Monday Series: Whack-A-Mole

Once upon a time, I thought that owning my own business would mean I had a bunch of free time. LOLOLOLOLOL

What a naive, naive child.

Now I understand that it is merely a game of whack-a-mole. Endless amounts of shit pop up all the time and all over the place but you only have one hammer. You can try to make the consecutive smacks as fast as possible, but you can only smack one mole at a time. It's physically impossible to do anything else. This is annoying but it's the truth. The sooner I internalize that, the sooner I'll see my expectations resemble reality.

I spent some time living with the plan I outlined in my latest post and I'm not happy with it.

While I appreciate it for its emphasis on reducing the number of consecutive projects, I'm not comfortable with how long I'll have to wait before being able to work on projects that will propel my business forward. Too much time is allotted to getting through the tasks I've taken on for money. I'll need an adjustment.

Not quite sure what form that will take just yet. One idea is to break the tasks into 3 categories: ongoing design contracts, commissions/one-off projects + portfolio building, and future business work. Currently the future business work is at the bottom of the "Commissions..." list. But... I don't think it will be wise to wait that long. Perhaps I can manage to diversify if I slide from list to list, ticking off one task from each at a time. It's still a lot but it may make more sense chronologically. Who knows?

That said, there are always going to be fires. I will probably have to drop this "plan" to put out whatever fire is hottest more often than I'd like. I'm just looking for ways to make all of those fires a little cooler overall. This lifestyle is tiring. Ha, I'm mixing my metaphors. Now I'm just picturing a bunch of little fiery moles.