I’ve Got Some ‘Splaining To Do

My last post was on the 6th.  Not too good for a guy who has said he has “blogged every day” since we launched.

Where have I been the last 13 days?

Well, we (my wife and I) decided to move.  Sell our house and move to another house.  There is a bit of crazy, a bit of urgency, and surprisingly, a whole lot of peace. We’re actually moving in with my in-laws, who are also selling their house.  This year they have needed a bit more care than they have before, which means my wife has been with them and I haven’t worked as much as I would have liked.  Living together will change that, and I’ll be able to focus more on work.

I know that living with family is unconventional, but hey… I’m an entrepreneur. Since when do we do things the conventional way?

Anyway, since we decided to put our house on the market now instead of “maybe next July,” I’ve been working from about 6am to 11pm getting the house ready for people to look at it. This mean finishing the finish work (doors/baseboard, etc.) in the basement, putting in carpet in the basement, painting 5 (kind of 6) rooms, and attacking about 100 small to medium jobs around the house.  It also meant getting boxes and packing tape an filling my garage with boxes filled with stuff we normally use in our daily lives so that my house is more appealing to people who walk through. All of this is stuff our realtor encouraged us to do.  Show more floor and more wall space. That means pack, dejunk, patch and paint holes… and then the house will appeal to others.

This very quick decision and weeks of work was not something I was planning on. But it consumed me. Luckily I have a team that has carried the ball for JibberJobber… all projects we’re working on have continued to make progress.  We have enough systems in place where the progress of the company doesn’t depend on my being here every minute, which is nice.

So… there’s my ‘splaining. If you have reached out to me and have not gotten a response, now you know why.

More importantly, let me draw this back to you. When you got laid off, where you planning for it? Had you prepared for it? We took 12 years of living in this house, and raising a family (which means beating up the house a bit), and tried to fix all of that in 2 weeks. That was what I did with my career…. I took years and years of work in my career, or, better said, neglecting my career management, and tried to fix what I had neglected in just a few weeks of my job search.

I didn’t know what I was doing, I decided to do it alone, and I failed miserably. To the point of depression. I worked about 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, but instead of working on the right things, the right way, I spun my wheels mostly looking for jobs on job boards, and applying online. What a misuse of my time.

When we decided to put our house on the market, we got a realtor, and he recommended a handyman to help with our huge list. The handyman even did things that I could have tried my hand at… but to have him work on his list while I worked on my list was awesome. Not only did we get more done, I didn’t have to learn the what and how that he had learned over many years. A job that took me two hours to do was something he was able to do in literally two minutes.

The correlation here is that the realtor is like a coach, who has been down this path before, and knows what I should do and how I should do it.  The coach is also the handyman, or knows who the right handymen are, and can get me the help I need (or can outsource) so that I can focus on the things that only I could or should do.  Like, figure out what exactly to pack, and what I need to leave unpacked.

I tried a DIY job search with me and my spreadsheet. It was a long, depressing mess.  If finding a job… even The Job,  is your goal, you really should get the right help, which will allow you to focus on the right things while you outsource the things that you really shouldn’t spend time on.