I noticed this morning that I hadn't posted to my blog in almost two months. A whopping 56 days have passed since I last wrote a blog post. I felt guilty. As a digital marketing and social media professional I believe and preach that for a blog to have an impact and be worth the effort, you have to commit to it, have a plan and post to it regularly. I broke a cardinal rule of content.

But as I thought back over the past two months, I realized that I had spent an entire week on vacation with my family. My team at work was charged with and succeeded at building and launching 14 new websites in a three-week period. And, I finished reading two books that had been on my nightstand for almost six months.

Despite these accomplishments over the past two months, feelings of guilt and remorse still loomed over my failure to write a recent blog post. I found myself falling victim to one of the great delusions under which we live in today's society, as we explain in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

Far too many of us confuse the ability to do anything we want with the ability to do everything we want. As onerous as this misunderstanding is, it is even more alarming that this confusion gets carried across all aspects of our lives, compounding its impact.

Work life: Companies often take advantage of technology that keeps workers connected to their jobs 24/7 and expect a work-comes-first orientation from employees. In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work now more than 40 hours per week. According to the International Labour Organization, Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers and 499 more hours per year than French workers. The result, according to Harris Interactive, is that between 2012 and 2013 the percentage of U.S. workers who reported being over-stressed at worked jumped from 73 percent to 83 percent, with increasing workloads being a primary cause for the increase.

Family life: We fear that we are bad parents if we don't expose our children to every possible activity and experience under the sun. And so, according to KidsHealth, 41 percent of 882 children ages 9-13 surveyed said they feel stressed either most of the time or always because they have too much to do. And more than three-quarters of those surveyed said they wished they had more free time. Because of over-programmed children and overworked parents, a study commissioned by Virgin Holidays says the average family only spends 36 minutes per day together during the work week, and less than eight hours together on weekends. We spend more time with co-workers in one day than with our families over a whole week.

Personal life: As Brigid Schulte so insightfully wrote in a 2014 Washington Post op-ed: "Somewhere around the end of the 20th century, busyness became not just a way of life but a badge of honor. And life, sociologists say, became an exhausting 'everydayathon.'"

In a 2012 Huffington Post blog, Julie Kantor wrote about a mentor who provided the analogy that we are all juggling many balls. Some of those balls, like family, relationships and some work projects, are made of glass and will break if dropped. Others are made of rubber and will bounce back up. As technology opens up more opportunities to us to work and learn 24/7, it is more important today than ever to continuously evaluate and focus on what we need to do— those glass balls— and separate them from all the things we think we should be or wish we were doing.

Source: Erik Johnson is a frequent blogger and speaker on digital marketing and social media, and was recently named one of the top 100 wine influencers on social media. He is the director of digital marketing at ClubCorp and maintains his personal blog at tabulatubular.wordpress.com. When not fused to the comfy chairs at Starbucks, Johnson is most likely either playing hockey or exploring the wonderful world of wine.