At eBay Live last weekend, one of the guest speakers addressed the room full of powersellers and small business owners and asked "Why did you go into business for yourself?"

He forwarded to the next slide on the PP presentation and it said only one word. Freedom.

"Freedom," he said. "That is the number one reason people decide to go into business for themselves. And you got freedom didn’t you? . . . The freedom to work any 80 hours a week you want."

I am a bit of a work-a-holic. Every night this week I have said I am going to take time off and play a computer game. Even tonight I said I am going to do it and I still did another few hours of work. And even now I am writing a blog entry which is a bizarre form of social work. I don’t know when I got this way, but I know that I am spend a lot of time worrying about my job, my business, my dreams and my life and how the all are meant to coexist. I work like somehow it will make them snap together.

I find it hard to step away from the work and take time for myself, particularly since my husband is pretty non-committal about leisure time. If my mother calls me up and says "Work can wait, come swimming with me" I’ll do it as long as its possible because there is a perfectly good suggestion given to me in a forceful way. When my husband non-committally shrugs that we could play a game, or not, I cannot justify stopping working for doing nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love nothing. In small doses.

I cannot just "watch TV." I don’t understand the fun in it. I don’t mind to sit down to watch a movie, a DVD of an old TV show or a specific show that we watch every week or an award show but I cannot just flip channels all night like the rest of my family can. I can, however, waste an astonishing amount of time on the Internet.  Some of it is kind of useful and work related, but some is just stupid.

I am much happier when I am busy, but there comes a point where I get too busy and I am on the verge of a breakdown. My life goes in waves of this. I have yet to find that happy balance but I made some choices this past week that, while terrifying, should hopefully help with that. The analogy I like to use all the time is that I like life to be like running on a treadmill. It should be just the right speed so that you are getting a bit of a sweat but not killing yourself. 80% of the time, everything is like that and its fine. It’s that other 20% when I feel like someone has cranked the treadmill all the way up and I am just running and running and never getting caught up that messes me up.

I think the last two paragraphs together sum together my problem. I have too much "time bleed." It’s when Perez  Hilton mentions some celebrity who reminds me of some movie that I then research info about only to find that the director is dead and then I spend time reading all the news I can about how he/she died only to find that the way that person died reminds me of a book and what was the title of that? and then before I know it an hour has passed. I consider that time that is bleeding out of my day and I do not know how to stop the hemorrhaging. The problem is that I don’t even notice I am doing it until too late.

Today, for example, I was working while on the phone with my mom and getting a lot done. Her computer was down and she asked me to look something up for her quickly on mine. I did and then something lead to something else and I wasted a good 15 minutes before I caught myself. And that was with me right in my working stride! Sometimes I will waste 3 hours doing god knows what before I manage to pull myself back in.

I think also that this is why I will stay up late and work like a maniac sometimes. Its like, when I do have the momentum and I am not wasting time, I want to take as much advantage of it as I can.

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