Got that stuck in your head now? Good. Me too.

I feel like this is one of those awkward moments where I was supposed to call but didn’t, and then I run into you in the grocery store and say “So…” while shuffling my feet.

So…

I’m being quiet right now. That’s the gist of it. I have a new project in the works that is going to change things up around here quite substantially, but I’m not pushing it.

I’ve discovered something about web strategy. First, it is so hard to be perfect at it when you’re a solopreneur. Either you have no clue what to do next, or you have too much to do next. Or you have an elaborate plan that would work if only you ran on batteries. Or jet fuel.

But unfortunately, we are not robots. We get sleepy, excited, overwhelmed, inspired, jealous, triumphant, and all of these other things that interfere with a well-run machine. I think that’s why 9 to 5 exists. I think that’s why corporate is so…corporate. When you take out the heart, things are much more predictable.

My gold-digging excursion left me people-shy. Me, the girl who loves performing, teaching, speaking, writing, and generally sharing with masses of people. I’m overwhelmed with the attention and interaction. I can’t explain it, but it’s there. And it hasn’t gone away yet, even though the excursion has been over for two weeks.

I generally share a lot around here. I share what’s made me successful, strategies that work, things to avoid. And those things are important. But I’m learning that being perfect in business can not only make you successful; it can also drive you crazy.

I’m hiring my first helper in a few days. Not just talking about it, but actually doing it. I’m focusing on filling my well instead of producing so much. Yes, I’m launching my new thing soon, but I’m not putting a date on it. And I’m actively ignoring the voices in my head that are telling me “You’re not communicating enough; you’re not building enough relationships; you’re not following your own freaking rules.”

They’re my rules. They’ve worked for me and countless others, but I’m not going to die if I break them for a month. Or even two. (Just keep telling yourself that, Sarah.)

Hopefully my people-block will be cleared soon. But even if it isn’t, I’ve learned a few very important things. First, hiring people is the only way to develop any kind of consistency without killing yourself to be perfect. Second, there is time. There is always time. So even if you have to do this alone, don’t dig those spurs in too deep. Your workhorse-self can only sprint for so long before you sputter to a stop.

I think we all agree that as startup business owners, taking care of ourselves is important. So we don’t get burned out…yada, yada, yada. But when we apply that to ourselves personally, it gets a little sketchy. Are we taking care of ourselves, or are we just being lazy? Are we conserving our energy, or are we not taking advantage of our passion? Do we need work-life balance, or is balance for slow-getters?

I certainly don’t have the answers, but I’ve noticed a trend in the business owners I’ve worked with, and it repeats itself over and over. You go through a time of blood-rushing-to-the-head excitement. And then you sober up. At the sobering point, you either decide that you were wrong and you need to start a different business so that the blood-rushing returns. Or you decide to start taking care of the goose.

Trailblazing and caring for the goose

When you start doing what you love for a living, for a while it’s hard. But somehow doing that hard stuff is so easy because you’re excited about the trail-blazing. It’s a rush of adrenaline that can last for months and months.

Are you at that stage? I know the uncertainty is tough, and I feel for that aspect of starting your own business. But I also want to let you in on a secret — that rush of adrenaline is a serious asset that mature businesses remember wistfully. Appreciate it. Languor in it. Use it for all its worth. Sure, take breaks. Eat when you’re hungry; sleep when you’re tired. But I’d argue that when you’re in that initial stage, you can get by with less self-care.

Most business owners I know (myself included) will tell you that the initial sprint was crucial for their business’ current success. Those 14 hour days that flew by…those days allowed them to book themselves solid in a few short months. Those times when they couldn’t sleep because of all the exciting ideas floating through their head…those sleepless nights are when they got their copy written, their website launched, their workflows staked in the ground. The likelihood of having that same energy two years from now is small. Take advantage of it.

Growing tall: When self-care begins to get important

When the startup adrenaline starts to wear off, you notice some changes. You start talking about things like “boundaries”. You start getting protective of your personal life. Or you start wanting to have a personal life. Maybe you start to doubt that this is what you’re supposed to be doing after all. You think a different type of business would be more fulfilling.

