Lists

As I mentioned, I am keeping a notebook of the things I associate with my future career:  ideas, thoughts, areas of interest, etc.  My mind is an open canvas at this point and I am not excluding anything.  I am not trying to figure out at this point whether ideas "fit together" or not.  I am just jotting them down.  Later down the road, I will take a look at what is in my notebook and see what I can some up with.  In the meantime, I am focusing on exploration, personal development and finding out what I love.

In the notebook, I am keeping a List.  A List of the criteria that become apparent to me that I want to shape my next career.  One item on my list I determined in an earlier post.  I want to live in New York.  I have pretty much determined that.  Unless there is a compelling reason to move (which I remain open to), I would like to stay here.  Not necessarily in the apartment I am in now.  Nor the neighborhood I am in now.

Although I love the community in my neighborhood, it is the tourists that are painful.  I am fully welcoming of the tourist population and love that they love visiting NYC.  Much of our economy would tank without them.  I just don't want to walk out to 100 tourists lined up outside my door waiting for one of three tour buses stopped on my block.  On second thought, it is not that bad.  They are all quite friendly.  Many miss their dogs back home and want to say hello to Bridgette.  It is just not that neighborhoody, i.e., I live on an Avenue and my side streets are filled with theaters.

But I still love it here!!  It is strange how despite all my yapping, I do have a community here which I love (despite not having a neighborhoody feel, if that make sense).  I love my juice friend at the nearby health food market, the woman at the dry cleaners, the coffee guy in Central Park, the guys at the candy and frozen yogurt store, the people who live and work in my building, the folks in Duane Reade (the local drug store), the people I see in the park every morning and their dogs who have now become Bridgette's friends.  I see many of these people every day.

Okay, I have completely digressed from my "lists" topic.  Getting back on track...

I also cannot go back to practicing law where my practice would consist primarily of documents.  Even if you are in a deal practice, you are a senior lawyer doing all the fun negotiating and a junior associate is doing all the crap work.  Eventually, you have to deal with documents.  I practiced real estate finance law and did not like it.  I practiced for a large New York firm as a junior associate under a lot of stress.  I am now helping out a friend draft a very simple contract.  No stress.  Easy contract.  Do it on my own time.  No phones ringing.  No partners competing for my time.  I think I hate it just as much.  It just is not for me to sit in front of a computer and deal with drafting/editing/monkeying around with documents.  I out and out hate it.  It is b-o-r-i-n-g and unrewarding to me.  Cross that off the list.

Which leads me to the next item on the list:  I need to be out and about.  I am an introvert by nature, interact best one-on-one and do not like long periods sitting in one spot on my computer.  I usually have ants-in-my-pants (which my mother refers to not being able to sit for long periods of time -- she is afflicted).  I appreciate that any career has its computer time and I enjoy being on it for a certain amount of time.  I enjoy blogging.  I enjoy researching.  I enjoy communicating.  But I cannot be on my computer for 12 hours.  I cannot have an office job.

My last comment about lists is that I need to have a List for the day.  I prefer to make the List the evening before.  Without a job to go to, structure is extremely important.  Of course there is flexibility and the List is a guide.  I don't always get everything done on the List.  But the List gives me an agenda for a day that does not have a routine.  Without it, I would simply while the day away.  That was one of my biggest fears about quitting my job (aside from starving to death and living on the street corner).

In my former industry, we used to say "what gets measured gets done."  I am not exactly measuring in the business sense, but measuring my day-to-day activities in that they stay on par with what I consider a productive day.  Also, by identifying the criteria for my future career, I am measuring along the way what I consider progress in shaping my future.