I can’t believe this happened to me!

One day, around the beginning of May, I just didn’t want to help anyone.

I stopped answering calls, and I didn’t want to do this work anymore.

In hindsight, I can now see it had been building for a few weeks…

• i’d often work 10 or 12 hour days, for 6 days per week.
• I have very high expectations of myself, and the quality of my work.
• Mandy would book anyone who called… which would sometimes mean 5 or 6 customers per day.

Luckily I managed to not let my apathy show, while I was onsite… But a few minutes after leaving a customer, I would have an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

The weird thing is: I couldn’t understand why.

Well, me and Mandy managed to get over it.

As soon as possible, we arranged for me to take a week off (although I still had to do some “catchup work)… I spent a lot of the time sleeping, feeling depressed and withdrawn. By the end of the week, I was feeling better.

The week after was “reduced” duties (max of 2 customers per day).

The week after, I took another break, and did a lot of things that I had been meaning to do, but just kept putting off, as my workload had gradually increased.

Taking a “step back” as I did, I can see that Computer Aid is now a successful business, and it provides a high quality service, at fees lower than the industry average.

So we had to decide where to go from here…

There were many options:

• Sell Computer Aid (not what I really want to do).
• Work less (and increase my fees, but accept a lower income)
• Just shutdown Computer Aid
• Go to a purely contractor model (I do the occasional job)… but this option has its own set of headaches.
• Franchise. I don’t believe this works well with this type service industry

At this stage, I’ve reduced my hours to something more normal, and I will consider my future options carefully.

From now on, I’ll be sure to take regular vacation time… it doesn’t matter how much I like my job, its still possible to overdo it.

And for those of you who really like my blog, and might be worried that I might start posting less frequently: I don’t think so. I usually “buffer” my posts, so that they appear regularly… so they can take up to 2-3 months from when they are written, to when they get posted.