How to Survive Your Day Job and Ways to Pass the Time

Unfortunately for today’s artists and writers, keeping a day job is often a necessary fact of life. It’s especially hard when you’re first starting out to convince others that your talent is worth enough money to pay for the little things (like rent and cat food). You know how important your art is, but your food service or retail job probably doesn’t share your priorities. Getting through an ordinary day at work can sometimes seem like an insurmountable task, especially when you know your time could be better spent creating something worthwhile instead of ringing up a long line of customers. Here are some tips for surviving your day job and holding on to your fragile, artistic sanity.

The Countdown

Developing a dark sense of humor about the time you’re wasting at your day job is often crucial to your emotional well-being. One way to do this is to log the exact amount of time you have left until you are set free to resume your “real life.” Upon arriving at work, look at the clock and figure out exactly how much time you’ve got left to before you can leave. Feel free to announce to friendly co-workers that you have nine hours, six minutes, and fifty-three seconds left to go. This is especially funny if you’re working a double shift and have a good fourteen hours of work ahead of you.

Since you are probably checking the clock frequently throughout your workday anyway, make a note of how many hours, minutes, and seconds you’ve got left every time you look. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quickly minutes and hours drop off your departure time. For a real laugh riot, keep a paper log of how often you look at the clock and figure out the average of minutes passed at every time check. You can play mental games with yourself, too. Tell yourself you will not resume your countdown until at least half an hour has gone by, and increase your goal as you get better at mentally estimating your amount of captivity left.

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