Donald Burns and a guest discuss why restaurant owners burn out and how to prevent it. They detail a morning routine of meditation, reading, and exercise, plus an evening buffer period for family and personal tasks. Screenshots of calendars shared in his community show how accountability and smart scheduling beat just staying busy.
You know, I talk about self-care a lot, a lot, a lot, right? Do you think self-care is a luxury or a necessity for restaurant owners?
Yeah. Coming from me who will just, you know, naturally put all self-care to the side and say, we're just gonna full steam ahead, business only, you know, that's it. I, I can be a human robot, you know. No, that doesn't work. It's absolutely a necessity. Yeah, it's—
how do you take care of yourself? I love you. You put really cool things on your calendar. Tell people. Yeah, share some of that stuff if you don't mind. It's really cool. And I was like, because I had questions like, what is that? You know?
Yeah. So, okay, so my, you know, standard calendar, it starts, you know, 7 o'clock in the morning. That is, you know, meditation time. 7:30 in the morning, that's reading time. 8 AM You know, that's my exercise time. And then we go throughout my day, right? And then we get to 8 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. is always time. And that's what Donald was like. What's that?
A lot of my members, I have them like screenshot their calendars and send them to me so I just see how they're planning today because we're really— we focus a lot on time management and being effective, not just being busy. And then she was like, I'm like, what is that? So explain what that is.
Right. And so that's what most people would call like, you know, buffer time or, you know, this is a time block to catch up. But yeah, not in my world. That's, you know, F-up time. So that's why I was like, okay, that's usually when I'm, you know, asking my mom how her day went or, you know, it's just transitional time between work and home. You know, if I stay over work a little bit later, but it's, you know, basically if I want to go to the grocery store, if I want to, you you know, do anything. That's my, that's my time.
Oh yeah, I need to start putting on my calendar too. I need some time on my calendar too because I'm pretty structured. I'm pretty sure my morning's real— I mean, my morning's super structured. I have like my hour of power in the morning where I do my meditation, I do my Bible, uh, I get my, you know, I get my supplements in, then I head to the gym, I do my workout, and then I usually come back, then I do my prep for like calls for the day and stuff like that. But I need, I need Somewhere.
Yeah.
And if you don't want to call it time, you can call it buffer time if you're a little more, you know, you want to be a little more nicer than Bree and I are a little more raw. It's a restaurant industry. Yeah.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
