Life is work. Work is life.

My first job was at a neighborhood drugstore.

Longs Drugs was a top employer for high school kids in my town and for a lot of us it was the place where we learned what it meant to have a job.

The folks at Longs taught us the essentials of workaday life as we ran the front register, stocked shelves and provided excellent customer service to the elderly population that frequented the aisles of the muzak-filled store.

It turned out to be a pretty good training ground. I learned how to devote myself to a task (even a pretty menial one) until it was done well. I learned to treat customers with respect and almost always give them what they want. I learned that sometimes working with other people requires patience and understanding. I felt good about my work, I earned a decent paycheck and I even got a promotion. It was a good job.

Back in those days, my afternoons had a comfortable rhythm of hanging out with friends in the parking lot after school, picking up a snack at Yummy Yogurt and then heading to work to change into my black skirt and white shirt before punching in on the time clock. I can hear that satisfying cha-chunk sound of the time clock as clearly as if my last 5–9 shift was yesterday. That sound punctuated the beginning and ending of each shift in such a clear, no-questions-asked way that there was no mistaking when my time was mine and when it belonged to the company. The pronouncement was so strong that I almost felt like a different person after I “clocked-in.”

Since those days, though, time clocks have been noticeably absent from my life. When I wake up in the morning and sit down at my computer, I don’t punch in, log-in or start the clock ticking in any way. Even when I arrive at school, there’s no formal pronouncement of the beginning of my workday. When I get home in the evenings and I grab a few minutes while dinner’s cooking to look over tomorrow’s lesson plan, I don’t mark those minutes as “working time.”

Most of us in the professional world, whether we’re teachers, designers, writers or engineers, have a much more fluid approach to our work days. Work is integrated into the rest of our lives in a seamless way that acknowledges that the work we are engaged with is truly our life’s work.

I really love the term life’s work. I love how it acknowledges that the work I am doing is something I am dedicating my life to. There is such nobility and honor in performing one’s life’s work. A person’s life’s work doesn’t require a time clock. In fact, maybe punching in on a time clock eliminates a task from the category of life’s work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately as I build my freelance career. Though I prefer to bill clients on a project basis, I often use my hourly rate to create a realistic quote. Thinking of every hour as billable time has changed the way I view my time, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Is it possible to maintain a fluid approach to time management even while I calculate and bill hourly? Sometimes the time=money equation asserts itself a little too strongly for my comfort. I would rather just immerse myself in the work, trusting that appropriate compensation will come. I don’t want to calculate those minutes I grab to respond to an email while dinner is cooking.

But then there are those who caution work-from-home freelancers against allowing the work to take over. It’s so easy to sit down and work for a few minutes, before you know it, work is invading every spare moment. It seems that these people are advocating against that fluid integration of work into regular life. I feel like I should listen to them, but it’s uncomfortable.

I like for my work to be a part of my regular life. I don’t want for there to be two different versions of myself — working-Meredith and personal life-Meredith. I like knowing that even the personal moments — cleaning house, eating breakfast, packing lunches — are all in the service of the work (in a put-on-your-oxygen-mask-first, kind of way). I do those things so I can work and make a difference in the world.

That’s what life’s work is all about.