I work for myself, which I’ve done full time for the past six years. Being able to do so is something that I’m tremendously grateful for, though I can’t say that it always works out perfectly.

One of the major challenges that I have is managing time well. I ensure that clients get timely responses to inquiries, but beyond that I find prioritizing to be difficult, to say the least.

Making this more of a problem is that there are times when I simply don’t do great work. When my tires spin and kick up mud but don’t find traction. When some other analogy for finding myself surfing the web or staring at my code editor shockingly yields nothing in terms of deliverables.

Again, thankfully I can handle those times, professionally at least. Sure I may work slower on projects than I might otherwise, limiting the returns that I can get, but I work on my own terms darnit! I get to direct the course of my life and make that mythical work-life balance a thing.

Except I can’t, because I carve out time for myself, but usually define that as time that I can be heads down on a project without having to worry about some other tasks that need to be done. The list of client deliverables is never ending, and when they are all satisfied the list of my own projedcts is even longer and growing.

Being tired can be a beast. The kind of tired that keeps you from doing your best work, but also the kind of tired that keeps you from focusing on work in the first place. Where anything that is not an immediate deadline gets pushed off because the mindset isn’t there. Where you lie down to take a quick nap and wake up more tired than before, or don’t even fall asleep in the first place.

I’m mainly writing this because at least five nights in a row I’ve been unable to sleep well and told myself every day that I’d be so tired come night that sleep would naturally come. Last night might have finally been the first restful night this week, after an hour of tossing and turning first.

Honestly I’m just jumping back into blogging as a rambling exercise in moving some of the thoughts that concern me out of my mind and owning up to them publicly. I do have some tools and tricks that I use to keep myself engaged that I’ll write about this month, but I wanted to start by acknowleding that with the best of intentions there are days that I have little to show and don’t even feel rested when they end.

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