Sorting

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about a website redesign. I’ve tried to figure out the categories of things I need to include. What I’ve discovered is that I have a whole bunch of things going on.

There’s the:
cooking, cookbooks, cookbook reviews, food speeches
Art
Writing – blog, my books, freelance articles, etc.
Social media consulting work – presentations, individual clients, planning
Marketing – working with people to help them figure out how to accomplish their goals
Book promotion – including marketing, social media and things like making trailers
Speeches – I love to give presentations
Novel – I want to finish my novel
website maintenance – I do a little of this on the side, too.

I don’t know how to sort all these things out yet.

All of them take time and energy. I’m very focused on things I can do to bring in extra money to pay off medical bills. And I love many of the things that do that.

But there are other things – like finishing the novel that is so close to being done – that I don’t spend the time on because no one is going to pay me for that right away. But I really want to work on that. I’m trying to weigh the restorative pleasure of doing that versus the cost of not getting other things done in that time.

I’m going on retreat soon and I think one of the questions I need to try and answer for myself is to set some priorities of what I can do and what I simply can’t do, even if I want to.

At the same time, I’m trying to find some balance. I realized at the end of last year that I was just totally exhausted. So, I have some fun things scheduled, but my fear is that I’ll just have to work even harder to pay for them and defeat the purpose. But I’m going to try, because I have to do something different and that’s one thing I can experiment with.

All of this, in addition to my fulltime job, is a lot to manage. It’s hard for me to even sort it out and I’m doing it all. I’m not even sure how that’s possible, but it’s happening. Hopefully it will become clear..