So I've been having a big problem lately: I have too many friends! It's friends over almost daily, always doing the most amazing, fun things. Swimming, bar-b-ques, hiking, dog parks, bowling, conventions, meals, video games, and movies, you name it, we're doing it.

But when we're doing that, we're not taking care of things that need to be taken care of. But there's the delicate problem of telling your friends, "hey guys, I love you like family, but I can't hang out constantly because I'm not able to focus on my work efficiently."

Most of my friends at this point are working from home, or between jobs, and I want to keep having a fun social life, and more than that, make an environment where we all can have a more synchronized social life! I feel genuinely bad that I'm not spending nearly as much time up north with  matrices as I used to, and I know a lot of it is because of the time gap between our homes. Working from home, time is everything, and it's hard to pare out time between "fun stuff" and "work stuff," it's something I've struggled with for years. I've swung everywhere from "I must devote every moment of my waking time to my commissions, and I can have fun when they're done," to "I'm so burned out I don't even want to stare at a commission for another month at least." It's unfair to commissioners and it's unfair to me, because I'm constantly struggling between personal time and business time, and I have the additional complication of all of my duties for  contact, which is a living, breathing beast all of it's own. It takes a lot of my personal attention, since I have unique talents and contributions in it that neither of the boys could do independent of me.

So we've come to something of a proposal for our local work-at-home friends, extending all up and down the US Pacific timezone (California, Oregon, Washington, BC/Canada). At this point, "work at home" is really a job that we all are doing at the same time, so why not share the same hours? I'm suggesting 10am-6pm, Monday through Thursday. That comes up to 32 hours a week, with a full 3 day weekend every week. It's not a super balls-to-the-wall full time schedule, but it's also a good chunk of work that gives a lot of room to get stuff done in a week. If we all agree to work on the same schedule, we all will have the same time off - time for hangouts without any awkward "I could be more productive somewhere else right now" vibe that I know we've all felt at some point or another. It would mean we'd have real, authentic weekends every week. It would mean that if we're all working at the same time, we cut down on distractions from friends inviting us for hikes at 2pm on tuesday, when we're full bore in on a project, but damn that sounds fun. It would also mean that our friends who still work office jobs would also be able to more easily fit into these hours, since we'd be mirroring theirs closer.

Thoughts? I'm pretty sure  contact will at least be adopting it among the 3 of us. Should make stuff go a lot smoother around here!