to my sister. I’d book overnights, weekends, and even weeks at a time as I got older. I had fun, always choosing to play with the kids instead of just ‘watching’ them: we’d bake, do experiments, build forts play outside, and get into all kinds of activities. I learned to tidy as we went and tried as much as I could to leave the houses cleaner than I’d found them, doing dishes, folding laundry, and putting toys away before watching tv after the kids went to bed. I loved having my own money, and saved enough to travel during my summers when I wasn’t working or at camp, exploring within Western Canada and going to Scotland at 15.

In high school, I worked after school and Saturday shifts at a dry cleaner’s. I folded bedding to be sent back to northern work camps and hotels, washed, steamed, pressed, bagged, tagged, and weighed along with working the cash register. The owners have been to this day some of the best examples of how to run a business and take care of staff that I have seen and experienced. They’d bring A&W breakfast sandwiches in on early wintery Saturdays, keep the coffee pot full, help out with the labor to keep things running smoothly; they were steady and kind, they encouraged potlucks and celebrations and always contributed. They offered feedback and raises regularly. There was always music playing in the background, and when the menopausal ladies had to run out of the steamy laundry and into the snow to cool their hot flashes, they wouldn’t bat an eye. In return, they had our loyalty. I remember having not gone to bed the night before due to a party in my Grade 12 year, yet rolling in, sleepy, sober, and driving a borrowed vehicle, to start my 8AM shift on time.

Work II: Novice

In my early twenties before I began teaching, I was a hairdresser. I worked hard in hair school, and invested extra time in practice, classes, styling friends’ hair with new techniques and tools. I was only 17; I would style everyone up, then drop them off and pick them up from the big-city bar scene. I learned to drive in the city at three in the morning on empty streets in other people’s vehicles. I had been planning to stick around, but the need to escape a drug-addicted roommate situation and ultimately missing my far-away family led to me following my parents and siblings to Yellowknife. The hard work of hair school had paid off, and I went to work at my first choice salon after interviewing everywhere I’d dropped off my resume. There was a ton of work in Yellowknife, too many people and not enough hairdressers. I loved it, and I had been super fortunate to have been offered continuing education. That had been a major selling point based on advice offered by my instructors, and I ended up with highly-skilled mentors who educated for top-tier product lines and invested in their own career-long learning journeys. They hosted workshops, spent time training me, and we traveled to Calgary, Edmonton, and Las Vegas for education events. I grew my skills exponentially, built a full clientele in months, including a host of delightful and wealthy diamond mine wives, business owners, government muckety-mucks, pilots, and a host of other people from our local area as well as those coming through from fly-in communities. I even had an exotic dancer client who was fiercely loyal to my coloring and who booked an appointment every time she came up for a performance ‘locum’ at Harley’s, just like the doctors and dentists who would fly up to the communities for weeks at a time. I was fearless, experimental, and learned to talk and connect with all kinds of people as much as I did how to do everything else.

A few years in, the work stopped feeling challenging. I hung around as long as I could, enjoying the relationships and creativity, but eventually tackled a major move and a new professional challenge. I moved to Medicine Hat, started at the college, and took up part time retail work. At the time, I needed a break from hairdressing, and I was mourning my clients and the shift in opportunity in the south compared to the north. I hadn’t finished my Journeyman’s certifications, and so I took shifts first at a shoe store and then a clothing store. They were by far the absolutely WORST jobs I’ve ever had. I resented my time spent there, doing mindless tasks and trying on clothing for creeps who swore I was the same size as their wife or daughter, and ended up quitting. I learned to live frugally, not wanting to return to such horrible workplaces and enjoying the cheap fun with friends and checking my credit card balance obsessively.

Work III: Apprentice

Not long after I began teaching, a neighbouring province’s teachers took job action, or maybe had job action imposed on teachers during contract negotiations. While I can’t now recall exactly which side this pressure came from, I understood that teachers in this location would be given only 15 minutes at the start and 15 minutes at the end of their instructional days in which to plan, prepare, mark, construct, contact, and all the other tasks charged to teaching professionals. Thirty minutes a day maximum. As a new teacher, I had spent my first years living in my classroom: weekends, evenings, lunch hours, early mornings – I was there all the time – and even when I was home I was thinking, making, marking, learning, planning, and organizing entirely in service of this mammoth undertaking that was and is teaching teenagers English language arts and how to communicate and navigate the world.

I had worked like a maniac to become the best I could be as quickly as possible, and I was just starting to understand that if I didn’t set boundaries, nobody else would do that for me either. I had been so fortunate and worked so hard, had four different contracts in my first year with the final one the coveted permanent contract. I never said a word: I didn’t want to brag, knowing that some of my friends from school or work were in very different positions and would wait years for the coveted permanent contract, the professional achievement and the luxuries it would bring. Most hadn’t also left a career and traded the paycheque I had had for the benefits and long-term investment I now valued. I built, gained, experienced, established, invested, and earned, and been gifted incredible opportunities as a teacher, for which I am grateful. And yet, it continues to be a profession that will take everything and more if I was willing to allow this drain to happen. I was not; I wanted a longer career than I could have if I continued to teach like I was on fire.

I took that 30 minute timeframe and used it to determine what was important to do and what could wait or be left behind entirely. I became a time management master: I would work through lunch, and sometimes until four, but I learned to rarely then never take work home in the evenings or on weekends. Learning not to check emails after leaving work came later but was no less important. I learned to do less and have students do more, find ways to tighten my planning and marking processes and invest time where it would be most valuable. I’d mark for the skills we were working on, streamline my comments, and use voice notes; I learned to write skill-based comments I could copy and paste, and then add a small personalization; I learned to frontload feedback then assign a grade at the end that was reflective of what had been developed. I continue to learn how to write as short as possible yet warm emails – the struggle for me in this area is REAL.

