Work-life balance: my confession

'Balance' photo (c) 2008, DirkJan Ranzijn - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

I know I've blogged about it at least a couple times already, but I guess it's time to remind my dear readers and myself that no matter how much you love what you do, you need a balance in your life. Remember this post in Mox's blog called Metamorphosis of a too-busy translator? Have you experienced those times of having so much work that you hardly have time for anything else?
I sure have. In fact, I just came out of this translation feast time when I had to get up at about 4:30 a.m. every day and went to bed around midnight; otherwise my work wasn't going as fast as needed. When I initially agreed to take those projects I thought I negotiated the deadlines pretty well. But later I figured out it was a mistake. So why did I make this mistake?

Well, it's because I am still getting used to my daughter's school schedule. The kindergarten she used to attend was just 1-2 minutes' walk from our house, but it takes us about 20 minutes to get to her school now. Not too long, I know, but with the time spent on waiting till she gets dressed (my FB friends probably remember me asking for advice how I can teach my little daydreamer to put on and take off her clothes faster), reading all the announcements for parents, attending class meetings for parents about once a week etc. the time quickly adds up. Besides, Delia doesn't want to go home straight after school. I know she needs a break. It's a good thing that there's a park right opposite her school, so we often take walks there. She loves this time, I do, too... But guess what? Riiiight, then it takes us over an hour and a half just to come home from school. Did I think about it when I was negotiating those deadlines? No, I didn't, because the negotiations took place before school started.
At first I thought that wasn't a big deal. But then I realized that I was getting off the schedule. So what did I do? Of course, I started getting up earlier and going to bed later. Did it help? Yes, sure, it helped to get the work done. But at the same time it wore me out. Finally I got sick and couldn't get better for about 2 weeks because I was awfully tired. The projects were finished on time, Delia and I were never late to school, but I was really exhausted...
Then I remembered reading this article in Logos Noesis blog. Here it is: Is your work worth dying for?
And then I realized that I really need to make a difference in my schedule. I need my weekends, and I need more time for all my family duties and for the time with my husband and my daughter. So here's my small list of decisions (actually, promises to myself) that I will do my best to keep in order to not kill myself over my work:
1. I will take no more than 2 projects at the same time (preferably one, but sometimes I get too bored doing just one project, so I need another one just to stay alert). Of course in this case I need to make sure the projects have different deadlines, not too close to each other;
2. If I see that working only on 1 or 2 projects at a time doesn't provide me with good income (although I am pretty sure it should) I will raise my rates.

How do you keep this work-life balance? How do you negotiate deadlines when your life changes and you don't know whether your normal schedule will work under new circumstances? Looking forward to your comments!

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post I promised to follow with the interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately 8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

15 interesting facts about the English language

I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.

Clients vs translators: how do we show that we're honest?

This is a personal post, and I'd really like to hear the opinion of my colleagues about such situations and how to deal with them. My situation is kind of like the one described in Mox's blog . In December a new prospective client wrote to me asking about my availabiility for a new project. When I read the overall description of the project, I got really interested in it. But the client needed to know exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost. No problem, just send me the text to look through or a part of it so I could get the gist of the style, level of complexity etc. In the reply that person just stated the wordcount, but there was no sample. I thought, maybe they didn't understand me. English is not my native language after all. In my reply, I stated the estimated time and cost based on the client's wordcount, but I repeated the request to see a part of the text. And then the person thanked me and ... disappeared.

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