My new corner office - and the job to go with it.   

January 1, 2009 | 2 Comments

The Feminists lied to me!

As a child of the late 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with the general understanding that housekeeping was what a woman did if she lacked the education, ambition, or intelligence to do anything else.  Running a household was the most mindless thing a woman could do.  Of course we could work 80 hours a week and slip in a little housework here and there.  No big deal, right?

Ha!

I’ve done both.  Ok, maybe I’ve never pulled an 80-hour work week.  Not even in the late 90’s when you had to put in 80-hour work weeks before the cool geeks would even give you the time of day.  Sorry, I guess I missed out on that bit of geek cred.  I kinda like sleep occasionally.  But I’ve been a working mother with a corporate job, a work-at-home Mom running my own businesses, and even (for brief periods) a stay-at-home Mom with no outside work responsibilities.

Anybody who tells you that managing a household is mindless has never actually done it.  Running a household - at least a household like mine! - is like negotiating Middle East peace, balancing the federal budget, running a corporation, and changing blow-out diapers, all at the same time at 4 AM on the day after Thanksgiving at WalMart.

For quite some time, I’ve been operating under the idea that if I could only get things to a baseline, get everything organized and figured out, life would run smoothly.  Unfortunately, I really need peace and quiet to do that kind of thinking, and well…that’s a pretty rare commodity around here.  Rather than giving up on the idea and just accepting life as one crisis after another, I’m trying another tactic:

I’ve taken a new job:  CEO of Ballad Family, Inc.

Responsibilities include oversight of various divisions including Education, Food Service, Accounting, Human Resources, and Site Maintenance.

Salary: $1000 per month.

According to the budget, there should be about $1000 left over at the end of every month.  So why have we been living paycheck to paycheck?  I have no idea.  I can’t even begin to tell you where that $1000 goes every month.  So, that’s my first goal.  To accurately track our budget, eliminate waste, and stick that $1000 into a savings account where it can’t go wandering off.  To achieve this, I’ll need to examine each area of this operation and streamline it.

I’ll be sharing my progress with you, in the hopes that what I’m doing will inspire and give you some practical tools to use in your own household.

And yes, I even have a corner office.  My Christmas present from DH was a complete re-organizatin of our bedroom.  What was once a storage and sleeping room is now an oasis of order!  I’ll post more about that on Tuesday, when I re-join Tackle it Tuesdays.

Being a successful writer requires a little insanity   

March 5, 2008 | Comments

No, I don’t mean the J.D. Salinger, Edgar Allan Poe style alcohol and drug induced madness. I’m talking about good, old-fashioned schizophrenia.

On one hand, you have to be a dreamer to even consider this type of life. Think about it - we’re talking about quitting a nice, stable job with a regular paycheck with little more than the hope that you’ll be able to replace that income with writing. You’ve probably heard the statistics - how millions of people want to write, but fewer than 10% actually do it for a living.

So how do those 10% beat the odds?

They’re disciplined and practical. Yep, all those half-crazed dreamers who quit their jobs have to be fanatically practical to be successful. They treat writing like any other job, putting in the hours even when they don’t feel particularly inspired. But at the same time, they’re crazy enough to follow their dreams despite the massive impracticality.

HUH?

Without going into too much detail, I’ve decided to turn down a project that all but landed in my lap. The money is decent, nothing to retire on, but not bad. The work isn’t even particularly difficult. So what’s the problem? I’d have to spend too much of my available working hours slogging through this project instead of working on fiction.

What it all comes down to is career planning. In 5 years, what kind of writer do I want to be? I want to be a novelist, and the only way to get there is to write this crazy story. I can’t do that if my virtual desk is completely covered by meaningless “just get it over with” projects.

Sometimes you have to take on projects that don’t lift you to the heights of inspiration, just to pay the bills. But other times, you have to take that leap of faith and turn them down so you have time, energy and creativity to pursue the dream.

End of the month, time to plan!   

February 27, 2008 | Comments

It’s February 27. This Saturday is March 1.

