It’s been a stressful few weeks.  Beyond the average pre-holiday stress, we’ve also been trying to figure out the best way to market our site once the phone apps come out.  And, because right now the advice we have been getting is to network, we have been out at events during the week that we think will give us a better handle on our new industry. 

It can get pretty exhausting.

And, it is really easy to suddenly find yourself overextended.  That happened to us a few weeks ago and the results were a bit disastrous.  It's something I still feel really bad about. 

We were invited to an awesome event by someone I really admire in the business world and I managed to write down the wrong start time in our calendar.  That probably wouldn’t be so bad, but I marked the end time as the start time, so it wasn’t even like we were late – we missed the entire event.  I think it is safe to say that most entrepreneurs are Type A personalities and hate to not honor a commitment (especially by such a careless mistake), and I definitely fall under that category.

In fact, it stressed me out so much that it actually gave me nightmares.  One, in particular, was so bad, I couldn’t even make myself go back to sleep out of fear that it would start again.  I rarely have nightmares.  I certainly did not think that something like missing a meeting would stress me out to the point of having nightmares.  There were plenty of meetings I voluntarily bailed out on in my professional life before this.  I never had a single nightmare.  Not a one. 

It's really amazing to care so much about this company, and more than a little bit intimidating.

I don’t feel like I can give other entrepreneurs advice like: “Watch your calendar closely and don’t be afraid to say no to some opportunities lest you too overextend yourself” because one look at my HATCHEDit.com calendar for this week and I can see - we did not say no to a single invitation.  But really that’s what it's all about.  Right?  I don’t know that there are any meetings or events we’ve attended so far that haven’t led to at least one user, or one important contact, or one vital piece of information.  Looking back through our calendar there is nothing that I would have opted to skip.  

I forsee this getting worse, and that in itself frightens me.  It's a good thing that Megan and I work hard to keep each other sane…(and that she doesn’t take offense when she dies a grisly death in my nightmares! lol)

Ok.  Well I’m off to finish decorating the tree and finish watching the Transformers Trilogy, which is the only thing I can think of to prepare myself for another intensive week.