Oh boy has it been crazy here on Avenue Z. I’m finishing up a new site (www.askbethz.com), getting ready to release the book (should be out in late May, but you can preorder here ), settling into married life, coaching a running team… Today I’m flying to Houston for my first speaking gig with a book signing, and I had to call the airlines to make sure I’d have wifi so I can get a project finished on the way there.

Crazy busy, I tell you!

But as I sift through my emails from the past couple of months, it looks like “crazy busy” is a new normal in our business world:

• “Sorry it took me so long to respond… things are crazy busy!”
• “I wanted to get to this last week, but it’s been nuts!”
• “Thanks for your patience… It’s just nonstop around here these days!”

And on and on. When I was growing up, I don’t remember my parents coming home and saying, “Wow, kids. Sorry we haven’t been home for dinner much — it’s crazy busy at work.” Both parents came home at fairly normal times, ate dinner with us most nights and retired to the TV room with us to watch awesome ’80s tv (Taxi, Love Boat, One Day at a Time, anyone?).

Are these “crazy busy” times a new phenomenon? Have we created work environments with deadlines at such an impossible pace that we’re all going insane? And has technology — the tools that are supposed to make our lives easier — played a role in causing this chaos?

I would answer in the affirmative for all three of those questions. I think the easier we have made it to access work, information, entertainment and connections, the tougher we have made our workloads. As much as I love technology and the excitement of this world we live in, I’d love it if we stopped answering the “How are you?” question with “Crazy busy!”

So, how do you answer “How are you?” Is your life calm, cool and collected these days, or are you crazy busy, too?

Gotta run… My Roomba robot vacuum just got stuck under the couch, my iPhone needs charging and I have to pack my Garmin Forerunner so I can go for a run in Houston.

Ever feel like your life will *really* get started if X happens? For me the X factor is the purchase of an area rug.

Let me explain. A couple of months ago I decided to give up my ocean-view office to move my headquarters into the house. Originally I had moved into a real office to increase my productivity. The off-site office worked wonderfully for a while until I figured out how to find as many distractions there as I did at home. So I decided to save myself a few hundred dollars a month and revamp my home office.

Our poor home office has undergone several changes in the last few years. When I moved in to D.J.’s house, he let me take it over, and I rearranged his big, wooden lawyer furniture to give it a little softer look. Then when I moved out, we moved in a twin bed for a while to accommodate extra company. Then D.J. sold his practice to a larger firm and took the office back over. But he didn’t really use it, so here I am again.

I have big dreams for this room that I sit in for 8-10 hours a day. I have a glorious blank wall to play with, and an unlimited imagination about things I can do. But so far all I’ve done is move one of the big, heavy desks to another side of the room and put up some gauzy orange curtains I’ve had for years.

In my mind, all I need to really make this room into *my* office is to find the perfect area rug. Something bright and cheery with flowers, or maybe a coffee cup, or perhaps even a cupcake! Yes! And once I find this rug, it’ll help me decorate the big, blank wall. It’ll help me determine what cute desk accessories would look best. It’ll make me feel at home.

So sometimes I get lost rug shopping. I can easily spend an hour or two searching Overstock.com or craigslist. I just get obsessed about finding THE PERFECT RUG that will ignite the completion of the office. Sometimes I find a rug that will probably do… but then I dismiss it because it has one too many flowers, or I flinch at the price (a perfect rug should cost about $25, right? Sigh). So I never buy my rug, and I sit in this office that I don’t consider fully formed.

To me this is a metaphor for other decisions in our lives. How many times have you told yourself that as soon as you lose a little weight you’ll really go out there and meet someone new? Or maybe you think all you need is to take the time to REALLY write a good resume, and then you’ll go after that great job. We sit around waiting for some little thing to happen to transform our lives (or our offices) into something more than it is. And in the meantime, life (and work) keep happening.

I know I’m not the first one to write on this subject — probably not even the one millionth one — but I think I need to look around me and accept this office as my own and get on with my life/career.

So, what’s your area rug?

This week I’m speaking at the California Society for Association Executives in beautiful Monterey. I’m trying out my new business cards, which are bright, sleek mini cards that point people to the new site, AskBethZ.com. This event is more or less my coming out party for the author/speaker path I’ve been wanting to take, a diversion from the freelance writer/marketing consultant road I’ve been on for almost three years.

