Divided Focus

I've been struggling a bit lately with my own goals and moves in life. I wrote yesterday about having a fallback if necessary. When I think about fallbacks I'm looking at careers/jobs. I know people who like to have a guy as a fallback if their current relationship fails or some other interpersonal fallback plan. Personally I don't like thinking about other human beings this way so I hope you realize this was not what I was talking about when I mentioned fallbacks.

The thing is, I probably do have a fallback career. Actually I spend more than 40 hours a week working at my fallback job. And I'm good at it. I like what I do. And again, I am good at it.

The difficulty is that I struggle to balance my two careers. The fallback is only called that because it is the career that pays the bills. I know I will eat next week because of that job so I dedicate the majority of my time and energy there.

Still freelance writing is also a job. It takes up at least 15 hours of my time each week, usually more like 25 hours. When I am tired, or just feeling frustrated, I long to stop dividing my focus, pick a job and dedicate myself to it solely.

There are some flaws in the single minded career focus (which is why I haven't made the leap)

• Single focus makes us boring
• It's easy to burn out with a single focus
• Any job/career is vulnerable when the economy is unstable
• A single path doesn't allow seemingly random connections to be made between two unrelated subjects
• The stress of a single focus can tie your stomach in knots

These are just some of the reasons I give myself for not choosing the singular path of either career. Still I often fear that I am not reaching my full potential at either career because of this divided focus.

So what about you?

Is it possible to divide your career (or your life) focus?

How do working moms handle their divided focus?

Can we really be multidimensional people?