You probably just need to take care of your goose.

You know the goose I’m talking about, right? The one that lays the golden eggs. You. You need to realize that working for yourself brings different types of pressures than working for someone else. You’re not riding on a smooth paved road anymore. You are off-roading it in rocky terrain. Your vehicle (errr…goose) needs a higher level of maintenance and at shorter intervals than before.

Maybe you used to gleefully work weekends. Now would be the time to stop. It will take some time to get used to the feeling of not working. You might feel guilty or bored or anxious; expect it. You might even have withdrawals (gotta check EMAIL!). Let yourself have withdrawals. At this stage, burning the candle on both ends makes the goose resentful (or worse, sick).

Now’s also the time to become more economical about your time. Maybe you gathered your audience by spending hours every day interacting on social networks and commenting on blogs. Great. But at this stage, that’s probably not the best use of your time. Figure out more efficient ways to get yourself out there. Start collaborating with other people to get twice (or ten times) as much done in half the time. Don’t disappear from the internet, but be more impactful in your involvement.

Now’s also the time to start planning quarterly vacations or retreats. Put them on the calendar far in advance, or you won’t have time for them. I heartily recommend that at least two of your vacations be 100% work-free. One or two can be more of a reflecting, re-grouping retreat.

Bubble baths and candlelit dinners are not the point

You’re not fragile, obviously. You wouldn’t be in business for yourself if you were. Even if you call yourself a delicate flower (phrase stolen from @copylicious), you’re made of sturdy stuff.

But we’re not looking for mere survival here. We want to flourish. And we have to take the steps to get there. (Read Joe Duffy’s take on it.)

Eventually, you are going to transition to a place where you are enjoying the fruits of your labor. Might as well be now. The point to starting your own business was to free yourself from corporate limits, live your life the way you wanted to live it, spend more time with your family and friends. If you’re not doing that, you might as well go back to work.

I’m in listening mode right now. No talking, just listening. Here’s what I’m hearing:

The Hardest Thing About Lifestyle Design by Corbett Blair

Every Idea Is Unoriginal by David Turnbull

The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior by Leo Babauta

5 Tips for Sounding Smarter (And Writing That Way) by Emma Alvarez Gibson

Guaranteed Goal Achievement: Your Daily, No-Excuses Target by Ali Hale

(How uncharacteristically brief of me. What else should I be listening to?)

First, let me admit to being an idiot. I TOTALLY believed the rumor that balance is for people who don’t love their jobs. It gave me the excuse to work around the clock, in the name of “If I work really really hard, then one day I won’t have to work so hard.” (Now I realize that’s true…because I’d be dead. Dead people don’t have to work hard.)

And a lot of that is fear-driven. If I don’t make $x,xxx by xxxx, then I won’t be able to pay the mortgage. That’s just (my) life, and it puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed and to make things happen. If I didn’t have that pressure, I probably wouldn’t be as successful at this as I have been. People have a tendency to do what they have to do to eat and stay clothed and sheltered.

Newsflash: Resting is productive

This is not a new concept. However, it is something that needs repeating, because people like me have a tendency to run on empty. (And I’m assuming you’re at least something like me.) We drive ourselves to the limit of our time, sleep, and energy resources because we love it. Or we’re addicted to it. Or because “one day we won’t have to work so hard.” Or because we’re scared not to work. If there’s a drawback to working for yourself, this is it.

We can work anytime we want. So…we work all the time. We can work anywhere we want. So we work everywhere. We have a zillion ways to stay connected. So we use all of them.

Thank God we love our jobs or we’d be shooting ourselves.

Each of us has to learn how we recharge best. I went through a time when recharging was hard. I hated it. I went through withdrawals, always wanting to get back on the computer or check my email just one more time. I had lost interest in pretty much everything but my work.

I’m going through a time now where recharging is a little too easy. I’m booked through the beginning of December, so everything is hyper-scheduled and organized. I’ve got my super-secret project that I’ve set a much-too-soon deadline for. I’ve discovered that my site and branding need re-vamping in a major, major way. Like…from scratch (who knew that so many people would think I literally make websites for musicians?). So yeah. I pretty much would love to play Xbox all day instead.

