Alas, alert readers will have noticed a paucity of posts in the past fortnight. As they say in the military, I was OBE — Overcome By Events. It was in a good way, enjoying the last weeks of summer with my family. That and a road trip to my favorite martial arts event of the year.

In terms of accountability, I’ve managed to keep up with my earnings quota. That’s about it. My speculative work and blogs took a hit. And keeping up with the earnings required some late nights and fast typing.

Really, this speaks to the importance of working ahead. As I mentioned in an earlier post, accumulating a buffer of work for vacation and sick time is one of the first things a professional freelancer should do if he wants to stay professional. And I did that.

I just didn’t do enough of it to keep up with the fun-filled demands of having my wife and kids out of school for three months.

The lesson here is about planning. If I had planned better, had more realistic expectations, I could have built a larger buffer during the weeks I was home. As it was, I had to scramble and postpone.

Not everybody can learn from other peoples’ mistakes. Hopefully, this post can help you do that in this case, at least.

Thanks for listening.