Taking Back My Work Day

For several months now, I have had my work days subtly undermined by someone else's needs. My brother has a store where he repairs bike seats, and does general sewing - hemmed pant legs and so forth. The trouble is, he can get in more business than he can handle from time to time, so I will tackle some of his work for him as an independent contractor / kid sis helping out.

My trouble is, that somewhere in the midst of all these favors, I have lost my work weeks. I stopped keeping all of my sites updated, then had a week and a half where I was more busy with things around the house and personal stuff I had to tend to and working on sewing when I did have free time that I looked up one day and it had been a couple of weeks since I had actually got any of my own work done.

That was bad, worse was that I sighed and decided I would get to it after the weekend. Then after that weekend I was hit by some other things... and that cycle of putting off til tomorrow and being overloaded with other things boiled up to where I have not got any significant work done for what is now a few months.

That is NOT acceptable and I can not figure out how it went that long without me realizing I had put things off for so long in some cases. If I worked for someone else I would have been fired a couple months ago, and been too busy to see the pink slip until now. By all rights I should just fire myself right now, but, I won't. I am going to give myself one last chance to stop doing other people's work before mine and to stop putting off work that needs done until the last minute.

The time has come to reclaim my work days and get back to the serious "I'm a writer" level of day in and day out work at the computer to rebuild my work, my reputation and most importantly my income.

Tax Time =-o

I don't know about anyone else, but I am so not ready for it to be tax time. =-o How the heck did this year pass by so fast already that we are staring down the barrel of April 15th?

Thankfully this year we get a couple of extra days, since the IRS has set the deadline of April 17th, because I really need the added days to finish getting everything done. I even missed Easter because I had not realized just how far into the month things were until Easter was here and gone.

I hate not being prepared for tax season. ARGH!

Tax Season again

It's here. The dreaded tax season. I know that I am not the only small business owner that is dreading having to sort through several boxes and drawers of old receipts looking for what I need to note on the tax return.

In addition to my work as a freelance writer, I need to also do business taxes for my brother's store for the first time this year. That is going to be a major learning curve for me and I'm going to need to get to the local library and pick up a bunch of stuff to help me sort out the right information for such a business.