Daisy Olsen

I come from pretty humble beginnings and, for most of my childhood, life consisted of myself, my Mom, and 2 sisters with special needs. Partly due to circumstance and partly due to the way I’m wired I learned to do things for myself. Why have someone else do something when you can do it for yourself, right? I have difficulty asking for help and even more difficulty delegating work when the help is available to me.

I now live in an area where I am surrounded by affluence(not me, the people around me.) It is interesting to see that, when money is not an issue, it is nothing to hire someone to do the pesky little tasks in your life. Have a large house? Hire a cleaning service. Yard work to do? Landscaper. Something broken? Repair Person. Oil Change? Jiffy Lube. You get the idea. I’m not saying that I don’t ever hire anyone to do anything but between myself and my husband we are capable of handling most things that arise. The problem is time. When you try to do everything singlehandedly it becomes clear, very quickly, that you will get to critical overload before you can say “stop the madness.”

I’m a generalist and so is my husband. We have wide interests and wide skill sets. Where one of us is weak the other is strong. This is really great for being self sufficient. It is not great when trying to build a career or hone in on a specific skill set. There are too many distractions.  Instead of thinking “how can I earn the money to buy that” hen I see something that I want. I think “I could do that myself!” What’s worse, is that when I see something that intrigues me I’m always tempted to dive into it head first to the exclusion of everything else in my life. I have a fairly significant string of failed attempts at business ideas. Most of them failed, not because they were bad ideas, but because I came to an obstacle where I couldn’t fix the problem on my own so I stopped dead in my tracks.

I guess the real issue here is balance and proportion. Knowing when it’s time to call in a professional and when it’s feasible to handle something on your own. Balance is definitely a problem area for me. I am a bit of an extremist and a perfectionist. All or nothing. If I can’t do it “right” (or, at least, the vision of “right” that i have in my mind), I don’t do it at all. I also have a problems with volunteering myself for things just because I know I CAN do the job. And the word NO is not really in my vocabulary when it comes to things that I have, even a passing, interest in.

My objective for this week is to reduce clutter in my workload. I need to focus on all the little loose ends and stray tasks that always seem to trail on after the majority of a project has been completed. The stuff that remains once the interesting bits of a job are finished.

To my readers: If I offer to do anything for you please remind me that I need to deal with what is already on my plate, first. Also, please remind me that offering to do work on your website for free will never get me anywhere even if it makes my own experience on the web, and your website, a tiny bit nicer.