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7 signs it’s time to re-balance your life

September 15, 2011 By rjones 18 Comments

priorities, time management

Did you quit your full-time job in order to pursue a dream of indentured servitude — or even slavery?

Would-be entrepreneurs always think life will be better without a boss or a 9-to-5 schedule. We plan to work on our own time, set our own priorities, and pursue the projects we’re passionate about.

And then one day it hits you: “I’m working from 5 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., my weekends are non-existent, I never see the people I love, and I’ve gained 2 inches around the middle.”

Wait, you didn’t add 2 inches? Maybe I’m projecting. The point is, we all have our own warning signs that things have gotten out of whack. Exercise was a big one for me: The gym is just an elevator ride away, Central Park jogging paths are right outside my door, and I still managed to pack on the pounds. I have skinny genes, but I can’t get into my skinny jeans. Clearly it’s time to re-calibrate.

When you’re the boss, there’s no one to shut off the lights, remind you to take lunch, or urge you to enroll in the office wellness program. Instead, you find yourself pushing harder, taking on new projects and working longer hours until …

Until what, exactly? How do you know that business has taken over your life and it’s time to get back into balance?

I put that question to some of my favorite bloggers and business thinkers. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in some of their responses.

You know it’s time to re-balance when …

  1. The only question your friends ever ask you is, “How’s work?” (Amy Tobin, Ariel Marketing Group)
  2. You show up on time for a family dinner, and everyone wonders what’s wrong (Tim Berry, Bplans/Palo Alto Software)
  3. You’ve been dying to see the premier of a new movie, and you suddenly realize it’s already playing on HBO (Rieva Lesonsky, Small Biz Daily)
  4. You forget to kiss your wife goodnight, but you’d never sign off Twitter without saying goodbye to your tweeps (Mark Babbitt, YouTern)
  5. You can’t remember the ages of your own grandchildren (Annette Penney, Inspire & Acquire)
  6. Your spouse asks “Are you all right?” more than 2 times in any given day (Rick Manelius, RickManelius.com)
  7. You would lose your entire sense of identity if your work were taken away from you (Christian Hollingsworth, Smart Boy Designs)

Tim Berry adds another point that’s worth mentioning: “When you pretend you’ll make it up to your family later, after the business is successful, then it’s time to re-balance.”

That flies in the face of many so-called “experts,” who insist that entrepreneurs owe 100% of their attention to the business in its early days. “Make the sacrifice now,” they argue, “and you’ll have more control of your time later on.”

In reality, it rarely works that way. Priorities become habits, and habits are notoriously hard to break. If we can’t make time now for the things that really matter, chances are we’ll never get around to it.

With that, I think I’m going to turn down a lucrative white paper job that was offered to me yesterday. I have friends I need to re-connect with. I don’t want to resort to a dog-walker. And it’s not like the gym is going to come to me.

What about you? What are your personal warning signs that work has taken over your life? Please join the conversation below.

{Photo credit: CraftyGoat via flickr CC}

Filed Under: Lifestyle Business Tagged With: , ,

Doughnuts, clients & other things I’m thankful for

September 7, 2011 By rjones Leave a Comment

thanks for your business, thanking customers, business thank-yous

The other day I was sitting in a restaurant (okay, it was a Dunkin’ Donuts, so maybe “restaurant” is too highfalutin a word), when the guy beside me got up, dropped a half-eaten doughnut back into the bag, and headed for the door.

Outside, he strolled past a mentally disturbed woman who sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, loudly demanding contributions from everyone who walked by. As he stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change, my fellow diner dropped his Dunkin’ Donuts bag into the metal trashcan on the corner. In a flash, the woman jumped from the sidewalk, dug through the trash, and pulled out the crumpled bag like some sort of buried treasure. The rescued leftovers disappeared into her mouth in a single bite.

I quickly gave thanks for my double chocolate iced doughnut, fat grams and all.

Until that moment, I had taken my breakfast completely for granted — something that’s easy to do when you’ve eaten three meals a day for 40+ years.