So what? In my experience, the last few days of the month is the most crucial. If I scratch out time today or tomorrow to write out our budget for next month and plan the projects I know are coming up in March, odds are around 90% that we will stay withing budget and complete most or all of what we want to.

If I don’t get around to working up the budget and planning the month until sometime during the first week of March, guess what? First off, we will have already gone over budget one way or another. Second, I’ll feel like I’m playing catch-up all month long, and I won’t get nearly as much done as I’d like.

So that’s the goal for the next two days - write up a budget and plan out the projects I need to tackle in March.

Sprinting in a Marathon World   

February 25, 2008 | Comments

I’m a sprinter. As in, give me a short project that requires 100% of my time and energy over a long-term thing that only requires 10% any day. Unfortunately, life is all about the Marathon. So how does a confirmed Sprinter manage to finish a Marathon?

She starts by breaking down a Marathon project into Sprints. Take this blog for example. You might have noticed that despite my best intentions, I don’t post nearly as regularly as I’d like. I tend to be sporadic. I’d love to post something insightful or useful every weekday.

Ok, so now we have the starting line and the finish line mapped out:

Starting line: sporadic posts whenever something useful crosses my mind.
Finish line: useful posts 5 days per week.

At this point you’re probably sitting there asking, “So what’s the problem? Take 10 minutes and post - how hard is that??”

(It’s ok, I’m not offended. I’ve asked myself the same exasperated question over and over.) The only answer I have is this: “I have no clue why I can’t seem to sit down and write a simple blog post every morning.”

Wait! There it is - a clue to the problem. My original goal (starting small) was to post twice a week. That means, I have to sit and think about it. Did I post yet this week? I know, everybody tells you to start small, don’t set unrealistic goals at first. But I’m going to stand here and say just the opposite. Set big goals that fit into your routine. For me, it will be easier to post every single day than it was to post once a week. Why? Because I don’t have to think about it. It will become a habit - every afternoon, I’ll post something to the blog, then move on to working on the next short story or the current chapter in my nonfiction book.

So here’s the next question. If you’ve read my blog, what would you like to see more of? What types of issues are you curious about? I’m working on an editorial calendar so that you’ll know what to expect when you swing by on a Tuesday afternoon, and so that when I’m staring at the blank screen on Friday I’ll at least have some idea of what to write about.

There’s no such thing as a small victory   

February 11, 2008 | 1 Comment

A victory is a victory, period!

This weekend, I had a pretty ambitious list of stuff to get done. This was the first weekend we were home after traveling the for the past two weekends, so I was in major catch-up mode. On Friday night, I made a comprehensive list of everything that needed to get done, appointments we had, everything. I wrote it on a big sheet of newsprint (borrowed from the kids’ art supplies!) and tacked it up on the living room wall.

By Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and convinced that we had spent all weekend running and gotten nothing done. Until I started marking off all the tasks that we had accomplished, and I realized that we had actually finished well over half of what I planned. Considering the ambitiousness of the plan, getting half of it done is a real victory!

When we label our victories over the craziness that is life “small” we minimize the time, effort, and creativity that went into those accomplishments! There’s no such thing as a “small” victory! Take the time to celebrate your victories and see how much more motivated you are to keep on going, even on days when your motivation is practically non-existent.

Hitting the reset button   

February 4, 2008 | Comments

Last week was crazy, and I haven’t a clue as to why. (Well, that’s not actually true - but we’ll get to that in a minute.) By Thursday morning, I found myself staring at a chaotic, cluttered house and two little boys demanding to know what we would do for homeschool that morning.

Uh . . .

Don’t even get me started on what we ate for dinner last week. Let’s just say Pizza Hut made their weekly sales goals. Then add in a freak snowstorm that kept everybody home on Friday and an unplanned trip to visit relatives for the weekend, just for grins.

It was a crazy week. But the thing is, none of this was all that earth-shattering. It certainly wasn’t enough to reduce a normally competent adult (or so my friends tell me) into a quivering mass unable to make the smallest decision. So what on Earth happened?

