Chapter Seventeen: The Juggling Act

We all lead multi-faceted lives. Every day we attempt to balance the personal, the professional, the obligatory, the entertaining, the relaxing, the essential, and the meaningful. We make commitments to ourselves and to others, and then we have to see them through, or at the very least, deal with whatever the consequences may be of not seeing them through.

For business owners, if we are fortunate, our commitments tend to grow as we become more successful. Our client rosters increase, our schedules fill up, and we need to make some decisions about what’s really important to us and how we approach our various responsibilities, as well as our joys, moving forward.

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Keep the Balls in the Air

The value of having a plan should never be underestimated. Through trial and error, we can chart our multitasking course. We can find the tools that help us stay on track and develop a schedule that suits our needs so it’s simple to maintain. Making lists, setting deadlines, and turning good habits into productivity systems are all vital in keeping our priorities well balanced and the various balls we juggle up in the air.

Compartmentalizing is a gift some people naturally possess. Others have to work through the mental muddle and train their brains and their bodies to be in work mode, to be in creative mode, to be in friend mode, to be in rest mode. Getting organized is really about strategy and mindset, but once it’s unlocked, productivity can skyrocket.

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Reduce the Number of Balls in the Air

Even still, no matter how well we plan, there comes an undeniable point when we have to acknowledge that our capacity has been reached and concessions have to be made. We cannot add even one more ball to the ones we’re already keeping aloft, and it is at that juncture that we have to start getting comfortable integrating the word “no” into our regular vocabulary. For overachievers and people pleasers, “no” is avoided like the plague. That practice is not sustainable, however, and will only lead to dropped balls. There’s only so much any of us can juggle, after all.

Saying “no” is a lesson we recently had to learn at Noteworthy Communications. After a year and a half in operation, we have scaled to a point where we no longer have the capacity to say “yes” to every potential client or project. While that is a good thing for our business, saying “no” is never something we enjoy. Still, we have to say “no” to some things so we can say “yes” to others, all while keeping our balls from crashing down.

Life is a juggling act and people do it every day. The juggle may never truly end, but we can put tools in place to keep the act manageable, profitable, and maybe even enjoyable. Not every system will work for everybody, but the learning experience of finding what does work for us is part of the satisfaction.

Noteworthy Communications can serve as one of your tools if you’re struggling to keep all your balls in the air. When we reach a point when we can’t juggle everything ourselves, hiring out some of our tasks can relieve that extra stress and ensure that all of the balls we’re responsible for continue to soar through the air.

Chapter Sixteen: Business as Usual

Bad days happen, and so do bad weeks, bad months, even bad years. Things happen that can absolutely devastate us, whether on a personal level, within our financial situations, on our professional paths, or throughout our larger communities. Catastrophes happen and then we are expected to show up, do our work, and remain focused on the task at hand. We mourn on our own time.

However, …

How can we go about business as usual when we see tragedies play out in our 24-hour news cycle?

How can we go about business as usual when our most basic human rights are at stake?

How can we go about business as usual when the rug is pulled out from under our feet and our world is turned upside down?

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Have Grace

Human beings are not robots, and we cannot be expected to perform as such. When we are feeling drained or stretched to our limits, accomplishing the bare minimum can feel like we’re pushing maximum capacity. What we can normally get done in a couple of hours can drag on for days. Our usually sharp focus can go blurry and waning motivation can cause exhaustion to seep down into our very bones.

Rather than allowing ourselves to become numb or nihilistic, having grace with ourselves can get us through the rough patches, and allow us time to get back into fighting shape. Self-care doesn’t always look like a luxurious bubble bath and a facemask. Sometimes just acknowledging the struggle we’re in, that it’s not business as usual, is enough to make something seem less daunting.

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Recalibrate

With deadlines looming and responsibilities weighing heavily on our shoulders, slowing down for even a moment can seem laughably unattainable. However, by reprioritizing our commitments, we can trim the fat, and focus on what’s truly vital so we have time to recover. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, what is the bare minimum we have to do to get through the day? We make that list, we do what we can, and then we rest. This is not slacking off, but rather, doing the best that we physically or mentally can manage at the time.

The Noteworthy Conversation itself is an example of a commitment that had to be reprioritized in a moment when overachieving was simply not an option. Noteworthy Communications has never missed a deadline for a client, but something had to give, and skipping a monthly blog post was something we were able to live with during a time that was not business as usual. Posting a month behind schedule seemed like a big sacrifice at the time, but now, a month and a day later, the conversation is back on track, and we even got a new blog post topic out of the experience.

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On the other hand, sometimes throwing ourselves into our work might be just the solution we need. We can harness our feelings and channel them into something productive and positive. When everything else seems to be falling apart around us, we hold tighter to what we feel we can control. Still, even that is not actually business as usual.

Feeling overwhelmed is a part of life, and it will happen time and time again. Coping with the unexpected and the devastating might look different day to day, but pretending everything is business as usual and forcing ourselves to power through is almost a guarantee of a burnout or a breakdown. It’s not business as usual, and that’s exactly the point.

Chapter Fifteen: Clickbait and Switch

It's the bane of every internet user's existence, but versions of clickbait have been around since the dawn of journalism and media. It's been called many names before clicking was even a thing, including yellow journalism, checkbook journalism, and tabloid journalism. These days, clickbait refers to a headline or image designed to intrigue audiences with sensationalized content so as to generate more clicks. When that headline or image fails to live up to its promise, we call it clickbait.

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Ethics Before Clicks Purposefully misleading audiences should generally make any content creator question the "Why?" of what they're doing. However, as clickbait continues to dominate all corners of the internet, we understand the "Why?" all comes back to money that can be earned off of such ill-advised clicks. Unfortunately, for many, that prospect outweighs any ethical dilemma they may be faced with as they hit the publish button. Clickbait is often used to drive visitors to certain websites because creators know this can lead to increasing revenue from advertisers who offer big bucks to appear on highly-visited sites, no matter the quality. With certain clickbait, the likelihood of predatory phishing schemes also increases. At best, clickbait serves as an unfulfilling experience for the clicker, but at worst, it can lead to malware and stolen personal information.

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Credibility Before Clicks The hyperbole of headlines and images that bait the reader and then fail to deliver may be good for clicks, at least initially, but it's terrible for a creator's credibility. Eventually, people wise up. They stop being chum and learn to recognize the creators, publishers, and websites that have misled them before. They begin to realize that the article behind the headline could never live up to the expectations being set in the first place. Losing credibility is arguably one of the worst scenarios that any entrepreneur can face. It becomes a domino effect, where first goes the trust, then goes the clients, then goes the flow of business. Purposeful misrepresentation is not a solid, long-term communications strategy for anyone with something of true value to offer, and, after all, isn't that what we should be striving for anyway? We all want to reach wider audiences. We wouldn't be posting on the internet if we didn't. However, resorting to exploitative or sensationalized headlines is a clear sign of giving up, of taking the easy, cheap path to publication and clicks. How much more satisfying would it be to watch our click numbers rise knowing we achieved those milestones with quality content, even if it did take more time? Noteworthy Communications always strives for quality first, in our own content and the content we produce on behalf of our clients. This is the only way to discover our voice, earn a positive reputation, and build a legitimate following. Flashy headlines are great, but delivering on superior content will always win out.