Are you finding that life gets busier and busier, seemingly by the day?
Since leaving the London job for my beloved businesses & a day job nearer home, I try really hard not to glorify busy – to only say I’m busy if I actually am, and to try and make time to live among the madness.
But lately it has just been constant go, go, go – and everyone I speak to seems to feel similarly.
It’s relentless…
There are our businesses, our day jobs, our evening jobs, our partners / children / parents / pets who both want and need our attention & love. Our friendships old & new, our self care (always slips to the bottom of the pile, it seems) and our basic needs – eating, sleeping, talking to people. And that doesn’t even account for the technology – which seems to chew an enormous amount of time either in mindless scrolling, or fixing the bloody devices when they refuse to work properly…!
We are all constantly keeping too many balls in the air and it is knackering – and probably not very good for us.
My inner multipod has just piped up to say that plate spinning is what she does best – but even a professional plate spinner needs a break every now and again.
Planning ahead
This morning, some sixth sense made me decide to be ten minutes late for the day job so I could put the slow cooker on with a casserole for dinner. Not something I’d normally do (I’m usually running late without any excuses or decisions required!) but OH, how grateful I was to come home to dinner simmering away.
Because today, I:
- juggled the day job between 9 and 5.15,
- chatted to a friend about her new kitten on the way to the car park,
- raced home and spent the last hours of daylight photographing some stationery for a magazine which needs sample images by tomorrow,
- periodically removed my cats from said photographs,
- imported & edited & exported the & sent them to the magazine,
- responded to client & customer emails,
- Instagrammed for a couple of my businesses,
- made rice to go with the casserole,
- put laundry in, hung laundry out,
- lost a cat and found her on the heated airer (which is a new hiding place but I can’t fault her, it’s nice and snuggly),
- filled in my bullet journal & tried not to panic at my endless to do list,
- talked to one of my best friends on the phone and one via Whatsapp,
- caught up on all the Whatsapp chats I have missed,
- text my Mum to see how her day is going,
- fed the cats and cleared up the regurgitated biscuits one of them puked up,
- all before I had a chance to sit down with my own dinner and read for ten minutes while I ate.
And now I am writing this post.
Have a picture of Luna on the airer, oblivious to my panic when I thought she’d vanished…Â
I have an editing queue a mile long, marketing to do so that my mermaid mini sessions can go ahead, blogging because my head will explode if I don’t get some of these ideas out of it soon, gifts to buy and people to write to, Dadmin to do, life admin to do, bills to pay and a household to keep running. My wardrobe is very much currently a floordrobe.
Like you, generally I don’t mind all of this chaos, because my priorities do not include ironing my clothes ahead of when I need them, and I will always choose cuddles with my cats or writing a blog post over deep cleaning the kitchen or folding my clothes. But it is kind of exhausting always being behind schedule, or like today, remembering once you’ve already locked up for the night that your bins need to be out before 7am.
A reminder that you are brilliant
All of this is a precursor to saying that I think it’s really important, whether you’re a fledgling or a seasoned entrepreneur, to remember to acknowledge just how much you are achieving on a daily basis.
Regardless of what other people think you “should” be doing instead, and regardless of what you think you “should” be achieving, you are doing SO much more than you give yourself credit for.
Even if it doesn’t feel like much, or as much as you’d like, you are doing epically well! And I would like to take this opportunity to tell you that YOU ARE FANTASTIC.
Truly. Even if  most some of the time you feel frazzled, deranged and barely able to face the world.
Plus, you’re in great company!
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I’d love to hear your stories of juggling life, business & the rest, and how you manage it – drop me an email and say hi! Â And don’t forget to for intermittent emails, and a group of likeminded people on the same mad journey.Â
