knowing when to walk away…

I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter; I especially don’t like to walk away from something I enjoy doing.  However, I’ve recently had to re-evaluate my workload (both personal and professional), and I realized that something had to give.  For me, that something was the Atlanta SQLSaturday 2011.

Now, before you panic, the project is still continuing without me; there’s still a team working very diligently to pull this together.  I’m just no longer working on it.

My reasons for stepping away were many:

• My personal life is getting very complicated. I’m getting married this summer, and there’s a lot of details left to work out.  On top of that, I have two wonderful kids from my first marriage.  My family deserves no less than my best, and that means I need to put them first.
• Volunteer work should be fun work.  If you’re leaving a volunteer project more stressed than when you went in, something’s not right.  In my case, I was too invested in the SQLSaturday project to really allow it to grow; I have certain ideas about what should be done, and it’s time to let others take it in a different direction. 
• Volunteer work should enhance your professional and personal skills.  In my case, I’ve let some of my technical goals slip because I’m investing too much time in volunteering.  I need to finish my technical certifications, for example.
• There’s other tasks to be done in the Atlanta SQL Server community.  I’ve spent the last few years working with SQLSaturday and AtlantaMDF; one of our original goals for SQLSaturday was to help feed the user group, and to be honest, that hasn’t happened.  Stepping back and looking objectively at the situation has made me realize that there’s some foundational work that needs to be done in the user group in order for it to truly benefit from community outreaches like SQLSaturday.

All of that being said, I’m still going to be doing volunteer work; I just need to make smarter investments of my time.  One of the harder lessons in life is knowing when to walk away from something in order to let it (and yourself) flourish.