I am a dorky Christian, husband to my beautiful wife & best friend and father of three amazing children. In my spare time, I like to play guitar and coach little kids' baseball.
I use this website to log my random thoughts (which doesn't seem to be that frequent).
I am a designer, developer and web analyst for my company, Visual Notion.
Contact me if you need something.
I've been through two opposing seasons in the past couple of weeks. One season felt like a drought that caused a lot of concern for our family. There wasn't much of anything (work/project-wise) coming in for about three months. There were some small items here and there, but not a larger full website project that we needed.
The season I'm in now is also cause for concern as I'm hoping I can get all of this work I've now been blessed with completed without any bottlenecks. I'm not complaining; it's just that I'm pretty much a one-man shop and want to make sure I don't have the problems I experienced last year with about 3-4 major projects colliding at the corner of Undocumented-Drupal-Bugs-Avenue and Needed-To-Be-Billed-Yesterday Street.
The stress from one situation to the next can wear on you. This year, I've gone from trying to market my business hard to questioning my lively hood altogether with no clean answers either way. Although, we've had an influx in RFPs (Requests for Proposals), the replies had been slow and painful to wait for.
So now I'm faced with trying to get some projects wrapped up so I don't wind up in a situation like last year (which taught me some good things). I certainly don't want to get burned out or bored with what I do so I've made a point to learn some new things by purposely adding design and code features to projects that I don't currently know how to do. I learn better on the fly, anyway. (Nothing is more boring than learning to do something for the sake of learning it... I need a project to apply it to)
After praying about it, it occurred to me that I need to reward myself with something small with every completed project. I've decided it would be beneficial to have a list of small things my wife and I would like to have; whether that be an album from iTunes, a pair of tennis shoes, etc.
Just that thought alone helped me get out of my 'burned-out' feeling and brought some energy to me this morning (despite not sleeping well lately).
Yes, paying bills is a blessing. Yes, being able to have work coming in is wonderful. But sometimes, we need a carrot dangled in front of us that is a fun item worth aiming for. It's not that we're going to go crazy or anything. I mean we live pretty frugally. I think we can swing $10 from iTunes, etc. when a project is completed. Maybe we could reward ourselves with something larger when a certain dollar amount is billed in a given period.
So... There it is. We're going to reward ourselves when a project is completed. I like it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got my eye on an album or two I'd like to get by next week.
