In March I set a simple goal for myself to write 13 500 word blog posts for this site during this quarter.
So far I’ve written two including this one.
I originally planned on writing one blog post a week but that hasn’t happened. Why? And what am I going to do differently to achieve this goal and what could you take away from this blog post?
Let’s take a step back and examine how I got here. Currently I’m writing this blog post at 5am, way before I start working my day job. I’m usually not up at this hour but on this particular day I find myself awake. I couldn’t sleep last night due to many reasons so instead of just laying awake in bed I decided to get up and work on my personal goals. Today is an important day at work because we’re launching a site that has caused trouble for us and I’m concerned about how smooth the launch is going to go. I guess I’m writing this post as a theraputic way of dealing with my stress about that project, as a way to control something in my life and also make progress. Happiness is progress. I’ll save more about that philosophy that in a later blog post.
I would like to get into the habit of doing this every day, I don’t have to get up at 5am but I don’t want to be rolling out of bed at 8:30-9am like I have been. I’ve been working 12-14 hour days for my day job and it has wrecked my sleep schedule and my calendar that I talked about in my last post. So what am I going to do about it? I’m going to set rules for myself, feel free to adapt them or add to them. I’d love to hear about them if you do set rules for yourself like I am, reach out to me on Twitter @richiekastl.
- Stop working around 7pm if I haven’t already
- In bed no later than 8:30pm on weeknights
- Wake up at 5:15am
- Dedicate 1 hour of time to this blog before working
These rules are simple enough for me to follow and will lead to future success of this blog. I could also follow these rules if I have to put in 12-14 hour days.
I would like it if I didn’t have to work that many hours, but the reality of the situation right now is that I have to if I want to keep our clients happy and make sure projects are done in the time that we said they would be. I don’t have a leader title at my company but I still take 100% responsibility of every project that I’m on. I treat every single one of them like I own the company. Eventually there will come a point to where I could start working normal hours again once we get through this hump.
I think that it is good to stare at your problems in its cold dead face. If you accept your problems for what they are you can start to address them. I could have taken a different path and decided to just let this blog die and blamed the fact that I’m working extraordinary hours on its demise, taking the responsibility off of my shoulders. It’s something that’s out of my control so it would be completely understandable to a reasonable person. But I decided to take 100% responsibility and find a way to keep it going and achieve my goal.
I hope that this has helped you in some way to help achieve something you’re trying to accomplish. Thank you for reading.