This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Thursday, November 30, 2023
6:44pm
I made a plan. The plan was to finish all of my December client work… before December.
Well, before the first Monday in December, anyway. Seven blogs, nine emails, several hundred social media posts and a handful of miscellany, all so that I could take the month of December off, where off means work on our business stuff, prepare end of year taxes, finish office organizing project, read SEO book, learn Photoshop and do the thousand other things there are never time for, maybe even with time to do something I actually want to do.
It wasn’t an undoable plan. Just a very aggressive one. I put it into motion before Thanksgiving and got my brain in gear.
Here is thing you don’t always realize: a day is filled with a LOT of distractions. Two hours trying not to get charged five times for a gift. The kitchen sink backing up so you have to get maintenance in to look at it which means first you have to clean out the space under the sink so you don’t look like the slob you are. A chair deciding to break so you have to spend time figuring out where to get a spare part and calling three places before one will get back to you.
Here’s another thing you don’t always realize: doing that much work all at once is hard. And also boring, because let’s face it, not all my clients run circuses and ice cream shops. One of them manufactures steel pins. The kind that hold things together, like sunglasses and construction buckets. They are not the most exciting things on the planet.
Another sells plastic boxes. Empty ones. I mean, how creative can you get with that? The answer is: very, if you spend hours thinking about how to come up with 500 interesting words.
I spend a lot of hours coming up with interesting words.
On the plus side, I have pared down my client list to people I like who are not hard to deal with, so they are usually pleased even when the words aren’t very exciting.
Anyway, that was the plan.
And given the distractions, I worked long into the evenings this week, until 10 or 11:00, sometimes even later. Dinner went into the slow cooker. I’m pretty sure I haven’t showered since last Wednesday.
And my brain is fried. It’s funny how when you think of being exhausted you more often think of physical exertion. Riding ten miles on the Peloton is exhausting. Running around like a madwoman cleaning for holiday guests or for maintenance is exhausting.
But thinking is really exhausting. There are not a lot of synonyms for “plastic boxes,” I can tell you that much. You have to think pretty hard to say more than two words about them, where those two words are… plastic boxes.
So that’s what I’ve been doing this week and I’m well and truly spent. Tomorrow I’m aiming to get through the last bit of what’s left. If there are no distractions and everything goes according to plan I will be… well, not done but mostly done. Because there are still approvals and last minute things and inevitably something will come up that I need to do during the month.
But I’ll be done enough and it will be so wonderful that it will be worth the pain.
This is all you’re getting from me tonight because did I mention my brain is fried? Sadly, that doesn’t even count as dinner.
Photo: I found this one of a burnt dinner that was too hilarious to pass up. Exactly how I feel.