Looking Over the Past Year. What a Year!

With the holiday season coming to a close, it’s hard to resist looking back at how my year has been. And what a year it has been!

Lots of lows. My earnings have been lousy for most of the year.

A part of that I can attribute to how little work I’ve gotten done most of the year compared to what I would have liked to get done. A chunk of that is from adapting to having a baby in the house and being generally amazed at how much extra work a third child is even when you already have two. Wow! Selene’s a wonderful baby but she wreaks havoc with my productivity when it comes to business.

Moving away from Poway was a bit of a low and a high. Didn’t want to leave our family and friends, but at least my husband finally got a better job.

That one also made a mess of my productivity, of course. Packing to move is hard and so is unpacking.

But this year also had some amazing moments, like being mentioned in an article that hit the front page of Yahoo and Bankrate. Promptly followed by the thud of  “my hosting wasn’t ready for that kind of traffic,” but Host Gator helped me get back on track in a painful but really not that possible to reduce amount of time.

And the traffic was still amazing. Naturally that resulted in a pretty good income month, and I wish I had managed to get my ads better tested before then, because I likely would have earned more still.

There was another amazing part of that article, specifically that I knew about it at all. That aforementioned move…

I had been interviewed for the article months before, and had expected it to be published much sooner. Instead, it hit it big just a very few days after I had my internet access turned back on in my new home. A few days sooner and I would have missed the whole thing. That would have been beyond agonizing. So I count myself quite fortunate there, that I had the chance to deal with it at all.

And of course, even though she’s added new levels of challenge to my ability to work productively, Selene’s birth has to be listed as a high, as does continuing to watch her develop.

The move and having a baby are what I consider to be physical blocks to productivity. There quite simply were no ways to get around them. Quite possibly I could have limited their impacts more, but it wouldn’t have been easy.

But the mental challenges were far worse. They usually are. It’s so easy to fall into slacking off, spending too much time reading information and not enough time acting on it or any other information.

I got pretty stuck thinking about the move as well as how hard it was working with a new baby. Like that’s going to get easier any time soon! The time would have been better spent finding ways to work around those challenges.

All in all, it’s been quite a year. It’s been difficult, challenging, busy and wonderful. And I intend to make next year even better!