MBA1945 Q&A Wednesday: How do I stop myself from working 24/7

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Hey oh welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business strategies and insights you can't afford to miss. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from AJ and a AJ asks Hey Omer, absolutely love your podcast. I've been applying a lot of the things you've been teaching but one of the things I have been struggling with is not being able to shut off. How do I stop myself from working 24? 7? I'm passionate about my business and I'm driven to be successful. But sometimes I work so much I drive myself to the point of exhaustion. I get sick and I'm forced to sit out a couple days. Do you have any strategies strategies on making sure I don't get to this point? I'd love your help with sharing any insights or experiences. Thanks so much AJ A very powerful question by AJ Entrepreneurs are more prone to overworking than underworking. And for that reason, I'm happy that AJ asked this question so I can address this topic. How do you pace yourself? How do you make sure that you build in breaks so you don't burn out, so you don't drive yourself ill, so you don't find yourself sick or worse, causing some serious damage to your health when your business, your customers, your team needs you? I'm going to share with you my best strategies, what has worked for me and also what has not worked. This is an area in my life that I actually am quite proud of. I have gotten better and better at this. You need to be your best at all times, and your health is so important to the health of your business. If you're not 100%, neither will your business be. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Hey Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

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So AJ writes in and asks, how does he stop himself from working to the bone? Working 24 7, burning out, getting sick from overwork. And my answer to this question begins with one thing. None of the strategies I'm going to share with you today is going to work without this first step, and that's changing your mindset. You need to first be convinced to be a believer in the idea that working more doesn't always lead to more or better results. A lot of us as entrepreneurs, we think that if I just work hard enough, if I work harder and harder and harder, I will reach my goals. And the best way I can explain this to you is to give you sort of an example in a different context. Let's say you're playing your favorite sport. For me, it's basketball. And let's say you're playing a full 48 minute basketball game and you're playing every single minute of the game. You're never being subbed out. And as the last minute of the game winds down, for some reason, the ref blows the whistle and says, you know what? We're establishing a new rule. We're going to run the game for another 48 minutes. And we go through 48 minutes again. And before the last minute, again, the ref blows a Whistle and says, you know what, we're going to do this again. We're going to run the game for another additional 48 minutes. I'd be fooling myself if I said, yeah, I'm going to shoot the same percentage. I'll play just as good, I'll run just as fast, I'll play just as good defense from the first minute versus the last minute of that, you know, three 48 minute games. Really. You have a capacity for performance, right? And you have an optimum amount of time where you're going to perform the best and everybody's different. But it's not endless. For some people in the working day, that's six hours of solid, concentrated, focused work. For some, they can stretch it to seven. Some people can go eight, even nine. But even with consistent long days, you can't keep this up day in and day out. Business is like American football, right? It's a high contact sport. You need to take breaks so you can recover. Because the decisions that you make in your business are high impact. They actually make a big impact. The decisions you make will impact your team, your product, how you serve your customers, a lot of things. So you need to make sure you're at your best as much as possible during your time working on your business. And you just can't do this seven days a week, 24, seven. Not possible. The human body has a right over you to rest and recover. So your mentality, your mindset should be, how can I make the most of my optimal time? Rather than how can I get more time to work? Most of us, if we just actually focused on what matters most and didn't spend a lot of time on things that kind of suck our time, $5 tasks, social distractions, messages. We would get a whole lot more done in a shorter period of time. But this cannot happen if you don't believe in it, if you don't believe that I can get more done in less time and rest more, or give myself more time to rest and recover. You know, it's important for you to pace yourself. It's okay for you to work harder in the beginning because you're trying to get traction, you're trying to get customers, trying to get product, market fit, totally get it. But as your business starts to get traction, you're starting to get some customers, you're getting some escape velocity where you're starting to make money to pay your expenses, and you have a profitable business on your hands. Now the stakes are getting a little higher and you need to really be careful of how you spend your time and your energy and how you treat yourself because you are the leader of the company and the condition you are in will affect the decisions you