Sitting here looking around my comfy home office, with the world to myself, I am feeling ever uninspired and frustrated. Or: Running around trying to do everything all at once, I’m feeling inspired and frustrated. Anyway, I’m frustrated. There’s something about my part-time schedule, and my own work that’s expanding to fill the gaps, and being 25, that doesn’t sit right with me. Is the time to write a one-year plan—or even a one-month plan—here? Do I need to make a list of things I like to do and things I’m good at, etc. etc? The standard post-college masturbatory soul-searching twenty-something routine?

Maybe that’s the subject of this blog.

I love my job and am really enjoying it lately, but with these extra 2 days a week, I’m left wondering “what’s really important.” The only thing I’ve done consistently on Thursdays and Fridays is bake bread (it doesn’t take much time, anyway), so I guess it’s time to open a two-day-a-week bakery. Boston Secrets goes between feeling great and feeling pointless (which probably means its great and I need to push through).

But nothing is really blowing my mind right now when it comes to my own work. Where’s the passion? If it isn’t in computers as much anymore, where is it next? I only start thinking about one-year plans and five-year plans when I am not getting what I want out of today’s work, out of right now, so I know there’s something missing. To me a one-year plan means seeing hope in the future but taking the present for granted. Usually I’m too busy to take the present for granted, so this is a new one.

But if my work at home is taking a major turn this year, I need to take a step, today, along that path. I feel my day job has been like a drug for the past 3 years, as I haven’t had to think too much about my work—or the lack of it. But now the pressure is on. I have time to sit here and think about this and be frustrated. This isn’t a pressure to make money, it’s a pressure to hold myself up to my own ideals.

And the pressure is a nagging sort of pressure. It’s telling me I’m in a rut and I keep going around in the same cycle. It’s saying I’m not pushing myself enough and I’m just floating along on what I’ve built up, without challenges.

So what’s the answer to this nagging? I think it’s time to make a short-term list and, reluctantly, a one-year plan. That’s my task for today.