A thought journey about working and quality time

I write articles for this blog and start tracking my time without thinking. However, in the last article, I found myself wondering whether this was work time or leisure time. Or rephrased – whether I track time or not. This question resonated with me, and I rephrased it: Do I work full-time or part-time? According to popular belief, I work all the time as a self-employed person. I always counter and say, "I hardly work because I enjoy what I do." The more I think about it, the harder it becomes to answer this question. So, I decided to take you on a journey of thought to answer this question.

The question of part-time or full-time can be answered if it is clear what the terms mean. I consider employment to be full-time if more than 35 hours are worked per week. Accordingly, part-time means working fewer than this number of hours. With this, I could look at my employment contract and determine which area I fall into - done!

In my opinion, it's just not that simple. I may not have an employment contract because I operate independently on a project basis. Or I have a very flexible contract with trust-based working hours. Or I officially work 20 hours but regularly have countless overtime hours every week. No matter how it works out, what matters is what the weekly average ends up being according to the time recording.

On the one hand, this definition creates clarity, and on the other hand, I have to answer the question of what I consider work. I consciously answer these questions regardless of the labor law framework. To give two examples: the break between two periods of high concentration, during which I hang out the laundry, is working time, just like reading specialist articles and specialist books every day or attending meetups.

At this point, I asked myself whether I record the time for all of my obligations and thus declare it as working time. This would include time in voluntary work, such as heading a department at a local club. However, this feels wrong from a “work” perspective. At the same time, I cannot drop these activities and the time spent on them.

This contradiction made me realize what matters to me: quality time. I have decided to view any time as quality time in which I feel joy. And this gives me a lot of power. Just by changing my perspective on an activity, I can transform it from work time into quality time. Writing is not yet my core competency - so writing a blog article is difficult for me. And just a few months ago, I found this process to be torturous. With my blog, I was able to have a positive perspective on content creation. Writing becomes a passion.

Conclusion

I continue to track time when writing articles. The reason for this is less the question of whether and how much I work but rather the creation of raw data for later evaluations on the subject of content creation. And I don't know if I work part-time or full-time. I don't care. Through this critical observation, I gained an insight that I can only recommend to you: by changing your perspective on what quality time is for you, your days can become much more fulfilling - at least for me, it works... most of the time :)