Hustle is very much a buzzword of the moment. I would define hustle as the art of working very hard and being incredibly productive. I might daresay I love to work, be active and feel accomplished in things big and small. I highly value progress and improvement, so I often feel my whole life is being lived with this philosophy. This does not just include my job; it includes parenting my children, home improvement and any other activity that is required to keep up with life. I rarely slow down and even when I do my idle activity often involves reading something that challenges me to be better, learn something or expand my perspective.

Over the last year, but especially over the last few months my ability to hustle has been challenged. The complexity of nearly every aspect of my life has become more challenging. I have been rebuilding my sales team, including serving as interim sales manager. We expanded to add a new office in a new state and are seeing growth in our two other locations. Thus, my travel schedule has been heavier than ever which also makes my schedule while in the office busier than ever. My son has been playing baseball on a competitive tournament team, which dominates most of our weekends. We undertook a massive home renovation, which I am now trying to finish. In a desire to provide a wonderful childhood for our children we want to continue to take them on vacations, weekend trips to the lake and do other fun activities. While things have become more complex in many areas, I do not want to compromise the quality of the time I spend with anyone inside our organization or my family at home.

This has led to three primary tests of my ability to hustle: keep driving, sustain, stay on priority.

As things have been so busy and my demands have been heavy, I am typically a little tired. The challenge then becomes to keep driving throughout the day. Based on my schedule, I only get to spend quality time with my family in the evenings. In order to give them my best and not just what is leftover, I must keep pushing through the day all the way to the end. This has proven a challenge almost every single day.

A major turning point in my year was when we lost our sales manager and another member of our sales team, leaving us with only one person in sales at the time we were trying to grow our sales team to five total. This occurred roughly 10 weeks ago. The team is now in place, but still in training and will be for another 8 weeks. I have not replaced the sales manager yet, so the onboarding of that key position has not begun either. Sustaining this pace has been a challenge for the last 10 weeks and it looks like the pace will remain breakneck through the end of the year. We will see how resolute my hustle truly is as I try to sustain over that length of time.

The third challenge has been to stay on priority. As things become busy, I rely more and more on my schedule. As I have increasing requests for my time, I tend towards responsive behavior, not proactive behavior. This puts me in the situation where I can be extremely busy, but not necessarily productive towards achieving the results that I want.

These are not complaints, just statements of fact.  In relaying this situation I am sure there are many that can relate.