Welcome to Grindhopping.com, the website for young entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, free agents and others who want to leap up the career ladder but prefer to hop over the regular 9 to 5 grind. Here you'll find career planning advice and support from other Grindhoppers and learn how to carve alternative paths to the top.
Tell of your experiences in 'Grindhopping Tales'.
Chat with fellow grindhoppers in the forums.
Grindhopping Named one of the New York Post's 4 Notable Career Books of 2007
Good news! The New York Post selected Grindhopping as one of its four notable career books of 2007. The others include Anita Bruzzese's 45 Things You Do That Drive Your Boss Crazy -- And How to Avoid Them, It's Okay to be the Boss, by Bruce Tulgan, and, of course, Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. I am happy to be listed in such well-selling company!
Grindhopping featured on "Lessons from a Recovering Doormat"
Grindhopping -- and how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable -- was featured on Daylle Deanna Schwartz's blog, "Lessons from a Recovering Doormat." You can find the blog here: http://www.lessonsfromarecoveringdoormat.com/
Daylle is a friend from ASJA, a self-empowerment counselor, and an author who has been featured everywhere from Oprah to Howard Stern. Enjoy!
This website has been hit by several spam-bots of late -- apologies for the ads for gold and the like, and please keep reading as I attempt to delete them! Laura
So my column on The Hired Wife ran yesterday in USA TODAY. For discussion on the topic, see below. A variety of small businesses have sprung up in the last few years to help families outsource various household chores. And, guess what? The sky isn't falling! When women spend less time vacuuming and grocery shopping, they spend more time with their kids. Who can argue with that?
Laura was just interviewed by guest host Caitlin Ross (the 23-year-old daughter of the show's usual host) during the 9 o'clock hour in Seattle. It was a great conversation about how to land that first job, and what to do if the usual jobs don't appeal to you. Have a look around and feel free to post. I'm always looking for new topics to cover.
Lately I've been collecting stories of ways couples outsource various domestic duties (usually because both parties work outside the home). Thirty-five years ago, Judy Syfers raised eyebrows with her essay stating "I Want a Wife." A generation later, it's still the lament: Working women don't have wives at home. They don't have someone to oversee the domestic details, to take care of the kids when they're sick, make sure there's a meal on the table, etc.
Except now, they do. In the old days, you needed a lot of money to hire domestic help, because it came in the form of full-time employees (a cook, a nanny, a chauffeur, a housekeeper). Thanks to the changing labor market, though, now these services can be outsourced to small businesses -- usually run by moms-- that take over the details of domestic life.
There are meal planning services, services to shuttle the kids around, virtual assistants to book vacations and dental appointments, professional organizers to make sure everything is where it should be, housekeeping services, babysitter booking services, personal shoppers, meal prep services, concierge services to run errands, tutors, etc. Yes, someone has to book all this (and it's usually mom) but if you're willing to fork over the money, you can also hire a household manager to oversee all this. All these new businesses, virtually unheard of forty years ago, have added many jobs and dollars to the national economy.
One of the complaints of the early feminist movement is that women's work wasn't counted in the GDP. If two housewives switched spots and billed each other for the services, though, it would be. In essence, the domestic outsourcing revolution -- the "hired wife" -- has done this.
Is it a two-income trap? Would families be better off having one person do the wife's work and thus not have to shell out the cash? Maybe that's true in some families. But the big difference between today's domestic outsourcing and the household help of old is the cost. Two weeks of groceries and meal prep can cost about $200. Good luck getting a cook to work for $100/week. So the outsourcing revolution has made domestic bliss more possible for more families than ever before -- which means it makes economic sense for more families to have two incomes.
USA Today has a fascinating article about earlier commutes in today's paper. You can read it here.I wrote about a similar topic two years ago for the Only in America section of Reader's Digest. Many fast food restaurants now open at 5am to accommodate early commuters. "Rush hour" now starts at 5am as people try to get on the road earlier to beat traffic. Getting in to work at 6:00 or 6:30 also gives you a chance to get a start on the day before people start interrupting you.
But it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For starters, I tell a story in Grindhopping about a new CEO who started coming into work at 6am in order to read up on his new industry. Within a few weeks the whole executive staff had started showing up at 6:00 to show the new boss that they were as industrious as he was. It didn't matter that the CEO was clearly showing up early to be alone. The face time culture lives.
And that's the problem with getting to work early. Good luck leaving early. In very few offices can you walk out at 3pm, even if you got there at 6am, without hearing snickers or disparaging comments. It also doesn't matter if you've finished all your work for the day in 6 hours rather than 8. The company owns your time, not you. So getting a jump start on the day just gives you longer hours. And leads to some very sleepy workers.
According to the folks at www.QuitYourJobDay.com, today, Sept. 10th is the day. As they say, quit early and quit often. Sept. 10 is a good day to think about it in part because of tomorrow. The folks who died on Sept. 11, 2001, certainly didn't see it coming. They went to work that day thinking about the usual things. But if you knew you would die before your time, would you want to spend your time at a job you hate? Probably not. But since life is always a terminal case, we all face that dilemma. There's no virtue gained by doing work that doesn't make you happy.
I have a column in today's USA Today about the only people who really like the corporate jungle -- high school kids! A new network of urban Catholic schools has managed to keep tuition low by functioning as a temp agency. Kids work 5 days a week for corporate employers, sharing the job with 3 other kids. In exchange, the corporation pays enough to the school to keep tuition at $2,000-3,000 per year. That's key since about 80% of students at these schools in New York, Newark, Denver and elsewhere qualify for free or reduced price lunch. But having kids work does more than just raise money. It also shows them there's life after high school, which is a lesson many more well-to-do children seem to miss entirely. You can read the column here.