I love that anecdote about the roast: a daughter makes a Sunday roast just as her mother always did; the mother asks the daughter why her roast is cut into two pieces. The daughter discovers her mother only did that to make the meat fit her roasting pan. I think there are a lot of things in life like this. In this decade, I learned to question. Is this the best way to do that? What can be accomplished here?

Work IV: Journeyman

In the middle of my post-secondary studies, I took a three-year break. This isn’t perhaps everyone’s normal, and I’m sure there were people who thought I’d failed out or come back out of inadequacy. I knew I was two years into Education, a year into a Business Marketing Diploma, and nowhere near sure of any of my choices anymore. I moved back to Yellowknife instead of continuing to burn through my Student Finance Assistance (granted to me by merit of my northern living residency, and more money than I should have ever borrowed for school). I started back where I’d worked before, but moved on to newer pastures in the city after watching baseboards fall off the walls, color supplies run short, and clients leave without products they’d wanted to purchase because the owners stopped doing inventory and ordering.

I moved to a beautiful location. The only problem was, I’d been studying philosophy and art history and advertising; now I listened to a coworker talk about the stellar results she had cleaning her windows with vinegar. I was having mostly authentic, meaningful conversations, but that was not everyone’s choice. My clients were incredible, almost all followed me during the move, but I still struggled to settle back into a life I thought I’d moved on from.

At this point, I’d lived long enough to understand the value of money and the way it can be traded for time. I wanted to work to my full potential and really earn myself some freedom. I wanted to be prepared for when I finally figured out what it was that I wanted to do next. I re-sharpened my skills, and regained speed and precision. I started booking more clients, cutting appointments from an hour to 45 minutes because I could, and because I could then fit in more clients. I was booking three to six months in advance and charging top dollar for incomparably polished work. I specialized in everyday glamor, beautiful polish, and lifestyle-matched my clients’ styles to make sure they looked great for as long as they needed. Eventually, I saw a new maximum for my month, and worked hard to make it over that hill.

The month I knew I would hit ten thousand dollars in service sales, I asked my boss and the owner for a bonus. I wanted an extra five percent commission on months I hit this target. I made my case, incomparable to any other employee’s sales, and made it clear that I knew the value of my professional services and contribution to her business. And then… nothing. In my first ten thousand dollar month, she wrote on my pay stub: “Wow, congratulations! Employee of the month, haha!”. I did it again the following month, and she wrote, “Wow, employee of the month two months in a row!”. And then I never did it again.

I knew I would never be valued by this person as I should be valued. I understood that she did not understand business, and did not know how to take advantage of what I was able to accomplish and do. Instead of hiring a dedicated apprentice or shampoo girl for me so I could continue increasing services, she had her manager ask me to stop double-booking clients. Instead of celebrating and honoring my work with financial incentive, she bad-mouthed me to other staff. Instead of helping me navigate the glass ceilings and finding new ways to innovate, she made me so uncomfortable in the ways I was treated that I knew it was time to get out. I made my choice to leave, and was the first of all the staff to go. The salon closed permanently within a few years of my exit, certainly not due to my own exodus, but perhaps related to the way this kind of leader thought about and valued the business’ human ASSETS.

Play

So now: how shall I use my time? Where do I save, where to spend, what am I willing to pay? How am I valuing it?

Now that I know how much is possible to accomplish in the time I have, I cannot go back. I’ve loved work since I began, it is my constant companion and a driving force. But my motivation today is very different. While it’s never really been about the money for me (see my career choices), the value of what I am creating and accomplishing is invaluable. I have always worked to achieve what I know to be invaluable ends and worthy investments.

At the top of my second career, I know I have a lot of choice. And I do mean the top – I create materials and develop items for the province; I mark and assess at the provincial level with PATs and Diploma exams; I teach and present to teachers across the province and have even entered the national space; I participate in influential committees and processes; I revolutionize and reimagine – I’ve achieved every goal and lofty dream I’ve had in this profession.

At the same time, that old song and dance that is ‘but you have summers off’ is wearing thin as my classrooms burst with learners and my paycheck grows brittle and inflexible. We are in an unprecedented province-wide teachers strike, Tuesday of Week 3 after all – there are many reasons 89% of teachers are calling for change and support. It’s hard to stomach the rhetoric, assumptions, and hateful language that has been pouring out.

It’s hard to feel valued in a bottomless, infinite-game style of career. While I believe in investment for every single learner and teach in public school because of the ways I have benefitted from its accessibility and strength, I’ve never assumed I’d be in public service for my entire professional life. For me, even going into education the second time in university, a decade or so always looked like it would be enough time spent serving the public.

Work V: Master

Change is difficult, but I’ve learned so much about the value of work from so many experiences and impactful bosses. Sometimes I learned what to do, sometimes I learned what not to do. And all along, I’ve learned about the ways I want to value others and make them feel valued. I’ve learned about the ways I want to be valued myself. I’ve learned about the valuing that I will and will not accept from others.

What I’m learning is that I must love the process, not the product, of what it is that I’m doing. Personally and professionally, I’m most alive when staking out new territory. The process for me now IS the product – whatever I produce, the place that I live is in the time it takes to produce it, not the product itself. I’m not entirely sure what this will mean for my future plans and undertakings. But I know that understanding this has made me more aware of and grateful for the learning experiences I’ve had under and with so many leaders, bosses, and trainers. Those old maxims and and adages really are true: the journey IS the destination.