Back to normal

Does your nose tell you it's time for a change?

This morning I was walking along the High St, and overheard somebody in front of me say ”everything is back to normal again now.”

I presume he meant that now all of the excitement and escapism of Christmas and New Year are over, we go back to the drudgery of our daily lives.

If I am brutally honest, his sentence did resonate with me a little. Only a little, but enough that I knew precisely what he was talking about.

Of course, it doesn’t help that today is wet and outrageously windy (so much so that I woke up to discover my fence had blown down, the felt has blown off my shed roof, and about 20% of the contents of the skip in my front garden were decorating my street…I’ll be popular when I get home tonight)

So what does back to normal mean, and why is there such a negative connotation attached to it?

I think it means that there are too many people out there that will spend tomorrow doing precisely what they do today and wishing they weren’t. I think it means that too many of us have the next year already mapped out before us, and whilst we don’t know what subtle variations will occur along the way, we do know fundamentally that unless a large helping of good or bad luck seeks us out, not a lot will change.

So how does that relate to a blog on a web design company’s website?

I suppose this post is just to say that I feel grateful that we get to work on creative projects, with ambitious, forward thinking clients. Our clients don’t just stand still and let life or business simply run it’s course. They are trying to ensure that tomorrow isn’t the same as today, it’s better.

It’s also to say that my business partner, Mark, and I spend every Tuesday night working solely on the development of Edge of the Web. We are just too busy to consider doing it during a working week, but we spend around 5 hours each Tuesday working out how to find new customers, improve our service levels, make our (excellent) staff happy, increase our margins, develop our image, understand where we want our business to be and so on. Every week, we are 10 hours of thinking and planning further ahead then we were last week.

Why not allocate a fixed time to try this for your own business weekly / monthly and see how you feel next year when it comes to “back to normal” time.

If it is normal for you to seek out new opportunities and ways to make your business (or your career/life better), then “back to normal” may be actually quite exciting.

With that said, I am not looking forward to the task of getting my garden back to normal tonight.