I was tired last Sunday night. I didn’t feel like spending an hour or two on schedule wrangling, menu planning (let alone grocery shopping), or resetting my household systems to get ready for the week. The result? I spent the entire week making it up as I went along. Unfortunately, that’s an exhausting way to live! Trust me. Maybe it works for some people, but for me it’s a one-way ticket to mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. I didn’t get any more than the bare minimum of writing done either.

So last night, I hit the reset button, and that’s the whole point of this post. I’d like to share with you how I pulled out of the beginnings of a tailspin.

First, I know that I have four major responsibilities in life (all of roughly the same importance):

• Writing
• Homeschooling
• Running a household
• Maintaining a healthy marriage

I set out a separate piece of paper for each category, then listed out everything that I knew I needed to get done for that category, including the raft of things from the week before that I didn’t accomplish. I find it helpful to break things down further into subcategories - fiction and nonfiction, each subject we cover in homeschool, etc.

Once I had all that down on paper, I could start to feel my head start to clear. Sure, I had a full week’s worth of tasks laid out on each of the four papers, but I’m good at ignoring trivial little details like that!

Next, out came my daily planner sheets. I’ve already got sections laid out for each of my four major categories, so I know that I have blocks of time set aside for each broad area of my life. Then it’s just a matter of fitting everything on my master to-do lists into the available time chunks on my daily planner sheets.

Sometimes it doesn’t all fit, so rather than kid myself into believing that I’ll somehow accomplish 6 hours worth of work in 2, I have a few blocks of time in my schedule that I can use for work if I have to. I’d rather not - I really don’t like working late at night, but if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I do. It’s the price I pay for not getting anything done last week, or for not working efficiently during my normal working hours.

Finally, I looked around the house and decided what absolutely had to be done in order to have the family functioning for the beginning of the week. The living room (where we do homeschool) had to be tidied and vacuumed. The dishes had to be done and there had to be clean laundry for everyone for Monday.

All told, it took me about 2 1/2 hours yesterday to get the schedule figured out, a menu and grocery list, and to do the minimum housework required to keep me sane on Monday. Not exactly how I wanted to spend my Sunday evening, but it feels so good to wake up Monday morning without that knot in the pit of my stomach wondering how on Earth I’m going to crawl out from under the massive pile of backlogged work.

So here’s to a week of fresh starts - if I can do it, so can you!

Being gentle with yourself - “Blue Monday”   

January 21, 2008 | 5 Comments

Here we are - starting the fourth week of January. One of my goals for this year was to post to this blog three times a week. The last post I put up was on New Year’s Eve!

I got up this morning, turned on the local news and saw the headline “Blue Monday.” Apparently this day is the most depressing day of the whole year - between cold, gray weather, credit card bills coming in from December’s spending splurges, and broken New Year’s Resolutions - suddenly the third Monday of January feels less like a new beginning and more like the first day of a long year of the same old problems as last year.

But that’s the great thing about Monday mornings. It’s always fresh start!

Join me this week in beating the January blues! To get things started, I’m posting my own list of goals for 2008. Please, leave a comment with your own goals - and forget whether you’ve already “blown” them. We’re starting fresh today.

My 2008 Goals:

• Finish writing my nonfiction book, Securing PHP Web Applications (by March)
• Complete edits on Securing PHP Web Applications (by May)
• Write Second Chances, my in-progress novel (around July)
• Implement a steady promotions plan based on the advice of my brilliant publicist, Shauntelle Hamlett of Get Known Promotions including posting to my blog at least twice a week. You’re all witnesses now - I will be posting here on Mondays and Wednesdays at a minimum, and hopefully on Fridays as well.

What are your goals for 2008?

Setting goals for 2008   

December 31, 2007 | Comments

It’s New Years Eve, and I know for some that means parties and Champaign. But for me, it’s goal-setting day!

December tends to be the Free-For-All month, when all normalcy gets thrown out the nearest window. We need that sometimes, a break from routine, a chance to do something special. But January becomes Pick Up the Pieces month. That can be demoralizing, but it can also be exciting - a chance to step back and decide where you want your life to go in the next year.

Join me on Families Online Radio at 5pm Central time to discuss goal setting for 2008! (If you miss the live broadcast, you can pick up the show later at BlogTalkRadio.com or on iTunes.)