Why I’ve been too busy to blog, part 1

So, no posts for 4 months. Sorry.

I wonder how many lapsed (failed?) bloggers make apologetic posts like this after a lengthy period of absence? It feels a bit pathetic to be honest. I hate those ‘oh my god I’m sooo busy’ people who will never help you with anything. I try to be the kind of person who says yes to everything, but perhaps that’s why I ended up so busy. And in a battle between my blog and getting by in the real world, I’m afraid the real world had to win.

(What’s interesting is that my trickle of comments never dryed up. About three posts I’ve made here seem to persist in attracting a couple of readers. Perhaps I’ve over estimated the premium on currency with blogging?)

Anyway, so why have I been too busy?

Part 1 to the answer is that at Albion, the communications agency where I work, we are going through that victim-of-our-own-success period. We’ve quietly done some good work, which has built our reputation, and has led to us being handed lots of new business, and being asked to pitch for even more. Which is all fantastic, but it’s hard to find the time to find the good people who we need to help us do it all.

I’m sure we could have predicted this, planned for it, and found a better way through it. We’ve all been involved in growing agencies before. But we were all having too much fun actually doing the work to stop and think about it seriously enough.

As (another) aside, there doesn’t seem to be too much competition for 30-person strategic and creative agencies with serious people and good clients. We seem to keep on coming up against similar competition: Karmarama and Farm.

Anyway, here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me so busy:

• Skype 3.0
• BlackBerry Pearl
• The Venice Project
• Atomico
• Betfair (not launched yet)
• Maggie’s (not launched yet)
• New Albion website (not launched yet – isn’t it always the way?)
• Plus lots and lots and lots of new pitches business.

So I’ve had plenty of good ideas for blog posts during the last 4 months, but really haven’t had the time to write them, because even my non-Albion time has been totally filled by another project – I’m getting married – see part 2 for details.

Hopefully in the New Year things will calm down a little, and I’ll be able to start to clear the backlog. (Hopefully I’ll get to go on some nice long train journeys too. For some reason I find trains the ideal place to write blog posts.)