THE SIX-MONTH NUMBER

With two months of runway, the rent is close enough to see. A bad job that pays next week beats a good one that pays in spring, and the calendar has made the decision before anyone has had time to think about the work.

Six months is where the calendar starts to step back. The same offer arrives, the same poor fee, the same three weeks of work that will not go in the portfolio, and now there is room to ask whether it is worth doing.

What half a year buys

Six months is long enough to absorb a no. Turning down a job costs a few weeks of runway rather than the rent. It is long enough to wait for a grant decision instead of spending the waiting on something else. Long enough to give an album the second month it needed, to take the fringe run that pays in experience, or to finish a draft before sending it rather than sending it because it might pay.

There is nothing exact about six. It is used here because it is long enough to outlast a slow invoice and a turned-down job in the same season, and short enough to be within reach.

A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, puts the case in a sentence:

“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf’s room is the part people remember. The money was what paid for the hours inside it.

Working out your number

Six months of runway is a smaller figure than six months of costs, because confirmed income counts against it. Here is an example. Costs are £1,600 a month. Shifts bring in £700 a month, confirmed. The gap is £900 a month, so six months of runway is £5,400 of money you can use. That is a long way short of the £9,600 that six months of costs would suggest, and a lot closer.

The number has limits. If the shifts stop, the gap grows to £1,600 and the same £5,400 lasts 3.4 months. Six months built on expected money, a grant not yet awarded or an invoice not yet agreed, is a hope with a date on it. A Runway To keeps the two apart for that reason: the runway on the home screen counts confirmed money only, and expected income is shown as a separate figure, never folded in. Costs that end change it too, a course paid off in March or a studio given up in the summer, which is why the number is worth working out again whenever something in the ledger moves.

It also helps to decide, before reaching six months, what they are for: the job you will turn down, the grant you will wait for, the record you will finish. Six months with no decision attached tends to be spent protecting itself.

Work out your gap: what goes out each month, minus what comes in that you can count on. Multiply it by six. Write that figure down, and beside it, what you can use today. The distance between the two is what half a year costs from here.