Balancing act
There’s this really cool place I keep seeing as my life lurches and jolts from one extreme to the other. It’s called balance. Looks really nice. I just have to figure out how to get off there. Maybe if I pull this emergency stop cord…
The most difficult challenge I face now that I’m feeling better is to resist the urge to overdo. The hardest part of that is determining where the tip-over point is so I can stay behind it. I can’t see it yet until I’m past it.
Getting my business back on track is really important to me now. Revenue is important to every business, and everyone, period. It’s especially important to me right now since there’s no cushion in the checkbook. Additionally, it’s not essential, but close to it, that for the sake of my mental health, self-image and all that, that I don’t have to go back on welfare.
I know that part of the process is to put in more time than I’m really comfortable doing since things are so far behind. This is called catching up. The problem is when catching up depletes my meager resources to the point I crash.
It happened again last week. I felt overwhelmed, yet I couldn’t stop trying to work. I’d sit down, knowing full well that nothing would happen, then be upset when, nothing happened. It was Thursday or Friday when I put an end to that madness by deciding to kick back for a few days.
I did nothing remotely business related (except download the backups) until I met today with a client that I was certain I’d lost. Tomorrow we’ll give it a go and see what happens.
I have to be careful though because I have meetings with four different clients in the next three days. Plus, the online library projects need to launch by the end of March and I took two extra shifts a week at the (public) library for three weeks in March to cover for vacations.
On the other hand, I’ve decided to play to my strengths and farm out everything else. I’ve found a programmer who I can subcontract some of the library site stuff to, and who will handle easily 75% of of the work to be discussed with the client we’re meeting with tomorrow night.
This isn’t sink-or-swim quite yet. I expect to cross the tip-over point a couple of times in the next few weeks. The important thing will be recognizing it and throttling back to compensate. And of course forensic examination to see if I can find advance warning signs I can look for in the future.
I’m sure it would have been so much easier to figure this stuff out, say, 20 or 30 years ago.
