It pours

Not long ago I was desperately unemployed. I have over 15 years of fairly high-level professional experience in every thing from magazine design to politcal consulting to internet communications but that perfect job had been evading me for months and months. I had turned to freelance work and was starting to make some inroads, picking up a couple good projects right when the perfect job fell in my lap. It was the exact job that I wanted and it turned out they wanted me too.

Great. Except that where I would normally devote a large amount of my after-hours time to a new job -- in the spirit of making a good impression, and because it's just what I do -- I was stuck in the unfortunate predicament of having too much work outside of work. So basically I've been essentially working two jobs for most of the summer and both of them are suffering. I'm hoping I'm doing well enough at the day job that people don't know what they're missing but I know for a fact that my freelance clients are getting their work from me at an appreciably slower pace.

What sucks is that I spend as much time fretting about not having enough time to do what I want to do as I spend at actually doing it. It's a character flaw that I've been acquainted with for not only my entire adult life, but much of my adolescence as well. It's a large part of why I graduated high school two months behind the rest of my class and college... well... I'll get back to it at some point.

Right now, I'm a month past deadline on a $6k project that's almost done; I'm 4 days overdue on a book chapter I promised someone I'd write (for free); I have about 20 2-3 minute clips of video I need to seperate into individual video files and also cut one 3 minute montage out of; I am way behind on work I'm doing for a friend's girlfriend who did me a huge favor by paying me in advance for the job when I was really strapped for cash; I have work to do for two websites I'm doing for a former/future political candidate in a state I've never visited who's paying me peanuts but I really want to help; and for my 'real' job, I have a website mockup that I'll spend almost all of tomorrow putting together, putting me further behind on a couple other projects. I'm averaging about 5 hours of sleep a night.

So, what am I doing about it? I'm blogging about it. Problem solved.