We all have bad days and this past week I lucked out — I had a bunch of them in a row. Now, putting things in perspective, nothing horrific happened and I am thankful for that. But every small thing that could go wrong did and the sheer volume of frustration and annoyance was enough to make this a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

I hate complaining — OK, I usually hate complaining, but sometimes you just have to get it out — and this post is not a whining exercise. It’s my genuine attempt to use my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week to teach myself a few lessons. I figure if I write them down and share them with you they have a greater chance of sinking in.

Lesson #1: When too many balls start to fall, stop juggling.

As I look back at my week I can see that by Wednesday night a lot of balls started to fall. Without going into boring details, a new release we’d planned for Work It, Mom! was late and full of technical bugs, I was behind on two important projects, had missed a meeting (yes, actually forgot to go to a meeting that was fairly important), hadn’t cooked dinner, was working on very little sleep, and snapping at everyone from our technical team to my husband and daughter (sorry guys!). And yet, I kept pushing along. Instead of moving some of my meetings and calls and taking a pause to regroup, I just powered through. Let me tell you, this playing tough stuff only sounds good. The quality of my work sucked, my family suffered and I kept feeling more and more under water. Wrong decision.

Lesson #2: When someone offers to help, don’t be an idiot and say no.

One of the more painful moments in my week involved, as they all do, several things going wrong at exactly the same time, that was the worst time for it to happen — an hour before I had to pick up my daughter from preschool. My husband and I IM during the day and he IMed me in the midst of this to ask how things were. HORRIBLE! I typed, which caused him to ask whether it would help if he picked up our daughter instead. Would it have helped? Of course. But no, I was going to be a superhero and get everything fixed in time to pick her up. Which I did, miraculously, but at the cost of a lot of sanity and a very grumpy mom that my daughter got when I showed up at her school.

Lesson #3: Putting life on hold to get work done only works for a short time.

I have naturally low blood sugar which means that if I don’t eat at regular intervals I get very weak, faint, and my blood pressure drops. Yet at 3pm on Thursday I realized that I hadn’t eaten since the previous day. What followed were several days of feeling horrible and not being able to be as sharp and productive as I had to be. Bad idea.

The next time things get crazy, I am going to come back and read this post. I want it to remind me — and you, I hope — that juggling work and family sometimes requires not juggling, not being superhero, and putting yourself first.

Subscribe to blog via RSS