The blog is back!

Not that it really went anywhere.

My Fourth of July holiday weekend started off great—and then I got sick. Not seriously-ill, in-the-hospital sick; just miserable enough to spend 10 days in bed and almost totally offline—and another two weeks crawling back to healthy.

When you run a business, you have to triage the musts, the maybes, and the not nows.

The Musts

I had two musts: (1) a meeting (I was able to call in), and (2) a proposal (due date coinciding with my time in bed). For the proposal, I did something entrepreneurs don’t do enough: I delegated. With help from two great colleagues, we got it out the door.

While I’m on the delegating piece, I’d also like to thank other colleagues who volunteered to help me if needed. You know who you are, and I very much appreciated your offers.

The Maybes

The biggest maybe was a MarketingProfs happy hour that I desperately wanted to attend. It was their first-ever event in Washington, D.C., and I had been looking forward to finally meeting Ann Handley and her colleagues—not to mention networking with other members of the local MarketingProfs community. Sadly, the inability to stay awake for more than 90 minutes at a time coupled with the fact that I couldn’t carry on a coherent conversation put the kibosh on any misguided plan I had to put on a dress and heels and head downtown.

The Not Nows

This is both the easiest and the hardest part of the triaging process. I e-mailed clients to give them a heads-up. I rescheduled meetings that could be rescheduled. I logged in only once or twice a day to answer e-mail musts (mostly to say I’d reply more fully at a later date). I put off decisions on my Web redesign (stay tuned). And I let go of the blog and accepted that it was going to be static for a little while.

Triaging may be for emergencies, but prioritizing is useful every day.

The funny thing about the musts, the maybe, and the not nows is that they’re a useful habit to get into. Not in the triage-what’s-on-your-calendar kind of way, but in looking at what you’re doing in your business and figuring out what stays, what moves, and what you’re prioritizing out of habit instead of need.

Photo by Dominic Alves (Flickr).