Finding Balance

I recently read article in an Art Jewelry Mag which discussed how to divide up the day ( or week) called the 3 Ms.... Making, Marketing and Managing.

We all wear many hats as business owners.  As humans we also have to balance the other parts of our lives: family, volunteer work, church, sports, fitness, meditation time, cooking cleaning, having fun etc.

How can we balance that all?  I personally spend too much time at one or two of those and it cuts into all parts of my life.   Working from home makes it doubly hard because there is no quitting time, no boss expecting X by such and such time.  Having said that , I dont know how yall do it working a regular job and doing this stuff at night! 

As for the 3 Ms,  the author ( whose name eludes me) stated that  it should be:

4 hours creating ( making)

2 hours Managing ( book keeping, shopping for materials, inventory, picure taking, listing, emailing customers etc)

2 hours marketing: advertising, ( I suppose online and IRL )  tweeting, facebook, blogging,  networking


I suppose somewhere in there we should sleep and eat.. but how can one person do it all? I am guilty of spending too much time online.  I flip flop between listing and pics  and marketing. I cannot remember the last time I sat at the bench with my metal and torch!


That is where networking has paid off for some of us in my opinion.  I have built a following on twitter and facebook and LinkedIn for cctexan3.  It took a year to get to that level though.   My friends retweet or share what I post and I do the same for them.  I am of the belief that this guild can do the same for the members.

 Obviously some are more active than others, but that is ok.  We can help one another, bank the Karma points and cover more areas.  Some of the Guild members have HUGE followings, it works well to use them in collections, tweets, shares and so on.

  But also we need to help the newcomers who do not understand how AF works.  There will be more posts on this in the blog.

The new guilds will be out sometime in January and we will use that one.  I will have new abilities as guild master to reach each of you via emails and links. in the meantime, use the  following link to join the yahoo group  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/texasartfire/


So how do you find balance? I am totally undisciplined and would love to hear how yall do it!