How I’m repelling the burnout

I’m stopping the fear. If me only working 8 hours a day means that my business won’t be growing as fast as I’d like, then I’ll grow slow and learn to like it. If it means I can’t pay all the bills, then somebody else in my circle of concern will step up and help. If it means I can’t take on every project that I’d like to, then the earth will continue to spin.

I’m pushing back self-imposed deadlines. Who said I have to launch my new thing by x? I did. I can just as easily change it to y.

I’m remembering to approach my work as art. That is my core. I never meant to approach my work as “I have to have this much output in a week.” When I approach my work as art, everything resonates from a connection to the creative process. I am not writing so that other people will like me and my work. I am writing because it is an extension of my art. I can break rules. Even (and especially) my own.

Anyone else smell potential burnout in your future? How do you attack it?

Wow. This week has been not my kind of week. First thing Monday morning, I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I wasn’t knocked out because my dentist said it would be easy peasy. Can I just say? That was the MOST TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE of my life. And they only took out two–the two that didn’t really need to be taken out, go figure. So I will be doing this again. 

The rest of the week, I’ve been floating in and out of consciousness. It’s a daily choice between feeling immense pain or extreme nauseousness from the medication. So far, the meds are winning. 

But rest, joyful rest

Even though I have been working (for some reason I really didn’t think this would be a big deal and scheduled my projects as usual), rest has taken a huge priority. I have felt no anxiety this week. No berating myself for not getting everything checked off my list. I actually have an excuse to be kind to myself.

This is not normal for me. I’m pretty ambitious, in case you didn’t know. I want to make a world-changing difference in my lifetime, and my daily list of things to do reflects that.

But this doing nothing on purpose…it’s been, while not wonderful, restful. It’s put an ease into my life that hasn’t been there in years. 

So my question for you is…how do I keep this feeling? Usually, doing nothing is a fate worse than death for me. There’s this whole undercurrent of anxiety that makes resting not worth it at all. (Can anyone relate to that?)

Is there a certain pattern of resting/working that works for you? What do you do when you’re resting that makes you feel good about it? 

I’ll just admit it, my list is driving me nuts. You know…the list. It isn’t really written down, but every time I look at my website, it stays in front of me like a bad pair of windshield wipers with the rubber part flapping off the end. I think things like:

“Man, my article categories suck. How can I even hold my head up around here?”

“Holy moly, I still haven’t made the ’stuff i’m doing’ section auto-update? I was working on that stuff back in February!”

“When the heck am I going to add a section so that people can easily find the series posts? And what is the plural of series anyway? Serieses?”

“Why on earth did I admit to the entire universe that building community is tough for me? I’ve dedicated most of my life to figuring out the web. I should be a paragon of community!

Or maybe I’m just down today, and everything I’ve put off because I’m working on paid stuff is finally slapping me in the face with a little too much force.

Even worse, you know what I started thinking today? I started thinking, “Man, I’m just adding to everybody’s list every time I post something.” I got all self-pity-ish. I started pitying you for all of the web ‘must-dos’ that I pile on your plate. And then I got to feeling bad for the entire world who doesn’t have time for all of the stuff that they need to be doing. (Yes, it’s been a bad day. I actually pleaded with my 4 year old to cheer me up today, and then I ate an entire bag of cherry bombers.)

Salvation from overwhelm

Thankfully, I’m not one to wallow in this kind of stuff. I just spew it all out here and move on. But what do we do when we know that there are about a million things to do to our websites that will bring us more income…but we can’t quite get around to doing any of them?

Focus on what’s important.
For me, that’s continuing to make my content better. The web is such a friggin competitive place. The barrier of entry is so low that anybody with a library card can blog or tweet or write an e-book or (God forbid) build a website. And there is a lot of really great content out there. I have to be different, and I have to be better. That is the Big Thing that sometimes gets pushed to the background when “urgent” tasks are crowding me like a sackful of mice. (Eww. I do not know why I’ve been blessed with a penchant for strange analogies.)

