My alter-egos hard at work. Yes, it’s the same stage!
Oh hello there, it’s been a while. Life is a funny thing, and recently I had some time to consider mine and make some changes, so here’s a quick update on what’s been going on.
Why you no blog no more?
After my last blog post in the spring of 2018, my life picked up speed quite suddenly but not in the conference space. I found myself spending more and more of my spare time on other projects, so I trimmed down my conference travel in the name of well-being and work-life balance.
Since this blog was mainly used for conference recaps, I simply didn’t have that much stuff to update. I do have to mention my keynote at DjangoCon Europe 2019, which was a wonderful honor to share knowledge and inspire people who inspired me in my open-source journey!
But where in the world are you?
Besides working and traveling, I dedicated a good chunk of time this year to settling down more in Prague, trying to make it my home. Back in June of this year, I finally got an opportunity to go to the next level when I received my permanent residence in Czech Republic.
Aside from the obvious relief of having unlimited residence in my favorite country and continent, the biggest impact was that I am no longer required to have a full-time job in order to maintain my residency.
Why does this matter? In the last few years I’ve been trying to improve my internal “burnout detector” so that I don’t end up crashing again, and I realized that now that my residence no longer depends on employment, I can finally make a change that I was never able to make before:
As of next week, I’ll be reducing my Red Hat job to 3 days per week. My work days will be Tuesday-Thursday, and Mondays/Fridays will be freed up to pursue other projects.
So what’s your life going to look like now?
I’ll still continue my Write the Docs conference work, and whatever time I won’t spend on Red Hat or Write the Docs, I will be mostly dedicating to music, which has grown enough to be considered an actual part-time job, rather than a time-consuming hobby.
And as the great poet said, “I’m not dead yet!”. If you want to invite me to give a talk or a workshop at your conference, please do ask me. I can’t promise I’ll say yes, but I definitely want to stay involved in open-source communities, as much as my time and sanity allows.
I’m excited about this experiment - for the first time in my adult life, I won’t have a full-time job as a focal point, and I’m curious to explore this type of balance. I hope this way I can keep investing in all my beloved projects while gaining more free time to relax (something else that I’ve been practicing).
Managing work-life balance is a skill that I have to practice all the time, because the underlying personality traits and environmental forces that drove me to my previous burnout will always be there. But I can see improvement over time, which is very encouraging!
I’ll blog here as often as I get inspired, but know that I’m alive and well and working all the time towards a more peaceful and joyous existence.
Stay healthy, folks! Take care of yourselves, you deserve it.
Yours,
-That Docs Lady