frustration

Travelling in the last months i received a lot of personal inputs, but it’s difficult to bring them back to my profession. Writing in my public blog is surely a suitable even though not easy way to help with this process.

I will soon be leaving Madrid, and i’m wrapping this phase of three months spent in Spain which were very meaningful personally, even though they stressed and stretched me in different senses. From the point of view of professional life, i can summarise my evolution as a growth in creativity, followed by a disruption of routines which i cannot consider fully negative.

I’ve been happy about the results. Nonetheless today, while mentally preparing to leave Madrid for Sicily, i reached what seems a peak in frustration about the way work is going. It might be a fluke, a moment of stress, but its components have been around for a while so i think that there is something here i could analyse.

Some of the stress might be just due to nomading. Noisy flatmates and noisy coworking, lack of personal space and general comfort due to accidental events and small practical problems. Overall i found myself reacting to these problems in a surprising positive and resilient way, so today i’m motivated to investigate other, deeper causes of dissatisfaction.

I’m focusing on the problems even though there is a lot of value i received from nomading so far. I hope that the good inputs will bring something good eventually, but today the problems concern me. Some problems are more deep and philosophical, but now i’ll try to focus on the more immediate and concrete.

The most concrete of all problems is the lowering number of hours per week that i could collect. I reorganised in order to keep the client work at a steady pace, but the hours devoted to personal work dropped.

Being in a coworking hasn’t always felt as inspirational as i’d like. I’m gradually introducing some hours of work from home, and this seems to be important for my comfort and productivity.

I left Berlin with the idea to promote remote work, but for personal reasons i staid for a long time in Madrid, which is also a big city. I didn’t look for work here, nor i engaged in networking events or tried to advertise myself. I just enterteined spontaneous peer relationships when the opportunity rose. The problem with this? Professionally, my costs are higher than my opportunities, and sometimes i feel in conflict with the environment i am in. I enjoyed coming back to the coworking because i felt like meeting some friends again, but sometimes i feel sick of the culture implied in physically keeping a spot in a prestigious location.

This is enough negativity for today, and i feel that writing already disengaged it. And now it’s turned into words. One day i might find some use for them.