On being busy and Lunch Up Guelph

September is such a hectic month for everyone, and I'm included.Personally for me, it's like waking up from a hibernation. Summer is a difficult, energy draining time for me. Come September I feel an rush of excitement come over me and I plow into tasks that have been on the back burner for months.

So far this time around I've started courses on deeper use of Google Analytics, I've attended at least half a dozen webinars on a variety of topics such as building better metrics retention systems, becoming more efficient in posting to online networks, creating content. I even attended my first virtual conference, which was intriguing, though I didn't take advantage of networking with any of the other attendees. Maybe the next time I jump into one.

For my own business I've had great meetings and headway on my website (which is something I've been neglecting for ages), I've started a Facebook page, and started setting more targets to measure what I'm doing.

New clients have been contacting me regularly this month. I suspect they are all in the same headspace as I am... new year, gotta get moving on these goals. And people I've been working with over the summer are now ready to move forward with projects we've been talking about for months.

All this to say, September is a busy month for me. And it always has been. Looking back to last year I was so busy in September that I hadn't gotten a chance to relax with any of my Twitter friends all month. Such a change from the slower days of summer when everyone seems able to grab a quick coffee anytime during the day, or take a long lunch and chat for hours.

On this day last year, I reached a wall where I realized I was going like crazy and wanted, needed, to spend some time with friends that had nothing to do with business and was purely social. So I tweeted out an invitation to get together for lunch, thus starting Lunch Up Guelph unexpectedly.

This month would be the anniversary of Lunch Up. That is if I had planned anything. Which I haven't.

It takes me roughly 6 - 10 hours of planning, organizing, and spreading the word each month to host Lunch Up. The most difficult part of planning is dealing with the restaurants, deciding which one, getting in touch with the owners, convincing them to host our event, organizing the menu etc. And the reality is that's just not a 2 person job. Involving more people would actually make it take longer. I know because I've tried 3 - 4 times to conscript help with the planning.

In short, I don't have 6 - 10 free hours in September. If I did, Lunch Up would probably never have started to begin with!

So, based on the first year of having Lunch Up monthly, I realize that instead of trying to plan and host events for July and August, which had very small attendance, that time might better be used planning September and October's lunches and then having a great handle on the entire years worth of lunching with friends!

Always learning, that's me!