In which I contemplate watching more tv

I've always been an all or nothing kind of gal. A few years ago, I got obsessed with fitness. I worked out a LOT! I was getting up an hour or so early, working out an hour, walking during breaks at work and doing other workouts in the evenings.

When the kids were babies, of course, my only focus was on them and, almost literally, every waking moment of my life (other than work) was aimed at them. When I wasn't caring for them, I was preparing food for them, finding and reading literature on how to better care for them, etc. I barely had time to feed myself at this time.

After buying a KitchenAid stand mixer, I spent a good year baking bread and other high-carb treats in my spare time (giving most of it away, but still gaining a good chunk of weight anyway). Knitting followed a similar pattern (and I have a LOT of leftover yarn stash in the basement still!).

2009 was definitely the year of Etsy for me. I really worked hard on my shop, designing new cards, refining my photography, bending over backwards to accomodate the smallest of requests. It was insane! Again, I was waking up an hour, sometimes two, early in the morning to work on new ideas, fulfill orders, write in my blog and more. After work, I would spend a little time with the family but then be irresistibly drawn to my email to check on orders or to check on Etsy to see if anyone had left me feedback, to Google analytics to see if my latest postings had brought me any traffic.

I belong to the EtsyGreetingsTeam, a collection of Etsy cardmakers and one topic getting a lot of notice on our discussion boards has been our goals for our shops. People have chimed in eagerly about wanting to take their sales figures past the 40, 100, 500 mark, about blogging more regularly, about putting together new designs, starting a FaceBook fan site, etc.

I may be the only member of the group seriously thinking that I need to watch more tv.

Let me 'splain: Last year was terrific for my shop and I had so much fun, but I spent so much of my mornings, evenings and weekends fulfilling orders and tending to business that I feel like I've neglected other parts of my life. I stopped exercising (and my blood pressure's gone way up!), I was having very little down time, my other interests took a back seat (I stopped knitting, baking, reading for pleasure).

It was all Etsy, all the time.

So when the other gals on my team talked about how they were going to achieve more, more, more on their shops, I realized that I needed to do much, much less.

If I set a goal for my online crafting business, this may take time away from other activities. Time is the single most valued commodity in my working mom's life. Since it's a limited resource, I need to budget myself very, very carefully.

So I'm cutting back on the Etsy addiction and making a conscious effort to exercise more, to spend time with my husband and play with the kids and catch up on the television that we've cut out the last year -- we need to catch up on last year's Lost episodes before the grand finale!