PUT YOUR OWN MASK ON FIRST
I had known, for a while, that I hadn't written my own newsletter. Not in the way you slowly stop doing something without noticing. I noticed every single time I'd sit down to write it, get halfway through, get pulled away by a client email that needed answering right that second, and by the time I came back to it a week later, whatever I'd been about to say didn't feel relevant anymore. I promised myself back in March that I'd send one every month. Every month came and went with the same excuse: something more urgent came in.
Working for Yourself
That's the strange thing about working for yourself. When someone asks for your help, you help them. That's sort of the whole job. And it usually means putting your own work quietly to one side to make room for theirs, right up until "quietly to one side" becomes "not done at all."
So there I was at the airport, with a couple of spare hours and a laptop I'd packed "in case of a client emergency." And somewhere around the gate I realised: I was having my own client emergency. It just happened to be me.
I clocked the moment properly on the plane on the way to Pisa. Sitting there, about to take off, watching the safety demonstration, the bit where the oxygen mask drops down and they tell you to put your own on before helping the person next to you. I've watched that demonstration a hundred times. This time it landed like a small, guilty punch to the chest, because that's exactly the thing I'm not very good at in my own business. I will always help the client first.
Make time for your own marketing
If I'm honest, that's advice I hand out fairly regularly: make time for your own marketing, don't let it be the thing that only happens once everything else is done… and it's a bit rich coming from someone who hasn't written her own newsletter yet. I'm not going to pretend I've fully solved it. I don't think "just say no to people" is advice I can hand my own clients with a straight face, not when half of what I do for them is help them say yes to the right things, at the right time. But I am learning, properly learning, not just nodding along to the idea that not everything urgent is actually important, and the things that quietly get pushed back forever are usually the ones that mattered most.
So: Italy. Five days with my friends Jane and Adam, staying in their home, which was exactly what I needed. We swam in the river, ate out with gluten free pizza and watched a herd of wild boar raid the garden one evening, which apparently is a normal Tuesday out there.
I did give myself one day to explore Pisa alone; yes, the tower really is wonderfully leaning, it survived an earthquake the day before completely unbothered, which felt like it was setting a good example (I toasted its resilience with a Hugo spritz or two).
I came back properly rested and genuinely excited for the next three months, and there's a lot in them. Since Venice back in March I've taken on new clients, published new websites, spoken at a summit, and grown The Monthly Edit into something I'm properly proud of. Which is sort of the point of this whole post: busy patches don't announce how long they'll last. There's no countdown. So the pacing has to happen inside the busy patch, not after it, because "after it" has a habit of not showing up when you think it will.
If there's one thing I'd want a client, or anyone reading this, to take from it: look after yourself in the middle of the busy, not just after it.
You don't know how long the quiet spell after this busy one, will take to arrive.
