A Balancing Act

Balancing Professional Work and Creative Work

I often get asked how I am able to manage having a full-time job in Social Work and growing my fashion design business, so I figure that I would share the answer with my readers as well. There is a constant struggle between my career, my business and my body. I schedule around whatever commitment comes first. If I know weeks in advance that I have to stay late at work, then the business events get scheduled around it. If a business event gets on the calendar first, then that takes priority. If possible I try to leave some free time for myself, but recently that has not been possible because of all of the holiday craft shows and appearances. However regardless of the schedule, my body will tell me if I need to cancel everything and just de-stress and relax. I think that this is the most important part about keeping everything in balance because if I’m tired, drained, or stressed nothing productive occurs anywhere.

This past week there were such great events on my calendar, but I worked overtime almost every day and my body just said “no way”. Because of all the overtime, the time I did have to myself wasn’t rejuvenating. I crashed almost every day and still haven’t recovered. However despite the lack of rejuvenation, I was able to start each day refreshed and my performance at work did not falter.  Even though I bailed on three of the events that I had planned to attend this week, I was committed to attending several events this weekend and I have some events next week that I hope to attend. My work schedule is pretty light, so work shouldn’t interfere this week. But who knows! I just take it one day at a time and work around important work, business and personal commitments, and it’s been working pretty well for me so far.