A few days later, as I was sending out my monthly invoices, I realized that clients are like doughnuts: After a while it’s easy to take them for granted, and there’s always someone out there who’s hungry enough to pounce on your “leftovers.”

I like to think that I’m grateful for the clients who provide me with a steady stream of work and allow me to maintain an independent lifestyle … but am I truly thankful? I do believe there’s a difference. Gratefulness is in the heart, but thankfulness is on the lips. You don’t just feel a thank-you; you have to say it. And mean it. You have to sell it, even.

Rejoicing over Invoicing

It was the routine “thank you” line on my invoices that made me think of that hungry woman outside the Dunkin Donuts. She made me realize that I probably wasn’t expressing my thanks like I should. My invoices change monthly in terms of hours, projects and total due, but the “thank you” at the bottom of the page? That’s an afterthought. It never changes.

Well, not any more. Every invoice now gets a personalized thank-you every month — something that shows some thought and some heart. Something that says “I never want to take you for granted.”

I’ve also started designing some custom cards that I’ll send out for the holidays this year. Who knows if they’ll make any impression at all. Maybe they’ll just get tossed without a thought. But the point is, there will be some thought on my end — some thought and some thanks. It’s the least I can do for the folks who are helping to make this a banner year, despite the tough economy.

Oh, and there’s one more thing that I’ve never done before: I’ve never said a public thank-you to the folks who keep me well supplied with doughnuts. Without CouponNetwork, ERF Marketing, Inspire and Acquire, Health Planning Source, AllBusiness.com and SmartBrief, I literally don’t know where I’d be.

Thanks for putting your trust in me. Thanks for allowing me to help tell your story.

Thanks for keeping me out of a cubicle — and out of the trashcan.

{Photo credit: 5thLuna via flickr CC}

Filed Under: Lifestyle Business, Rants & Raves Tagged With: , ,

Mastering the business of the everyday

September 1, 2011 By rjones Leave a Comment

If your life were the subject of a movie or a Broadway play, what genre would it be?

  • Adventure?
  • Comedy?
  • Horror?
  • Romance?
  • Tragedy?

I got to thinking about this last night while I was watching Master Class, Terrence McNally’s wonderful play about the twilight years of Maria Callas. Master Class is a funny, moving, insightful ode to music and beauty, but it’s also the study of a diva in decline. business priorities, lifestyle entrepreneurs

During the 1950s, Callas was the most famous and successful opera star in the world. Though her career lasted just over a decade, she remains to this day one of the best-selling Classical recording artists of all time. She was rich, glamorous, haughty, tempestuous and controversial. (Think Madonna, but with a great voice.)

As a self-proclaimed fat, ugly child who was reared in poverty, Callas’ meteoric rise should be the stuff of fairy tales. But McNally tells a different story — one that could serve as a warning to any entrepreneur consumed with success at any cost.

In her later years, after her voice had gone and Aristotle Onassis had left her for Jackie Kennedy, Callas was reduced to teaching the occasional graduate glass at Juilliard in NYC. This is the setting for Master Class, as Callas reminisces her way through several coaching sessions. The students are her pupils, her imitators, but also her rivals — each one a potential star who could push the diva deeper into history and irrelevance.

“I don’t want to sing like you,” snaps one student, reminding Callas that she’d ruined her voice after just 10 short years onstage. “I hate people like you. You want to make the world a scary place for everybody, because it was scary for you.”

Callas insists that bitter rivalries, broken hearts and deep loneliness were simply the price she had to pay for her art and her career. But when the footlights dim and the crowds go home, she’s left to question her choices in a world that has passed her by.

In a business world with a single-minded obsession for growth, I couldn’t help wondering how some of today’s most famous entrepreneurs might fare as the subject of a McNally play. If he stripped away the trappings of success, what sort of human being would he find underneath? What sort of life?

