UNITED STATES—There are 24 hours in a given day, well to be exact its only 23 hours and some minutes. For most Americans the notion of having enough time is something that seems incomprehensible. For most of us we spend 8-9 hours working, factor in another 1-2 hours of travel time to and from work, 6-8 hours sleeping, and you only have around 7-8 hours at most to yourself. It might seem like a lot, but in all honestly it’s not. For those of us who work more than one job or who might also be students seeking a higher education, the free time we have is sliced in half even more.

Yes, time is indeed precious, but I wonder why some people don’t consider the importance of other’s people’s time. This is a conversation not just aimed at the importance of family and friends considering other people’s time, but employers who seem ambivalent to other people’s plight. For many Americans, they don’t have the luxury of working from home, and those that do have to be extremely and I mean extremely disciplined to the point that they get things done when they need to get done.

I will bluntly admit the notion of working from home is not easy. I like the idea of going into an actual office to interact with people face-to-face. Yeah, dealing with traffic and the commute to and from work is not always fun, but if a vast majority of Americans deal with it, why shouldn’t I have to. Am I saving some transportation costs, yes, but knowing when my shift ends at this specific time frame that is the end of work is a great feeling. However, when you work from home time is always moving and distractions are always prevalent.

Working both from home and at a physical location presents interesting dynamics where people are always questioning the notion of time and how fast and how slow it moves in certain situations. I mean when you enter the office you know when your shift ends that is IT! You get to go home, anything that wasn’t completed at the office, won’t get completed until you return to the office the next day or during your next shift. When you work from home that is NOT the case, because of that anxiousness of making sure everything is finished always lurks in the back of the mind.

You cannot seem to escape that pressure and no matter how hard you try the sleepless nights, the constant worrying is persistent sometimes. This is absolutely the difficulty of working from home: not knowing when to shut things off, or better yet, how to decipher your personal time from your work schedule. I have grappled with it for years, but the year 2018 has provided so much insight for me. Why? I’ve stopped working when I’m not scheduled to work. Point blank and period, when my shift ends, it ends. That’s it. No more emails, no more phone texts, no more computers, nothing.

I DO NOT have a lot of personal time, and the personal time that I do have I like to utilize that to explore my writing capabilities, the creative ideas floating inside my brain of film ideas and stories that I want to tell. When it comes to work, you sometimes just have to learn how to shut it off. Drop everything, take a moment and breathe, the world will not end if you take a moment to yourself.