However, later on after a bit more thought (and a small glass of whisky which may have helped) my fighting spirit kicked in and I decided that 2009 is going to be the year that we turn things around. So there! I know what I want to achieve and have the beginnings of how I’m going to achieve it, so it’s now just a case of knuckling down and doing it.

I think my motto for the next few months will have to be “don’t be afraid of a bit of hard work”. Is it possible for me to work harder than I was already doing? Let’s see, shall we?

We’ve actually been having quite a long break over the Christmas period. We stopped work on the 19th December and are opening for business again on the 5th January. And, miraculously, I’ve mostly managed to keep away from work. Hopefully this will mean that I’ll have lots of energy for the coming weeks.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been easing myself back into a work frame of mind by updating our accounts and reviewing our incomings and outgoings for this financial year. I’ve found some good things and some not so good things. We’re getting to the point where we really need to start taking more money out of the business, but unfortunately things aren’t looking too brilliant on that front. So, the next few months are going to be all about turning things around and seriously improving our turnover. Could be interesting…

The weekend is going to be spent catching up on coursework. Got the next instalment of my management course on Tuesday so need to do some stuff for that. Hope I’ll also have time to do a bit of actual management of our business - see what an impact our busyness is having, apart from making me work flat-out. Oh yes, and mustn’t forget to fit in a bit of relaxation.

I think the secret was that I’d estimated how long each task would take and planned 4 hours of billable work. I must be getting better at this because for once things took less than I’d estimated rather than more. So, even with interruptions I still managed to get through everything. I’ll have more days like that please!

It’s a really quick download (just 8MB) and took literally seconds to install, so very lightweight. It basically works just like doing a mindmap on paper - you start with a central point and then work out, branching in whichever direction you want. If your map starts getting a bit on the big side (which my first one did) you can open and close the various ‘nodes’ (the bits branching off) so you can see everything or just the parent node. It’s fab. What I particularly liked about it was that I wasn’t limited to what would fit on a sheet of paper - if I’d tried to do my mind map on paper I would soon have run out of room, but this just lets you keep going. You can export in various formats (PDF, JPEG etc.) so that you can then use the resulting map in other documents.

So, having installed it for the first time yesterday morning I did a mind map of our business (that was a bigun), a mind map of what I needed to do that day (which I then kept up on the screen and ticked things off as I did them, lovely ), and a couple of mind maps to work out the structure of client websites, one of which we PDFed and sent to the client to have a look at. Talk about being instantly useful!

Then after lunch I decided to have a lie down for half an hour … 2 hours later a I woke up. Ooops. There went the best part of the afternoon. I guess it goes to show how tired I was but it wasn’t great for productivity. Means I’m going to have to work extra hard today to get through everything. I’m hoping to take tomorrow off but it’s not looking too likely at the moment.

We’ve got an assignment to do for this module, which will count towards one of the qualifications. We have to take a problem we’re facing in our business, analyse it, work it through, choose the best solution and write an action plan for implementing it. I’m quite looking forward to tackling this one - hopefully it will be something that I can practically apply so will directly benefit the business.

So, with the course over and done with I can start bashing through some work again. Am heading into Penzance in a moment to do the banking and stock up on some office supplies then I’ll be chaining myself to my desk for the rest of the day.

I managed to polish off my course homework yesterday but not without a great deal of grumbling. I don’t know, it just seems to be asking an awful lot - it’s not that it’s particularly difficult, it’s just that there’s so much of it! I wish the course description had been clearer about what was involved. Oops, there I go grumbling again.

So, positive attitude! I’ve already planned out my day so it’s just a case of knuckling down and getting the work done. I’m sure once I get started I’ll be ticking the various jobs off in no time.

Now I’m not sure what I need most …. some time off to recharge my batteries or just some solid days of working so I can feel a bit more on top of things. Maybe a few days of solid work followed by some time off will do the trick. Not that I’m going to get either! Meetings, courses and a massive workload is what we’ve got waiting for us. Tuesday I’ve got the second session of my management course so today I really must get the great pile of homework polished off for that. Could really do without it! When I booked up the course a few months ago I had no idea we’d be so busy now. I really must concentrate on the benefits of it and stay positive.

This topic has come up because we’re doing a talk on Thursday. We’re down for a full hour but the talk itself won’t need to be as long as that as we need to leave time for questions. Turns out I’m going to do the talky bit and my partner is going to control the powerpoint (if we manage to get hold of some equipment in time that is).

I forced myself to draft out the talk on Sunday and so am going to spend some time revising it today and preparing index cards so I’m not just reading it all out. Am feeling nervous even writing about it here. How pathetic am I?

I’m down to do a workshop in presentation skills in a few weeks, so hopefully that will help with my confidence. And this is something I definitely need help with!