Amy Tobin nailed this issue recently in a blog post entitled “One Thing That’s More Important than Work“:

I try to find one moment each day that is more important than work. I’ve completely accepted the fact that I am a workaholic and I will never be able to take a vacation without sneaking in some form of ‘productivity’ everyday. I know this is WHO I AM. But I refuse to be only that: a hard working, ‘successful’ person.

For Amy, the key to balance is her 4-year-old daughter, plus a conscious effort to find meaning in the seemingly mundane details of life, whether scented candles or good towels. “I still have the insatiable need to be productive,” she admits, but “now I just work around it.”

Success, growth, productivity — they’re a big part of what it means to be an entrepreneur, but only a small part of what it means to be human.

We’re hard-wired to want more. The question is, more of what?

{Photo credit: magro_kr via flickr CC}

Filed Under: Lifestyle Business Tagged With: ,

Love, loss and peanut butter pie

August 15, 2011 By rjones 5 Comments

I’m not writing about business today — not much, anyway.

Instead, this is a post about death and life and words and memories. It’s about a guy named Mike Perillo, whom I never met, and his widow, Jennifer, who wrote a tribute I can’t forget.

Mike died of a heart attack on Sunday, Aug. 7. He was a young guy with a kind face and deep laugh lines; you can see his picture here. He and Jennie had been together 16 years. They had two young daughters.

Jennie dealt with her loss, as any writer would, by putting it down in words. She wrote about Mike’s wedding ring, his busy schedule, and his favorite pie. For several weeks, Jennie had planned to make that pie for him “tomorrow,” and now the chance had passed. But there was still time for others:

For those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie this Friday and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there’s no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on.

Twitter and Facebook lit up with the challenge. Within a matter of hours, more than 300 food bloggers responded with recipes and photos and, presumably, lots of hugs. “I’m not sure there have ever been this many variations of one recipe in the history of food blogging,” wrote Phyllis Grant on her blog. “Or maybe in the history of time.”

That’s an amazing tribute to Mike Perillo and to the power of social media.

But if you go back a little further, it’s also a tribute to entrepreneurship and priorities and the pursuit of a dream.

The rest of the story

In 1999, while the two were still dating, Mike handed Jennie a Newsweek article about becoming a personal chef. Jennie had just lost her father to a heart attack at age 49, so “I figured it was time to get cracking on my dreams since there’s no guarantee of tomorrow,” she recalls.

That same year, Jennie started Time to Eat, a Brooklyn-based catering service that garnered a good bit of local press coverage. Her successful catering gig launched her into the New York restaurant scene, working with top chefs like Tom Colicchio and Alain Ducasse.

Then came her daughters — and decision time.

“After working long hours in the restaurant business I decided it was time to focus on motherhood — after all they’re only kids once,” she writes.

Jennie made the choice to work from home, setting up a test kitchen in Brooklyn where she develops recipes for Cuisinart and Working Mother magazine. She also launched an award-winning blog, attracting a slew of advertisers as well as mentions at Oprah.com, Time.com and more.

In other words, she chose to do what she loves, surrounded by the people she loves — a classic lifestyle business.

The disciples of growth would argue that her choice didn’t make economic sense. After all, she could have made a lot more money and created more jobs by opening her own restaurant, maybe even a chain of restaurants.

Over the years, as she read about the hot new spot in Manhattan or watched the latest celebrity chef on the Food Network, there may have been moments of doubt in Jennie’s own mind. It’s human nature to second-guess, to wonder what if?

I’m sure any such doubts have now been laid to rest last. Several weeks ago, when Mike got a day off work, Jennie’s lifestyle business allowed her to make time for what would be their final date:

The moment I heard he was taking off, I cleared my work schedule. Deadlines were the least of my priorities. We finally had the chance to walk, hand-in-hand, during daylight hours—the fact that it reached 102ºF didn’t matter to me.

Too many business owners live every moment of their life pursuing a bigger slice of the pie. Jennie Perillo decided to pursue something else. Now, when it matters most, she has hundreds of pies — and years of sweet memories — to show for it.

Photo credit: matthileo via flickr CC

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