I keep wanting to write the story of the dress fitting, but I’m not finding a chunk of time to do it. So like everything else pressing in my life, I’m finding that I need to do just a little at a time, and then it will all get done in the end.

In the world of the internets, we call this being iterative, or having iterative releases. Instead of slaving for protracted stretches of time on a colossal project that will be obsolete when you finally get it out the door, you do development sprints where you plan a development cycle, you push it out, and then you keep doing little chunks of improvements at a time. A project should never be done, essentially. You are always improving it.

When I left my last job, my boss signed my card, “Stay iterative and clicky!” Words to live by.

This is how I need to start approaching everything in my life, because I naturally think that everything has a big red URGENT stamp on it (in fact, I had a dream last night that involved an URGENT stamp), and while many other people around me seem to operate the same way, I’m going to have to buck the trend. In light of some, well, interesting news that hit me yesterday, I need to change my approach from URGENT to, “It will get done, and it will get done well; I’m working on it. It will happen bit-by-bit, progressively. Please keep your pants on.”

Yesterday my glorious friend Nancy, who is not only a published author, but a New York Times Best Seller, if that’s a noun that can describe a person, quit her day job so that she can focus on her second book. Her first book was obviously wildly popular, and as the old saying goes, she needs to strike while the iron is hot on book two. Her agent, who knows what’s best for her, told her that she’s spending too much time on work and not enough time on her sequel.

This decision would affect me no matter the circumstances, because she is an inspiring, far-reaching, incredible woman and someday I would like to grow up to be her. So it's an amazing and grab-me-by-the-lapels-and-shake-me move that she's making, and it makes me dream even bigger to see her run like that.

But unfortunately, her decision also concerns me and my day-to-day life directly. The job she’s leaving is as my right-hand woman. She has helped me set up a prolific operation of fabulous writers practically overnight, something I couldn’t have accomplished single-handedly without completely abandoning every other work responsibility I have. (What, you mean you want fifteen web sites launched and a huge team of writers too, and then you want a ton of well-written content to go on those web sites every day of the week?) Well, Nancy helped me accomplish this, and she did it extremely well.

Yeah, so obviously I have mixed feelings about Nancy’s decision, and I told her the first emotion I had was jealousy, because, hello! She’s living the dream, that extraordinary life that I want, and now I’m feeling even way farther away from that as a possibility as I lose an employee that had become an extension of me. When I say she was my right-hand woman, I mean she was like my right hand. And now I will make the analogy that I have to learn how to function with only my left hand, and you all know how annoying that is.

(With my apologies to lefties.)

So what this means for me in the very immediate sense, as I sit and type and sip coffee, is that I didn’t sleep at all last night. The first reason is because I am allergic to the entire universe, as Steve says, and I have decided to get allergy shots. The upshot is that for 7 days, I haven’t been allowed any anti-histamines leading up to my appointment, which is today. The drug-free week culminated in an itching, wheezing, hive-ridden scratch-fest of a night, while my head swam with work details. I even got up and made a to-do list around 1:30 a.m., thinking that would help with the brain part of the equation, but it only allowed me to focus in earnest on the itching.

Sigh.

Wish me luck today. I’m gonna need it.