Pyjamanating

Yesterday was busy. In one area I hope to have secured some paid work for at least 5 days a month homeworking, and I applied to a neighbouring borough to teach a couple of short courses. These are likely to be just 2 hours a week each, probably at weekends or evenings. Another one I was hoping to land has yielded nothing but silence so far.

On the whole I’m feeling quite pleased with the way my ‘portfolio career’ might be shaping up. Of course it’s very insecure, and there will be times when I despair but at the moment I’ve never been more sure that this is the right time to cast myself fully adrift into the freelance world.

P minus Four and counting…

Yesterday my journey to work was abandoned. I travelled all the way to� an interconnecting Underground station� before being informed that the service was suspended for the rest of the day. So I hummed and haahhd for a little while, jumped on and off another train then decided to give up and go home.

Then I had to negotiate a refund of the automatic penalty fare taken off my Oyster card credit for having an “uncompleted Journey” !!

I won’t miss being a commuter one little bit!

From Loompanics Unlimited

The Job Culture isn’t just jobs, work, and business institutions. It’s a comprehensive way of life in which millions of people place institutional paid employment at the center of their world.

�What do you do?� is immediately understood to mean, �What kind of paid employment do you have?�

In the Job Culture, family life, recreation, deep personal interests, and desires all must be structured around and subordinated to The Job.

Even things like how we eat (fast foods), how we spend our leisure time (TV, shopping) and how we save for a rainy day (investing in stocks and bonds) are dictated by a culture of job holding and corporate institutions.

Our conversations, our holidays, our dress, our choice of neighborhood, choice of vehicle, health-care options, and a thousand other things are all dictated by one central force: The Holy Job.

This is normal? No, this is whacko. This is not the way human beings evolved to live.

I applied for a part time, home-based content editing job today. It’s on a topic which I’m passionate about, has a lot of relevence to this pyjamanating project, and requires skills that are right up my street. So this could suit me down to the ground.

There’s just one tiny little snaggette….

But hopefully the potential employer will be broad minded enough to see it as an opportunity to take the site beyond any perceived restrictions. There could be some interesting business to be made between us.

21/7/07 is now the official date on which I begin working from home. It seems to have come around very quickly, but couldn�t be a day too soon.

This phase is going to be a bit like being thrown in at the deep end, without any really firm engagments or safety net but it�s also kind of transitional, in that I�ll be applying for some kinds of work that would still be based in physical locations in and around London, UK. Just as long as they are either (1) helping me to survive and (2) moving me in the right direction.

Oh yes, and everything I do towards the goals is going to be recorded, diarised and published though the use of 43things and the Pyjamanating blog

See more progress on: work from home

In fourteen days time I will quit my day job and become a full time Pajamaworker, working from home on various projects, making a� living one way or the other.

Since that is a big step to take, a huge change for me, and there is a definite date involved now, I think it would probably be a useful excercise to� write up the whole process as I go. The steep learning curve which I will need to traverse, the trials and tribulations, sucesses and frustrations will all be documented for posterity, in public, on the Pyjamanating blog here.

For once, the description “a kind of online diary” will be� appropriate.� I’ll adjust the tagline.

So I begin by counting down the days and thinking about what, if anything, I should be doing during these last two weeks in order to prepare myself for the journey ahead.

“Pajamanation creates a sense of community between the freelancer and its customers. My experience was very professional, eye-opening and simple; it gave me the opportunity of delivering my designs to the other side of the earth while connecting with extraordinary professionals.”
- KARD Karina Rodriguez D., Brand Consultant. Caracas – Venezuela

Pete’s View
local is the new frontier.

Work Wise UK
Although the actual proportion of the UK workforce which currently makes use of smarter working practices is not clear, ‘home workers’ – defined by as ‘people who work mainly in their own home, or in different places using home as a base’, is known to be 3.1 million out of 28.76 million, or 11 per cent of the total workforce (source: National Statistics, Labour Market Trends Oct 2005). Work Wise UK believes that this can be extended to 50 per cent of the workforce within five years.