My “sabbatical” last semester has helped me set boundaries this semester and, God willing, into the future. I came to realize that my job is not my life.<\/p>\n\n\n
And since it is not my life, it does not hold a claim on every waking hour.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
When the school day ends at 3:00 pm, I don’t think, “I’m glad that day is over.” Because the day is not over. Instead, I think, “What am I going to do with the second half of my day?”<\/p>\n\n\n
And it is the second half of the day that gives me the most satisfaction: connections with family and friends, keeping up with the necessities of physical and spiritual life, reading, writing, and exercising. Melissa and I have four short years before our nest is empty. These are precious weeks and months.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
In January I signed a contract with the school system in which they promised to pay me for 7.5 hours of work each day, 5 days a week, and I promised to work for 7.5 hours a day, 5 days a week.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
So far I have kept my end of the bargain and then some. I do the work that can reasonably be done within 7.5 hours Monday through Friday and some days a little extra when absolutely necessary. Some things don’t get done.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But just as I do not squander my school hours with reading Twitter or scrolling Facebook or answering personal email, I also will not spend an extra hour or two of a weeknight on school work (at least on a regular basis). And weekends are much too short to give any hours to unpaid work time beyond what is unavoidable.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
It feels like I finally got some balance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My “sabbatical” last semester has helped me set boundaries this semester and, God willing, into the future. I came to realize that my job is not my life. And since it is not my life, it does not hold a claim on every waking hour.\u00a0 When the school day ends at 3:00 pm, I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4630,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions\/4630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}