Grave Decisions

By Olive L. Sullivan


My decision to hire Mike as a personal assistant is working out well (aside from that whole England incident). We have been busy updating archives and my blog, and next will get to work on the neglected Web site. It has freed me up to concentrate on my clients, which means more income. Right after I hired him, one of my friends sent me a link to Jeanne Robertson’s U-Tube video of how she hired her personal assistant. Robertson is a Southern comic and motivational speaker who is just plain hilarious. Her bit about sending her husband to the grocery store brought tears to my eyes. But the one about the personal assistant hit a little too close to home. I worried, Am I making my business decisions based on comedy sketches? Surely not. Am I making my business decisions so I can write comedy sketches? Yikes!

I mean, Mike and I together are a little bit like Frank and Ernst, or Laurel and Hardy. But overall, it’s going well.

I told Spike I’d made another decision this week that I thought was going to make things go much more smoothly. He was intrigued, but the look on his face became more and more skeptical as I explained it. “So, your big business decision is to take time off?” he said.

Well, it doesn’t sound so smart when you put it that way, does it? But, yeah, that’s it.

Like many freelancers, I have a couple of issues. One is that, if I don’t do it, the work doesn’t get done. I can’t just hire someone to write my column, blog, or edit for me. These are the skills I bring to the table, and I have to implement them to bring in the money. That means if I don’t feel like working, no money comes in. I think we can all agree that’s a bad business decision. I have to work. Unfortunately, the other common freelance bugaboo is procrastination. I was talking to Spike about this, too, and he got it. He gets deadlines. He recalled how, in graduate school, the closer the deadline got for a term paper or dissertation chapter, the more urgent his need to clean the kitchen or mow the lawn. In my case, I sometimes think the housework would never get done if not for deadlines I’m avoiding!

But because I know I have to work to pay the bills, the deadlines do get met. I was complaining to my writing coach, Ann, one day about this very problem. I had hired Ann to help me work through a major book project that I was simply stuck on. She listened to me whine about procrastination and how I simply couldn’t break through it. Then she told me that I could procrastinate all I wanted, as long as I realized I would have to make up the work later. I got through that project, but her words didn’t really sink in until I had already made the decision to take more time off. The part Spike didn’t get is that it’s not so much taking time off, as scheduling time off.

My former procedure was to declare that I had to work from the time I got out of bed until the time I went back to bed that night. Those are my working hours, seven days a week. With that schedule, I have pulled more all-nighters than you can imagine, because if there’s a deadline looming in the morning, I don’t get to go to bed until it’s done. When I was a 20-year-old journalism student, I could pull all-nighters several times a week and just move on. Now that I’m closer to 50 than 40, I can still do whatever I want or need to do, it just takes me longer to recover. So each all-nighter pushes the next project back that much more. But I know many entrepreneurs that have the same attitude. The success of my business depends on me, and therefore I have to work all the time. Talk about being out of balance!

This attitude is hard to keep up, and it sucks all the joy out of doing what you love for a living. You might as well get a real job!

The other thing that happened to me this year was that I started spending a significant amount of my free time with Spike. Before, I spent some of that time working on the restoration of my house. I’d work on the house on Saturdays, then edit or write in the evening. Now, the house crumbles around me unnoticed, and I’m with Spike in the evening. We also discovered that dating somehow multiplies your social obligations. Last fall we were amazed to have at least one or two social events planned nearly every weekend from September to December. Spike instituted the seven-date rule: no more than seven dates per weekend. Guess how well that worked? We both claim we didn’t go to that many parties before we met, but we were on the go all season. This year we’re braced for it, but we still have some social see-and-be-seen sort of thing going every night this week. Evenings are my prime work time—once I’ve spent my day procrastinating and making excuses. So, something needed to give.

All these things contributed to my revolutionary business decision to take more time off. Instead of scheduling my day as work from dawn to midnight (okay, noon to midnight), I decided to take designated days off during the week. I’ll spend those days working on other projects, such as my house renovation, or a project my mother and I are doing for the library. If something comes up to distract me, I’ll go with it, and, as Ann said, make up the work later. From the outside, my days probably don’t look a lot different. This shift is more of an inside event. I have given myself permission to goof off when I need to.

And it’s worked! I got more accomplished last week than I have in a single day for a long time. And I had some fun along the way. I painted the bathroom, helped a friend with a work-related art project, and took a few good long walks with the dogs, my mom, and Spike. One memorable evening, I watched Spike catch a trophy bass in our secret pit, accessible only by canoe. I still had time to bake a pie and clean the kitchen and do laundry and meet my deadlines. I even worked ahead on long-term goals. It doesn’t get much better than this.

By embracing my time off, I’ve discovered productivity, and instead of feeling guilty and harassed all the time, I’m actually having a good time doing the work I love. I’m pretty sure that’s what Ann was getting at two years ago. I’m not sure if that means I’m a slow learner, or just stubborn. But I guess the key is that I do eventually learn, even if I am reinventing the traditional business model to suit myself. And isn’t that what entrepreneuring is all about?


My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on September 15, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.