Last night I ran into a speaking guru and personal brand expert, who asked me what I did. I froze. Speakers are obliged to be able to spout their conversation-provoking “brand promise” or tagline or elevator speech in a nanosecond — confidently and with conviction. It’s a thing, and I don’t have that thing.

So I stuttered and said, “Oh, I don’t have my little speech down yet, but let me give you my card.” So I got out my cute little cards that had been impressing people all day. I was hoping he’d love how adorable and colorful they were and would see how I was positioning myself. He said, “You certainly need to work on your brand promise.”

Sigh. Deflate.

And then there was a wonderful coincidence — this guy is actually a brand promise coach for speakers and authors! And he could help me hone my brand promise with one-on-one consultations! My… I am a lucky girl to have found such expertise at a time when I need it so much.

All sarcasm aside, though, he’s right. My tagline — Beth Ziesenis, The Quick Tech Trainer — was a suggestion by another speaker during a 5-minute breakfast conversation at another conference. My first draft was something like, “Hi, I’m Beth Ziesenis, and it really makes me happy to help people.” That wasn’t quite catchy enough. For a while I’ve gone with themes around me being “The Cheapskate Freelancer,” but speaker coaches and marketing gurus really, really hate the whole “cheap” theme.

Is it just me, or is it almost impossible to be your own marketing analyst to elevate your business? I spend so much time answering emails, writing for clients, sending bios to meeting coordinators and making travel reservations that I feel like I never have time to really think about my own messaging. And when I do come up with an idea, it’s tough to find people to bounce it off of because I work alone and don’t have much of a community around me.

What I need is a me — an outside consultant who can take an objective look at what I want to do and help me figure out how to say it. Any volunteers?

This week several people at the conference came up and said, “I used to keep up with you via your blog — aren’t you writing anymore?” Thanks for the encouragement to get back to the blog, and thanks to the guru for giving me an ego-bruising encounter as a writing prompt.

Here’s a speech I regularly give to people who ask about how I spend my days as a writer:

The writing life is different from other professions. We writers could never write for a full day — it’s just too taxing. We have a tough time just sitting down and writing, and we rarely get in more than a couple of actual writing hours (read: billable hours) per day because the act just takes too much concentration and energy.  (Here’s where I sometimes lay the back of my hand against my forehead.) It’s tough being us.

Turns out… I’m completely full of crap.

I was listening the other day to a piece about Mark Twain and his writing habits. He went to work writing in the morning, spent all day at it, and returned in the evening. Stephen King writes 10 pages a day, even on holidays. Ernest Hemingway wrote 500 words a day. Writers, at least those who make a living writing, WRITE. All the time. Thousands and thousands and thousands of words, some of which are complete crap, and others that turn into something phenomenal.

Writers like King and Twain seem to me as a mere mortal writer to be fearless word wranglers. With such prolific writing, they must not be afraid that the writing is not perfect the first time out. They must not fear a missed plot or a badly developed character. They must trust that with all their words, things that are good will rise to the top.

In contrast, I am a cowardly, conservative writer. Truth be told, I write most of my work for my clients in one sitting, one draft. I don’t write a thousand words to pick one hundred for publication. If I need 100 words, I write 92 and celebrate being a concise writer. I think I’m fairly lucky that my first drafts usually come close to the end product, but I think this skill makes me a lazy writer, especially when it comes to my own creative writing projects.

So what would happen if I sat in front of a typing instrument for 6-8 hours a day and just produced words? Well, I’ll let you know. On Saturday I’ve signed up for a 6-hour writing marathon through the San Diego Writers’ group. It seems illogical that I would pay $100 to sit for 6 hours somewhere else to write, but I want to change my venue, change my writing style and just let the words flow. For one day in 2010, I want to write like Mark Twain — fearless, without an inner critic, with fingers flying. I’m going to work on the mystery novel I started last January, before I got the nonfiction book deal.

If you took your own fear out of the way, what could you accomplish this month and into 2011? How can you break out of your own habits, bad or not, to tap into new areas of your brain, new stores of your creativity?