Getting Away

Finding time for a vacation when you are self employed is difficult.  Sure there is "flexibility" in your day to day schedule, but carving out a week or more seems impossible. 

It isn't.  Almost nothing in business can't wait a week or so.  The practice of law or the operation of a small business isn't like emergency medicine.  Sure, somebody might need a Temporary Restraining Order to stop the use of a parking lot or some such, or an inventory shipment may show up unexpectedly, but even those items can probably wait a few days.  

The day before you go away is always far busier than you intended.  No matter how much you tried to get all your loose ends tied in the week leading up to that last day of work, you inevitably have more to do than you wanted.  Filing, phone calls, checks, last minute court filings.  They all HAVE to be done that day, even though those very same action items have been languishing under your time sheets for weeks.  Can't they wait until you get back?  Don't be silly. 

In the course of clearing my desk of documents to be filed by my assistant during my absence, I located items that should have been dealt with much earlier.  So what did I do?  I did them.  Right then and there.  Treating each new find like a new project.  I let them control me even though they got in the way of my other, more current projects and needs.

This "shiny object" approach to getting ready to go was satisfying, but ultimately inefficient.  It is a far better practice, I would imagine, to treat every day as if you were leaving the next day for a week away.  That would assure that filing would be prepared, calls would be made and returned, checks would be cut and invoices would be sent.  I'm going to employ that mindset when I get back and see how it goes.  With any luck, my desk will continue to look like it does now:  a piece of polished wooden furniture, and not an oversized pile of manila folders, three hole binders and assorted 3M Post it Notes.  

I do need this vacation, I just wish I didn't have to earn it so hard.