April 15th 2009
When life gets in the way
As I write this, I can not believe it’s April 15th – I’d like to know what happened to the first half of my month.
Do you ever wish you could pause everything happening around you so that you could get everything done in a day that you wanted to?
I wish I had a pause button, I’ll tell you that much.
On Wednesday night (one loooong week ago) an unwanted stomach virus made it’s way into our home through our eldest daughter. This normally would be a bad thing, of course it would, but this was bad timing at it’s very best…or worst. I’ve just started working hard with a personal trainer at 6:30 every morning, am still dealing with a toddler that won’t sleep through the night, have a home freshly listed on the real estate market which needed a deep spring cleaning for its first showing, had two Easter dinners (we had to skip out on) and…what am I forgetting?….oh yes. That thriving business I’m running!
The flu quickly spread to my husband and then our youngest daughter and it did not leave until yesterday. What a wild week! I have to say, I have no idea how parents who work outside of the home deal with these situations when they arise. I feel very lucky to be a freelancer at a time like this because my schedule is so flexible. However, I was totally thrown for a loop when all this started happening.
I’d planned to take a long weekend away from my work but having lost a significant amount of time thanks to the flu a couple days before my break, I lost a lot of ground.
I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts, books and whatnot about contingency planning and having a back up in place for when disaster strikes and I do have a plan. Sort of.
I know what to do if I lose my power, get sick or have a *eek* hard drive crash. But nowhere in my list of procedures do I have a plan for what to do when the arse goes right out from under my life for a week.
Luckily I have amazing clients and even though I had to miss a couple of deadlines they were understanding and nothing caught fire or anything because I was late.
There’s one thing that saved me, having to be away from my work for so many days at a time without planning to, and that’s the buffer I build into the time estimates I give for projects.
I used to be a “I’ll have it done for you on Friday” kind of person and I said that to everyone. But the problem was, I would literally have a dozen things to have done each Friday and by the time Thursday would come around I’d be going nuts trying to get caught up.
The thing is, it’s not smooth sailing in my life 24/7. When you’re a working parent, whether you work from home or outside in the “corporate world”, things are never going to go according to plan ALL the time.
I am so happy that I saw the light a few months back and started giving more reasonable time lines for project completion because…well…you just never know.
If you’re a service provider constantly overextending yourself, I hope you’ll be able to take something away from this.
Give yourself some breathing room – build in a buffer because sometimes life just gets in the way.
This morning at 6:30am instead of pecking away at my computer or sleeping which is what I’m normally doing at that time, I was at the gym doing many squats, hammer curls and painful things with a medicine ball.
The English language is a funny beast, isn’t it? I mean, I love words more than anyone, but we have one complicated dialect. I do not envy the teachers who have to explain to children (or adults) trying to grasp this language why proves is spelled with one o but hooves has two.
One of my big outstanding to-do items was to do a clean up of my email inbox which I’ve just been “too busy” to get around to. Since Outlook has been crashing about five times a day on me, I figured it was time to do something with the 7000 messages in my inbox.
The Internet is full of so many resources to learn from. You can find teleseminars, ebooks, ecourses, articles, white papers and newsletters on any topic under the sun. It can be overwhelming for information junkies like myself when there’s new knowledge coming at you from every direction. I get emails daily announcing another course I should consider or a blog post I should read.












