I have a friend who is refreshingly honest, so unsurprisingly her favorite thing about me is that I “own my sh*t,” or take responsibility for the silly stuff I do and try to figure out how to fix whatever is within my control. Yesterday’s post made it clear to me that even a few minor changes to my priorities could get my life back in balance, so I’m owning the fact that I made this mess and making the tough decision to say no where I need to in order to get my goals back on track. Here is my new order of things:

~ 60 hours per week, watching my daughter when my husband isn’t present: I ask for my mom or mother-in-law to babysit my daughter on a semi-regular basis, but this is split between personal time and speaking engagements. I am deciding to back off the professional gigs for a while to get a little more time for me or me and my husband, or for working on my novel. Even just an hour every other week will make a difference.

~ 15 hours per week as Transportation Editor for Inhabitat AND any other writing I do for Inhabitots or other automotive publications: Inhabitat will shortly be asking me to up this commitment, but that will depend on the amount of compensation offered that I will use to fund my other projects. No more saying yes without a clear purpose in mind. I am also planning to offer to write more technical car reviews for other publications as Inhabitat doesn’t have any use for the hardcore tech details, but this is going to have to come out of the same chunk of time as I can’t let this section of my career balloon into something bigger than its purpose (which is maintaining my career for the time being and offering visibility for my other projects).

~ 10 hours per week on 29 Diapers: I think as I work to replace myself with contributing writers, I can accomplish more with the same amount of time. I still have to get over that hump, though.

~ 10 hours per week on my novel: here’s the kicker. I only need 5 more hours per week to make massive progress on this novel, and I know it. So that time will either come directly from my Inhabitat commitments, or I will more jealously guard other time that I fritter away. Yes, even I fritter away some time in ways that can’t be construed as creative idleness.

Will it work? I’ll let you know. When I Tweeted my previous post yesterday, someone responded by sending me a blog review of a self-help program for balancing your life, and the key takeaway there was that saying yes to everything means saying no to yourself. That’s not okay, as I even gain weight when my life looks like it does right now. Even making the decisions I made yesterday that allow this schedule to be possible made me feel great. Reinforcing the idea once again that this isn’t about money at all.