As I posted earlier, we need to have priorities in our life. Sometimes that priority is to work 12 hour days (6 days a week) but you can’t live your life that way, constantly, because that’s not really a life is it?
As a work-a-holic and a small business owner, it is easy for me to justify working crazy hours to get the job done (at the expense of everything else, including my family, health and sanity).
Thank goodness my wife sees things a bit differently. For her the priority is to family, to friends, to ourselves and then to the business.
Does this crazy attitude (of hers?) cause a bit of strife in our lives? Of course it does but it also balances out my crazy attitude. In the end priorities are interchangeable.
If I am in the middle of a distillation run and I get a phone call that one of our kids is decorating day care in vomit (and Caitlin is out of town) I must shut down the still (unless my assistant-distiller is around) and tend to the child; again, priorities shifting.
An unexpected day off (as it were) is never fatal to a business; inconvenient, maybe, but never fatal and sometimes it can be a blessing. Me not being at the distillery may mean I work from home and catch up on paperwork, the blog or read a book (between bouts of outwardly expressed illness of course).
As counter intuitive as it may seem to some the top priority must always be to yourself because if you go down so does everything else.
I once told a friend, who was a single mother of two young teen boys, who was running herself ragged driving her boys all over the county to their different events that she needed to slow down a bit and take care of herself first.
Her reply was that the boys came first.
My reply was “So what would happen to your boys if you got sick and (heaven forbid) died? Who would take care of them then?”
Her reply was silence.
Priorities People!
Cheers!
Christopher M Neumann