Out of sync

I've been out of my routine lately, which makes me anxious.

The disruptions have all been good: Vacation travel to Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, and getting my son David packed and moved to New York City for graduate school at Columbia University.

All good things.

And yet I'm unsettled.

I think that's what happens when you're your own boss.

I had high expectations of others to fulfill their responsibilities and meet their deadlines when I worked as a manager in newspapers. I have that same expectation of my employee -- me -- now that I'm working for myself.

I had been a Type A personality all through my work life.

My hope after retiring from newspapers a couple of years ago was that maybe I'd downgrade a bit -- to a Type B+, or at worst a Type A-. But I'm still locked in as a Type A -- feeling at times anchored to a set schedule.

Gone are the paid vacations. It's pretty simple math for a freelancer. If you don't work, you don't get paid.

So the trick was to fit some kind of a work schedule into the loosely structured vacation schedule. It was a little bit like a square peg in a round hole, but if you put enough effort into it you can actually get the square peg a bit into the round hole.

I was up before everyone else to do some work. When some of the crowd went shopping at the outlets, I passed and did some work. (For the record: I'll always take a pass on shopping as a vacation activity.) In the couple of hours between the beach and dinner, I'd sneak in some work time.

The other thing you can do when you're pressed for time in a disrupted schedule is just shorten each task.

That said: Talk to you next week, schedule permitting.