Priorities

My life is crazy busy. Between the family, the business, the farm, and homeschooling (just to name a few areas), I always have more goals I want to accomplish than I can possibly achieve.

Because of everything that competes for my attention, I am very careful to make sure that I am constantly re-prioritizing how I allocate my time and where I expend my effort.

When applied to my priorities, that means that whatever is important today, if given a few days (or weeks or months or even hours) can become rather unimportant.  Now of course, this doesn’t apply to things like my family or God.  But rather the tasks and that surround my life and my family and God.

Toward the end of 2014, our family was deciding whether to launch a major shift in our priorities.  Up til that point in time, Goat Milk Stuff was an online goat milk soap business.  We had other bath and body products and we had a few customers stop in at our farm store, but we were mainly online.

That was about to change.

After much prayer, thought and discussion, the family decided to expand Goat Milk Stuff from just bath and body items.  It was time to add food items (cheese, milk, yogurt, fudge, caramel, gelato, and more) to our product offerings.  This was a massive endeavor.

Massive.

While maintaining the farm and current Goat Milk Stuff responsibilities, we had to start what in reality amounted to an entirely new business (even if it was under the Goat Milk Stuff name).

It involved designing a new building (The Sweet Shop),

constructing a State approved and inspected Cheese Kitchen,

constructing a Candy Kitchen,

switching from hand-milking to machine milking (in another new building),

forging a relationship with state regulations and regulators,

purchasing commercial manufacturing and display equipment,

designing compliant labels,

and launching a local agritourism/service business.

Just to name a few tasks.

Did I mention it was a massive change?

That change has consumed our lives for the past three years and has directed many of our priorities.  And while there is still a lot I want to do with the local/food/agritourism portion of Goat Milk Stuff (farm dinners, anyone?), I am feeling like the food portion of Goat Milk Stuff is stable enough that I can shift my priorities elsewhere.

You may be wondering why I am discussing all of this.  The point that I’m trying to make is that during these last two years plus of adding all this extra workload to my plate, I had to let go of a lot of things that I really enjoyed doing and that a lot of other people really appreciated.

If you’ve been with me for a long while, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been as active on social media.  And I haven’t been blogging or podcasting at all.

I’m hoping to change all that.

Starting today, I am committing to blogging at least 3 times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the remainder of 2017 (which is 6 months).

I am also committing to re-launching my podcast – the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide (hopefully in July or August, but I don’t have a firm timeline for that yet).

And… drumroll please… I am actually finally going to make writing the book a priority.  Yep, I’m ready to make that dream a reality with a target completion date sometime in 2018 (or 2019 by the time it’s published).

I just wanted to say thank you to all of you who have reached out to me the past few years to tell me that you miss my blog posts and you miss my podcasts.  Not only did you make me feel very much wanted, you’ve inspired me to get back to it.

Please let me know if there is anything specific you want me to blog and write about.  I’d love your input and feedback!