I’ve been spending a stupid amount of time on getting my new working holidays site up and running and I’m nearing the end. Problem is that I’m also nearing the end of my patience with it. I’m so sick of looking at it that I wouldn’t mind if the site spontaneously deleted itself into oblivion. Ok maybe that’s a bit hasty but you get the idea -Â I’m fed up.
I’ve done all the fun bits and now I need to tweak a few annoying things, write a lot of annoying articles, research some annoying information and install an annoying forum. The whole thing is, you guessed it, annoying the hell out of me at this point. I had all kinds of good ideas for the site but it seems to have sucked the life out of me and all I want to do at the moment is get it out of my face.
This is the first time I’ve felt this way since I started doing this website development thing. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been working full time in my regular job, building sites for hours each night and have a lot of other things going on making life pretty busy. It probably won’t be the last time I feel a bit burnt out so I’ve come up with a little list of how I might deal with the problem.
- Launch the site, ready or not – When I find myself a bit sick of a project and start to neglect it, one thing that usually brings me back on board is landing a few Adsense clicks or affiliate sales. I expect this site to do well with Adsense so if I put it out there and start to see it earning well then that will be good motivation to keep working on it.
- Work on another site – I’m pretty scatty when it comes to building sites and I normally tend to jump between them doing little bits at a time. This is probably the first time I’ve sat down and worked on a single site from start to (near) finish without also working on my other sites from time to time. I’ve found myself thinking up ideas for my other sites but haven’t had the time to work on them so maybe mixing it up a bit would be a good idea.
- Take a break from building sites – There are plenty of other things I have to do before I head off on my travels like setting up a server on my PC (whatever that means), downloading some tunes, backing up my computer, burning my photos to CD, catching up on emails, typing clever things into Facebook etc etc etc. Plus there things I can do with my sites that have nothing to do with their construction like looking at new affiliate programs, approaching potential advertisers for private link sales, researching keywords, learning new skills yadda yadda yadda. All this stuff needs to get done at one point or another so now is as good a time as any.
- Take a break from the online world completely – I have 100,000 things to do in the offline world and I could probably stand to take a break from the computer for a few days. I find when I’m not able to work on my sites for an extended period of time I usually come up with some good ideas and am really eager to get back to work. A bit of time away while I organise my life might result in some stupendously amazing ideas. Of course I might just veg out, watch lots of TV and eat ice cream but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
I think working hard initially is a major key to success down the road but I also think that working too hard might turn out to be negative if it saps all my energy and makes me want to assassinate my website.
I’m going to opt for a combo of options one and two. I’ll launch my new site and hope it starts to pay off and spend the next week or so after that working on my living in London site. If that doesn’t bring me back to life then I’ll start doing some non-building things and if all is lost then I’ll have a break from the internet for a few days and see how it goes.
I just need to keep my eye on the prize… more work now means less work while I’m sitting on the beach!
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