Seeking the magic formula

Walking my dogs this morning, I was thinking about our upcoming trip to Italy and what I want to do professionally afterwards. Keep consulting? If so, how do I want to “market” myself and my services? Look for a job, either full or part time? A friend of mine who just started a new job after taking some time off of work was telling me that she likes her job and the organization and the people she works with, but she's chafing under the rigidity of full-time employment at one place. "It's crazy," she said, "but I find myself resenting that these people actually expect me to come to work every day, all day, on their schedule." I know exactly what she means, that's how I feel when I contemplate full-time employment. We agreed that this attitude is a little worrisome, in terms of our ability to live in the real world.

As I was reviewing my experiences of the past couple years and thinking about what I want next, it occurred to me that since I bit the bullet and walked away from full-time employment about 21 months ago, I have spent roughly one-third of that time not working at all for money; one-third of it working (vigorously) full-time; and one-third of it doing consulting projects, with work load ranging widely, as self-employment tends to do. And I decided that this is an extremely civilized way to structure one’s life: one-third working hard, one-third working not at all, and one-third somewhere in between.

When I do the math, there are some important requisites for both of us to work within this magical formula. For Enrico to follow the Formula of Thirds, he would go from full-time to half-time employment, because that's what the thirds work out to: one third full-time + one-third half time = half time for the year. To make that work, between us we’d need to make maybe 25-40% more money than we would have over the past couple years if Enrico had been half time. But I want to believe there’s a way to make it work, maybe spread over longer time periods and with some tweaks. Of course the variation in work load probably requires self-employment, or perhaps a job on the academic year. And self-employment isn't for everybody.

But still, it's food for thought.