In the way of freelancers, I have more than one job—one as a Montessori trainer and field consultant and another as a writer on the public school beat. When it’s time to switch from one to the other it’s a shock to the system, every time, like dipping into the hot and cold pools at the tiny health club near our home.

The switch should come as no surprise because each job has a predictable rhythm. The Montessori training takes place in the summer, over the course of two weekend seminars, and on pre-scheduled days when I visit teaching interns. Writing about schools is my on-site day job with pretty consistent weekly hours.

Not only is switching from one job to another jarring, but it’s also difficult to stay within the parameters of my contracted hours. The emails for one never stop when I’m at the other, for example, and I can get obsessive and perfectionistic in my work, spending hours of my own time preparing a Montessori presentation or tinkering with a school profile, for which I have only myself to blame.

I put the problem to Chris, who has juggled multiple artistic projects and promotional junkets for decades. As his career got underway in the early 1990s, he frequently traveled to schools to give talks to kids. Early on it became apparent to him that he had to juggle the travel and the book making in a more satisfactory way.

He wanted to deal with the “interruptions” of travel, he said, without getting frustrated at being away from what he saw as the more important work of making art. Travel required all sorts of mundane tasks, from buying dreaded dress shirts with buttons to searching online for airline tickets to nervously prepping his presentation.

Of course, the travel inevitably fed the art, but Chris wanted to find a way to make each part of his life equally meaningful, rather than hurry through one to get to another. He put extra time into his school presentations to make them more interactive because he didn’t like giving talks with Power Points. He sewed puppets out of felt and had kids “perform” his books and found this was much more fun than speech-making. He practiced his concertina at home so he could add a little music to events especially when he introduced his jazz books.

Most of all, prior to a trip, he checked his schedule and built in a pocket of time to take a walk or visit a museum, alone, in order to fortify himself for the hours of small talk and being “on” his trips require. And he admits it took years to figure all this out but it made the “interruptions” less interrupting and into valuable experiences in their own right.

“I needed to find a way to make one serve the other so I wouldn’t feel resentful,” he told me. Travel is a respite from solitary studio work and serves as an external way to set deadlines for the sideline art and writing he does to try out new ideas.

I like that deadline part in particular. My Montessori work could also serve as a deadline for my own writing projects—such as this blog and the book project I occasionally mention—which are important to me but very difficult to prioritize. Another way of looking at intern visits is as a chance to travel, often by train, which I enjoy because it offers me time to read and do some creative writing. These mini trips are an opportunity to window shop in a different city or try a new café or take a walk of my own.

After all, I’m writing this blog post en route to Boston in Amtrak’s quiet car with a thermos of tea and a package of Trader Joe’s new Brownie Crisps, billed as "a crispy, crunchy take on classic chocolate brownies!"

An interruption? I hardly think so.