Get that list out of your head.
On paper, it’s check-off-able. In your head, it’s a nagging guilt trip that you don’t need to be on. Be specific when you’re writing your list. Don’t just put “Update categories.” That is not something you can actually do without doing a bunch of other things first. Write “Log in to WordPress.” “Open categories section.” “Decide what the categories should be.” And so on.

Realize that things don’t take as long as you think.
Updating my categories? Okay, maybe it’s a big task, but it would still only take an hour or two. Adding a section for my series posts? I could throw up something simple that would do the job in about 30 minutes. Creating an editorial calendar for the next month? An hour, tops. We think these things take such a long time, but they really don’t. And once we do them, we feel lighter.

Set a timer every day.
Devote 15 minutes to working on your website. Then just do the next small thing that will get you closer to the end of your list. Login to WordPress. Open that page that needs sprucing. Spruce. Then move onto the next thing.

Do it. Please.

I don’t want us to work on our websites because I said it was important. It really is important. It is the place where your customers and clients come to see how you do things. If you’re worth it. We don’t need to convince them otherwise just because we’re overwhelmed with all the stuff that we should be doing, but aren’t. Steady, progressive improvements can be just as monumental over time as a complete site overhaul.

You know what’s annoying? Looking at a page of images and then clicking the “next” button. Waiting for that page to load, and then clicking “next” again. Repeating the process 500 times.

My favoritey-est thing about using Firefox as my browser is that there are lots of useful add-ons you can enjoy. One of the best is Greasemonkey. Once you install Greasemonkey, you can install these nifty little things called userscripts. (If you’re super-nerdy, you can even build your own.) These little scripts can potentially awesome-ize your web experience in a bunch of cool ways.

For instance, since I’ve grabbed AutoPagerize, I no longer have to deal with clicking “next” a million times to find what I want. I just scroll and scroll and scroll to my heart’s content. The page automatically expands with new content to meet my ever-growing informational appetite. It works on Flickr, on Twitter, and on most other sites that require clicking “next,” “next,” “next next next next next….argggggh.”

Here’s the low-down:

1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Restart Firefox
3. Install AutoPagerize
4. Look for a little monkey head on the verrry bottom right hand corner of your browser
5. Click on the monkey head to activate it if it’s greyed-out
6. Go do a flickr search or look at your Twitter stream to see the script in action

See? You don’t even need to be a super-geek to figure it out. Productivity for all.

I’ve gotten to the point where I really need to hire a virtual assistant. It’s pretty surreal for me. I’m excited to hire her, but at the same time, two things are bugging me.

First of all, what in the world will she do? Yes, I’m busy pretty much non-stop. It would be great to not have to do quite so much. But is there anything on my plate that I don’t have to do myself?

Email? No, can’t cut that umbilical cord. Proposals? No. That’s something that only I can do, even though it’s rather boring. Contracts? Maybe. Invoicing? No. Freshbooks does that for me. (And rather cheaply, I might add.) Writing? Ha! Yeah right. Twitter? Umm…then what would be the point? Obviously not web design or code. That’s kind of my job. Marketing? Well, umm…most of my marketing is done word of mouth. I don’t really have a whole lot to do there.

So basically, she can format MaTweeps articles for me and get them ready for me to write. But MaTweeps is something that I don’t even get paid to do. I don’t have a clear plan for where that is going. And that brings me to my second question. Is it worth paying somebody $30 an hour to do something that doesn’t generate income? Should I even be doing something that doesn’t generate income? And why am I always starting things like that?

Breathe, Sarah.

Really, I’m just processing all of this on you guys. I know our business has reached a tipping point (and that’s a good thing). John is getting ready to graduate in May with a degree in animation. That means that all of his time is spent working on his culminating project (a short film).

While we started this whole thing out as a husband and wife team, in reality, John is getting ready to move into a whole different branch of production. We’ll probably be under the same umbrella, but I’ll be in charge of this half of it. That means I’m starting to build relationships with people that I know and trust so that we can collaborate. I’m starting think bigger than my little home studio. I’m starting to think of maids and preschool and…virtual assistants.

