When do I exhale?

You'd think two weeks off would put one in the right frame of mind. And mind you, it did, for like a nano-second. I'm stunned at how quickly all my hard relaxing went to waste and stress was again my roommate.

Today was our quarterly business review. Now, I didn't expect anything bad to come from it. Quite the opposite. I expected to breeze through the meeting. The meeting with our sponsor is the easy part. The getting to the meeting prepared with stats and numbers and highlights and lowlights...now THAT part is the tough stressful part.

Next quarter I'm not going to be proactive and try to get this process started early. It's useless. I did that this time, but since we're humans, and very busy humans, we didn't do a darn think in prep for this. We put it off. And why wouldn't we? I mean we have 3 months until the next one.

I'm reminded of my report cards from school. I didn't believe them at the time, and was, a bit, offended, when a few teachers (most of them) wrote I procrastinated. I wanted to show them I didn't but I had better things to do, I'd get around to it. Still, we all procrastinate at one time or another and we all have good reasons for it. Business reviews, in my opinion, one should not procrastinate.

Yet we did. Not because we wanted to, but because we 1) could and 2) were ubber busy. The amount of stress that causes though is really not very enjoyable. I felt like I've not exhaled in two days. The execs came later than I thought they should, and we were "rushed" I felt to pull the deck together. I want to plan. I want to start Q3 now. I want everyone to put in 100% between now and the end of Q3 in the deck/numbers/stats. Its not gonna happen. I'll just have to get used to holding my breath.

Still, as I mentioned, the meeting went well. We're on a track - notice I said not the right track (or wrong track), but we have come a long ways and I can't help but feel we are primed to move on. Okay, well I feel primed to actually start managing this program. I just have to get brave, vocal, aggressive, arrogant, consistent, forthright, a little conceited, and confident. Right. All the things I don't think I am. Well, except consistent. I procrastinate consistently apparently.

The third quarter is a month over and I've got two months to find the inner rock star. Which I will, right after I write this blog. And organize my photos. And read Dilbert. And...And...And...