Balance & Delegation

Our panel at AWP was about finding balance between your professional or paid writing life and your personal creative writing. Funny that some days I seem to fail miserably at this. Like today.

I’m reminded now, after seven solid hours of fighting with PHP code and my ISP’s server settings, that my mantra as a marketing manager was delegate, delegate, delegate.

A great boss once handed me a stack of paper related to problems with a vendor and said, “make this go away.” I laughed because I knew what he meant. It was an aspect of his job that he despised but I was good at, and in return for making his worst headaches go away, he ousted some of mine (and rewarded me at bonus time).

When you work for yourself, you don’t have a junior manager to make things go away. But you don’t have to do everything yourself. About five hours ago, I should have picked up the phon

e or emailed one of the great coders I know and use for client projects. They’d have likely fixed the problem in less than an hour. Sixty bucks could have made that problem go away, and saved me five hours to work on a client project or the essay I need to submit by Friday. Or taken a much-needed

run after four days at AWP.

So get out and cultivate a network of people who do things that you don’t do. Trade work when you can, but at least build a database full of specialists you can hire while you focus on the jobs and activities that are important to you. Sometimes saving money by doing it yourself comes at too steep a price.