We’re driving to Edmonton soon, and that one trip is doing five separate jobs.
Rick has a union meeting on the Saturday. While he’s in that, I’m working my way through a few bookstores and sitting in a good coffee shop, and then we’re going out for a proper dinner. From there we carry on to the coast to see my mom, which is the real point of the whole thing. Rick goes fishing for five days at the start of October. And on the way home we stop in Edmonton again to do the shopping that gets us set for winter, because November is a bad time to discover what you needed.
Five jobs, one trip.
We’re in Northern Alberta, six hours from Edmonton and a good deal further from anywhere else. When the drive costs you the better part of a day at each end, a trip has to earn itself. You don’t go down just for a haircut. You go when there are enough reasons stacked up to justify the road, and then you do all of them while you’re there.
I ran my business the exact opposite way for about fifteen years.
Everything was its own separate trip. One afternoon to write the emails and a different one to think about what to put in them. A call for a question that a voice message would have answered. A system to track the things the other system was already tracking.
Each one was small. None of them looked like the problem.
What was costing me was the road. The getting there and back. Opening the thing, remembering where I’d left it, loading the whole of it into my head again, then putting it down four hours later having moved it slightly.
I never noticed, because I had the energy and capacity for it. That’s most of what I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, in the piece about energy after fifty, and it’s the bit I’d go back and tell my forty-year-old self.
What in your week is a separate trip that doesn’t need to be? What have you got that’s doing one job when it could do three? The email that could also be the blog post. The conversation you’ve had eleven times that could be a recording. The thing you already made, sitting in a folder.
The reason we stack the trip is so we can take fewer of them. Same in the business. Making one thing do three jobs buys back those trips, and the trips were always the expensive part.
One more, which took me longest to learn. Between now and the trip I’m starting nothing big. No new projects. My whole job until we leave is getting things prepped so that when I’m with my mom I’m fully present, enjoying my time with her.
That’s a phase too. Knowing you’re in a get-ready stretch rather than a build-something one is worth as much as knowing what to build.
Something else I’ve been enjoying for the last three months is The Story Post, a monthly snail mail subscription from Amber J Baldwin. Each envelope has a four by six piece of artwork in it, some prompts, a letter, and a few small things that change month to month. So far I’ve had a bookmark, a couple of stickers and some recipes. There is no reason for it beyond the pleasure of it, which I think is the reason. Something in the mailbox that isn’t a bill or a flyer.
And I’m still smitten with my Xteink, a tiny alternative to a Kindle. What’s surprised me is how much more I’m reading, purely because it goes in a pocket or a purse and any spare few minutes turns into a few pages instead of a short doom scroll on my phone.
I’m about halfway through Stoner, by John Williams, on it. It’s a novel about a man living an entirely ordinary life, which sounds like nothing and isn’t. A lot of the readers I follow kept mentioning it, so I picked it up to see what they were seeing. So far I get it.
What are you making a separate trip for?
Life first. Work optional.It’s your business, your energy and your rules.