We sound like we've been in the same places in life.
I???ve been operating at about 60-80% of my billable capacity, in order to reserve time for self-education, open-source projects, and other activities. I therefore adopted a ???picky and pricey??? stance towards new business, weeding out all but the most attractive projects.
After learning the hard lessons, this is where I ended up, and was comfortable with it. "100% capacity" simply is not sustainable.
I had a lot of trouble with procrastination ??? it was hard to get started on anything when I had so many things I needed to do. My usually over-optimistic estimates became downright pipe dreams. That whooshing noise of deadlines flying by didn???t do anything to relieve my stress, either.
Strangely enough, this remains my biggest obstacle. First thing on the morning, I look over the "to do" list. On any given day, it can be 20 to 50 items long, and grows once I start reading the e-mail or getting phone calls. And the end of the day, what didn't get done gets re-prioritized to the future. It never seems to get shorter. It can be dispiriting, and frequently leads to procrastination, which clearly is the opposite of what needs to happen. The trick to dealing with it has been accepting that the list will always be long, and you simply need to continue attacking the items one-at-a-time.
