sweetheart, you're so cruel

I'm having a recovering workaholic day, in which it's vital to remind myself that I'm in recovery and I need to take it easy. I got to work at 7:45am, which was the third day of a pre-8am start in a row, because I had meetings straight through from 9:15am to 6pm and I had to write a performance review that I was delivering at 4pm.

Katrina and Adit attempted to give me advice on my meetings on Saturday, and while their advice was valid, I find that I have trouble getting rid of meetings because I a) genuinely like many of them, b) am at a level where meetings are intended to comprise a bulk of my day, and c) I have trouble saying no. I'm working on c to make sure that I'm prioritizing my time effectively, but b will only get worse and a is directly related to my core problem of engaging enough in work to feel satisfied without engaging so much that it takes over again.

I was reminded today that part of the problem is that I'm just genuinely very good at what I do. I don't usually toot my own horn, probably because my high school peers beat any such scholastic pretensions out of me, but I have a talent for strategic, operations-focused management, and the role that I'm in now makes use of my talents and offers opportunity to stretch them. Add to that the fact that I genuinely care, and care deeply, about the business and my team, and it's hard to keep myself back sometimes because I have a lot of trouble consciously *not* doing something that I could technically do just because I'm trying to have that thing that some people call a "life" -- even if my "life" consists of working all weekend every weekend on a romance novel instead.

So anyway, I got home at 7:15, made dinner, and then worked for about an hour and a half. This is danger-zone material, but I'm taking Friday off, which will help to reset me. And hopefully I'll figure out the querying process this weekend so that I can make continued progress on selling the book and eventually be in a position where I can make a truly informed decision between pursuing business and writing. Now, though, I'm really tired, so it's time for bed!