I’m sure every small business owner goes through this at some point or another. You’re ready to delegate, but…you’re not. You feel like you are the only person who can do all of this stuff. After all, you are SO BRILLIANT. Not everyone can format a coherent email or put that spicy little touch on a client contract, right?

Well. I’ve obviously got a lot of growing to do with this issue. I’m rebelling against my own good sense. Of course, that’s nothing new.

Image by Maxine

I’ve been feeling a bit philosophical lately, being smack dab in the middle of Sophie’s World. So beware. I might even should beware myself. Writing posts in the middle of a philosophical muse is probably not the best idea. But it has gotten me thinking about the work I do.

Ever since I found out about the internet (that would be in 1995, when my family got our first computer), I’ve been magnetized to it. It has pulled me in and somehow replaced part of my actual world. As I think I’ve mentioned before, a large portion of my life is lived online.

Most of the time, I’m happy with it. I enjoy my work. I can work for ten straight hours and not realize that I haven’t eaten. Or blinked.

But then sometimes I wonder…is this whole thing even real? What makes something real? Is it more real if you work in a busy office with twenty other people? Would it be more real if my work were on canvas hanging somewhere? Is it more real when people talk about it? When people purchase something from a website I designed? When some kind of physical transaction takes place?

And what about all of these people I know online? These relationships I’m building…are they real? (By now you’re thinking…yep, you definitely should have waited until the philosophical trip was over to write in your blog again. And you’re probably right. But I do have a point…)

Web work is real because it has influence. Sitting here in my home office, typing this post, I have influence. And if you have any kind of web real estate, you do too. If you work on the web, at least part (if not all) of your job is to increase your influence. Most of what we do on the web needs to be accomplishing one of two things:

1. Paying the bills
2. Increasing our influence

Period. Anything else we’re doing is fluff and can be eliminated.

So that’s what I’m working on this month. I’m de-cluttering my web life by evaluating where I spend my time and where I NEED to be spending my time. Is it paying the bills? Is it increasing my influence? If no, it gets dumped. If yes, I embrace it like a long-lost uncle.

What one thing can YOU eliminate? Think real hard. (And Kelvin, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, you still have to read my blog.)

Image by wilsoncruk

(Wow. Pictures on the blog! Somebody give an Amen!)

Somebody twittered about Zenbe.com the other day. There are so many new applications and services out there that I barely ever give them the time of day. But for some reason I clicked. I think that reason was because somebody said it was “email for social media” or some such nonsense. I was curious as to what that would look like. And when they said I could keep my current email address, I was convinced to give it a look-see.

The simple interface impressed me. It seems to take the “don’t give your users stuff they don’t need until they actually need it” approach. I like the fact that it easily integrates with Twitter and Facebook. It’s so nice to have that all in one place. And let’s face it. It’s just nice to have a new way of looking at your email. Even Mac Mail gets a little boring.

So I was tweeting my little heart out about how great Zenbe was, and then I got a little deeper. How many people out there use rules to organize your email? Am I the only hardcore user of email rules?

Anyway, I tried to set up my rules (I was about to be committed to this thing), and then the weirdest thing happened. I set up a rule for certain emails to be tagged “clients”, which was fine. Then I set up another rule that was tagged “urgent”. It actually tagged it both “clients” and “urgent”. And on and on until every rule had the tag I specified, plus all of the tags I had used since I logged in. Weird. After messing with it for a long time, I’ve concluded that the rules function in Zenbe is possessed. At least in Firefox.

But the good news actually far outweighs the bad. Everything is exactly where you would think it should be. The interface is very intuitive, and the features are extremely useful. I especially loves the task lists, the way the calendar is integrated, and the files panel (it collects all of the files you’ve been emailed in one place – automatically). And the environment is just plain nice.

All in all, I think it could be a really great application. Anything that integrates a lot of those things that I do on a daily basis is fantastic in my book. I think I’m willing to stick the rules issue through and see if it isn’t fixed in future upgrades. But I’m not totally ditching my Mac Mail yet. Almost, but not quite.