The past few years have been interesting to say the least. After getting my mom to move across country in order to be closer to me so that I could start to help her as her need to be helped increased – I started to see a dramatic increase in personal time in my calendar.

As a rabid type A – most of my time has been spent working. As a free lancer and the sole means of support for my critters and my house – most of my time was spent working or marketing or bookkeeping or networking or something else that required large amounts of time in my “cave.”

So, learning how to carve out the time for my mom was a challenge.

Combine that with the down turn in the economy and there was a bit of a dip in work – which in retrospect was perhaps a good thing – as it allowed me time to help my mom when needed.

The possible side effects of this internal struggle between work and personal time is that I may very well be seeing that I actually don’t need to spend as much time “working” as I thought! Entire weekends have gone by recently without stepping into my studio and miracle of miracles, the work continues to come in.

A thread on a VO forum recently has been discussing what people do to market their business. A few people doing this as their sole means of income don’t spend a lot of time “marketing.” They are able to use the “repeat business/referral” formula of marketing. They were feeling a bit guilty that they didn’t spend hours creating newsletters, researching new companies or opportunities, networking, etc.

In reality, they have established a reputation for being good and reliable and the business is coming to them. What little “marketing” being done ends up fairly passive, but still effective.

And there may be another side effect of learning to balance life and work – when you take the time to be involved with people and really connect, a side effect is that you connect better with the scripts you record, which shows in the end product and makes the client happy.

I guess the bottom line for me is to make sure I am doing the best job possible for my current clients so that they think of me the next time they need a female voice.

Oh, I still poke around the Internet looking for potential work partnerships, but getting out of my studio and into the world of people and real relationships is much more important.