The whole second half of the year has been verrrrry weird and I was just wondering if it was the same for all of you. I have been mostly dead, dead, dead during the week and then absolutely hectic at the weekends one minute then the next the whole week has been dead (I mean not one booking) but the other three weeks of a particular month have been so busy I've been finishing early.

What the hell is going on, do they all push a button or something? It's so frustrating! Why can't they be evenly spaced out throughout the week/month? One minute I am twiddling my thumbs the next I'm begging the phone to quit ringing.

Still making goals but my god it's exhausting physically and mentally.

I'm going to apply my civvy street analytical brain to this "is it slow or not" question.

Typically we only see a maximum of 10 clients each per day, right? For many of us, much lower, more like 3-5, or even less.

In my former career as a business analyst, one particular thing I came to appreciate is that when you have low volume of anything - customers, products, phone calls, vehicle traffic - it makes it very difficult to predict volume, and any small fluctuation in volume can feel like a massive swing.

For example: if I normally get 3 customers a day, and then tomorrow I get 6, that's 200% of normal volume - it feels like a huge deal, because I've doubled my volume. But in reality, it's only three extra.

Conversely, if I normally get 3 and then I get zero, OMG my business has died. But again - it's only 3 less.

When you have a small volume to assess, normally you move from considering the volume on an hourly or daily basis to looking at it on a weekly or monthly basis instead. So instead of saying "Oh no, I had no customers today" I just look at my MTD (month to date) figures and say "OK, it's day 7 of November and by now I was expecting to have seen 15 customers. I have actually seen 12 so I am really not too far behind - I can easily make this up by working an extra day this week and/or doing a quick price drop day and bringing in an extra 3 this week, then I'll be back on track."

But realistically for us, we are working in a cash business which is subject to seasonal fluctuations, primarily around school holidays and the notorious mid-Jan blackout. So even a monthly position is not that helpful: we should be working to an annual budget, broken down into quarters, then monthly, then weekly.

And always build in a safety net: if you need 3 customers a day just to cover your monthly bills, then stretch yourself and aim for 4, and put that extra in a savings account so you can draw on it when (not if) there's an unexpected emergency.

Hope nobody takes this as patronising - I've only been doing sex work a short time, but I've been analysing data (and in particular forecasting customer volume) for over 10 years, so it's a strength I really want to bring into this business.