The balanced life

It's about 10:45 and I just got done with my sales calls for the day, so I figured I'd take a short break and catch people up on the past week.

For the past four months I've been working really hard on the business. One thing I'm pretty pleased with is my sustained hard work over a number of months. As I've mentioned before, for much of my professional career I felt like I was just drifting along, not being too challenged, and not reaching my potential. When I trained for my first marathon a few years ago, that was really the first time in my life that I felt really pushed and challenged, and really proud of accomplishing that goal.

So on the whole, I'm pleased with what I've accomplished so far this year. That being said, one thing that got my attention in a recent podcast from Dan Miller was the idea that when your work consumes you, you start to borrow from the success in the other areas of your life. My fitness level has definitely suffered the past few months, and it's been stressful on Debbie as well.

I've been thinking about all this for about a week, and just yesterday we put Elliana in daycare for half a day for the 2nd time ever. I dropped her off at 8am, and we got a call at 10am that she'd just woken up from a nap, didn't recognize the lady at the nursery (the person in the nursery switched with someone else while she was sleeping) and she was crying pretty hard.

So I rushed over there, and picked her up from the daycare. That got me thinking about how much of a strain my working so much on the business was affecting both Debbie and Elliana. When I got home, Elliana went down for a nap, and I started thinking about all the things I'd heard lately about balance in ones life.

Looking around the house, the place was a mess, and I realized that one of the reasons was that since we had Elliana last August, we kind of just put her baby stuff in the living room, I'd crammed my workspace at the other end of the living room with no good place to keep everything organized, and really, the house was kind of a metaphor for the face that for the past 9 months, a lot of things have just happened without us taking the time to organize or put in place systems to keep our lives and house organized and in balance.

So I spent all day yesterday rearranging our downstairs, the closets, basement, my workspace, etc. I also think it's pretty clear that I need to dial down the efforts on the business a notch and get organized.

Debbie gets stressed when the house is a mess, and it will make it much easier and less stressful on everyone if we get the house and our lives more organized. So probably for the next few weeks we'll be organizing the house, putting into place methods to keep our lives and paperwork, and schedules more organized and more balanced.

My next entry I'll talk a bit more on the business side and how dialing things down a notch seems to fit in with how things are going with the business as well.