Too Much?

A couple of months before we came to France, I had an opportunity to sign up for a course that would jump-start my coaching business and really help me focus on my target audience. It was definitely something I was interested in, but it was scheduled to start in mid-September, and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to take on something fairly work intensive while we were out of the country. I eventually chose to sign up for the course and figured that I'd make it work. For the first three weeks of the course I was doing okay. Then came London, Italy and my parents' visit, and I found myself falling behind. Mind you, I'm clear that it's because of choices that I made. I chose to spend all my time in London and Italy seeing the sights instead of working on my homework, and I chose to spend some quality time with my parents while they were here, and I chose to sort through pictures from our trips and post them on Facebook.

What else did I choose to do? I chose to sign up for not one, but *two* writing courses that both started this past week. I'm feeling a strong pull toward writing lately, and I want to cultivate that. Both writing courses strongly recommend daily writing, and one of them has assignments. I want to take full advantage of what both of these courses have to offer, and at the same time I need to remember that I made a much larger investment in and commitment to the building-my-coaching-business program.

So I have to ask myself, "Have I taken on too much?" 

The reality here in France is that I'm only spending four days a week doing "work"-type stuff. Friday through Sunday are our explore-the-area-and-have-adventures days. Another reality is that I'm having trouble focusing on the coaching business program because it's "hard" and I have to make some big decisions about which direction I'm going to go in. In other words, my inner three-year-old is screaming "I don't wanna!" and I'm indulging her by spending my time doing pretty much anything else.

So no, I haven't actually taken on too much. It's completely within the realm of reason for me to invest appropriate amounts of time in all three of these programs. I just need to put my big-girl panties on and stop making it so hard for myself. Simple, right? We'll see...

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Getting Sucked Down the Rabbit Hole

The last week or two, I've really found myself getting sucked down the rabbit hole that is the Internet.

One of the things I've been doing to establish a web presence is to be consistent with Twitter and try to build a following there (speaking of which, if you're not following me yet, click here to follow me!).  I've got Twitter open in one of the tabs of my browser, and when new tweets come in, it puts up the number of new tweets in parentheses so I can see it no matter which tab I'm in.  If I don't stay on top of looking at the new tweets, it can get overwhelming.  For example, I've just sat down at my computer for the first time today (it's 4:30pm), and the scary number on my Twitter tab says (263)!!  So there are 263 new tweets for me to look through since the last time I looked.  Now, do I *have* to look at these tweets?  No.  Will anything bad happen to me or my loved ones if I don't look through them?  No.  However, one of my strategies with Twitter is to follow people who post interesting quotes or information, and then re-tweet that stuff out to my followers.  So looking through those 263 new tweets (now 264) gives me valuable resources!  I would like to figure out a way to manage this more effectively so that I can still get what I want out of Twitter, but not be a slave to looking at it all the time.

I've also been checking out some writing resources/blogs as well as social media marketing resources/blogs, and it's very easy to get sucked into following link after link on these sites.  It's a seemingly never-ending process!  Yes, I'm getting some useful information out of it, for sure.  And it's also keeping me from doing other things that I want to do.  For example, I'm in this writing teleseminar, and one of our assignments is to write something five days a week.  For me, sitting down to write a blog post here is relatively easy (as long as I can think of a topic).  Somewhat more challenging is writing a blog post for my coaching website (perfectionist much?).  And even more challenging than that (as in, I haven't done it yet at all!) is doing some sort of fiction writing, which I *definitely* want to try my hand at.  Just yesterday, on at least two separate occasions as I was getting sucked down the rabbit hole, I thought, "I should stop and try to do some sort of fiction writing experiment."  Did I?  Nope.

I've found that structure usually works pretty well for me with stuff like this, so it may be a matter of setting limits to how much time I spend on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., or it may be to set aside a certain amount of time for experimenting with fiction writing.  Truth be told, I have sort of an overwhelm about the fiction writing.  Mostly I have no idea what to write about.  So if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them!!  :)

(Sidenote:  now at 269...)

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