Quotes from 19th century Danish philosophers aren’t the usual fare for this column, but when I recently heard a British comedian paraphrase Soren Kierkegaard, his words reminded me of you.

During that BBC radio interview, comic Micky Flanagan said Kierkegaard wrote of how life can overwhelm you before you have a chance to process what has occurred. As we enter 2018, I think many of us share that feeling.

One reason why, of course, is that remodelers are so busy these days that they even lack the time to take phone calls. Many of you are working 60‑hour weeks, which can be great for the checkbook but not so fine for your health or your sanity. That has to stop. And the best way to do so is to take Kierkegaard’s warning to heart.

Flanagan did so by taking a year off while at the top of his fame. You undoubtedly can’t do the same, but you can dedicate some hours or days to processing what’s been going in inside you and your business.

Away from work, we all can agree that 2017 has been a tumultuous year. Like the college football season, no one went through it unfazed. On the job, we had record spending on repair and remodeling projects, run-ups in building supply prices, heightened concerns about the availability of labor, and a growing awareness of how relaxed drug laws and a generational change in the labor force will alter how we do things. While these may be the best of times economically, for many they sure don’t feel that way.

Processing the recent past has been on my mind lately because we’ve just finished compiling and then crunching the numbers for the 2018 Cost vs. Value report. You’ll see the results in a few days. The overarching result is that prices rose for all 20 projects we tracked this year, but there were stark differences in the values that real estate professionals placed on those jobs if they were to sell the home within a year of when the work was done. If our 149 individual market reports are any guide, your experiences varied.

Our partners at Remodelers Advantage like to promote the goal of working less while earning more. That’s a great objective. But to achieve it, you can’t just look forward to the bookings already scheduled for 2018. Look back as well, and strive to figure out just how you got to where you are today.