What is your occupation where you get paid to work only on what feels right, only when it feels right, for only as long as it feels right, with leeway to hop on your bicycle and forget about work whenever you want?
Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.
allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come."
Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now, unless I goofed up while fiddling with nginx.
Before that I was a contractor for a year or two. After seeing contracting colleagues disappear for months-long vacations, I wanted in on that.
Before that I was a regular employee in Europe, where work culture is far more relaxed. I had more vacation days as an intern than my parents in the home country ever had. I also became really good at aggressively cutting meetings for me and my team, which gave us more time to experiment without affecting output.
In Germany, you also have the right to reduce your work hours. Coincidentally, that's the article I'm currently working on.
There's a minimum number of frogs that you have to eat. Mine is very low out of sheer luck. However there are different ways to bring most people's number down, starting with don't glorify eating frogs.
Affiliate links on things an immigrant needs during their journey. There's enough genuine demand to skip the sales pitch entirely. The quality of the advice gives the rare product recommendations a lot of weight.
That is a great website. Very well thought out and actionable. That model can surely be replicated for other arenas. You have actually thought about what people need and given an easy way to find it. Big props for that!
Intersting. I am also a remote software engineer, but either working "feels right" a lot less for me than for you, and I feel like spending time outside riding my bike a lot less than you, or my employer is a lot less tolerant of taking the day off to ride my bike because work just didn't feel right.
I am curious how many hours a day/week you work, and if you are open about this with your employer...
I wouldn't say that I'm taking my day off to go ride my bike without telling anybody, but I would say that working from home affords me flexibility to, say, take a few hours to get a massage, go work out, or take my time making lunch.
I make sure I'm aligning my personal technical interests with the kinds of projects I work on for the company, so work feels more like a fun puzzle to solve rather than slogging through tedium. Generally I don't work late into the evenings, but sometimes a problem is really just that fun to solve, and I enjoy spending time on it. Other times, projects may be less interesting, so I work fewer hours, letting myself rest. Burnout is real, and it sucks, and I avoid it at all costs.
My employer really just cares that I get my work done, not how many hours it takes to do it. If I'm getting "meets all" or "exceeds" in my yearly ratings, then I'm meeting or exceeding their standard, and we're both happy.
I have a similar schedule, although a slightly more organized. I try to be available from 9 to 4, atleast through emails if I'm not in my office, because that's when other people also work and might need me. I often leave mid-day to go running or come in late because I went bouldering in the morning. If I don't feel inspired to write or work, I often instead go for a walk and read books tangentially to my research topics. Then some days I'll work 12 hours straight.
I mostly work when it feels right, yes, and do something else when it doesn't. But I am doing my PhD and (in Canada) it absolutely does not pay enough to live comfortably.
Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.