make. Again, let me say that again. The condition that you're in, your mental state, your physical state, your mood, all that kind of stuff is going to affect the decisions you make in your business that will impact your business now and in the future. To go back to the basketball analogy, during the regular season of the NBA, it's common for a basketball team to have a back to back night, meaning they play two games in a row. Because it's a regular season, not super high stakes, it's okay to kind of squeeze in a little extra work. Same thing in the beginning your business, you're going to pull all nighter here, you're going to have a launch period, you're going to work a little harder at certain sprints. Makes sense. But back to the NBA, back to basketball. In the playoffs and in the finals, they do not schedule back to backs, right? There is no such thing as playing two games two days in a row. Doesn't happen, okay? Because the stakes are higher. So they don't do this. They want the players to rest, they want the players to recover, they don't want them to get injured so they can, you know, continue to play, play in the playoffs and entertain all the fans. And the same goes for you. You need to maintain yourself, maintain your health, not get quote unquote injured, get sick so you can continue to serve your customers. Because now you got people relying on you, you got a team relying on you. So now that we got the mindset portion covered, what are some strategies that has worked for me and what are some things that don't work? Number one, I've cut out all late nights. I used to work really late trying to get more work done. Burning the midnight oil, as they say. This is super counterproductive because you wake up groggy, you don't work up fresh, it basically tires you out for the next day. And instead of having two days of work, you kind of have like one and a half, if that. So I have a hard stop of work at a certain time of day every single day. And I actually have a hard stop for bed. Like I go to bed at the same time every night. I don't go to bed any later than 9:30 because I like to get up early no later than six. And this allows me to start my day, do my morning routine, have a good breakfast and hit my to do list around 7:30. So I'm fresh and I don't have to recover. I'm not groggy. I don't have to drink extra cups of coffee. I am just as energetic yesterday as I am today. And it stabilizes my mood, it stabilizes my energy levels. So stopping at the same time every day and going to bed every day, the same time, even the weekends, I know that sounds a little bit strange, but that's just the sacrifice I feel is important to make for me to be able to sustain my health in my business. You have to have to have to have a day off. If you're working every single day of the week, that's just not sustainable. You have to have at least one full day off to shut off, to rest your brain, to allow your mind to consciously be not thinking about work. And what happens is that subconsciously you start solving problems because you're not thinking about it anymore. It's very interesting and I highly recommend you check it out. I mean, all my best ideas come when I'm on break or a holiday. Should definitely take my word for it. If you're not taking at least one day off a week, you need to do that as a minimum. If you can take more, that's even better. Two, three days. If you've been able to carve out that kind of life for yourself around your business, that's fabulous. Next. One of the reasons why you feel like you need to work more is probably because you're not getting a lot done. One of the things that wastes a lot of time is context switching. Context switching is you switching back and forth between two different kinds of tasks or several different kinds of tasks. A lot of people call this multitasking. It's incredibly draining on your brain. It's also super time consuming. Let me give you an example. Let's say, for example, you're writing a blog post, but then you kind of get distracted because you got a message on Slack for one of your teammates asking a question. So then you go ahead and you answer the question. And then while you do that, you're reminded, oh, man, I got a reply to so and so on messenger in Facebook. Then you go back to your blog post. When you get back to your blog post, you have to then re remember, hey, what was I working on? Where did I leave off? What am I trying to achieve here? Where am I at? In the process, your brain has to refocus and get back into that mode. And that is time consuming. But more importantly, it's tiring a lot of Us don't realize how much energy, how much caloric energy, actual energy, gets burnt from using our brain, using our mind. And you want to minimize this context switching as much as possible. This is why if I'm working on something like writing a blog post, I shut off my slack, I shut off my notifications. If I need to get back to somebody on email or messenger or whatever, I schedule time in my calendar to do what I call message catch up. And that could be emails, that could be messages, that could be my, you know, team inbox and intercom. The point here is that I don't allow myself to jump around. I just focus and finish something from A to Z and then move on to the next thing. What I find is that it actually creates a sense of calm and allows me to get things done quickly and with less exertion, with less friction, with less struggle. It's just so much easier to get it done when that's over. That's all that's in front of me. It's like folding a pile of laundry in the living room and there is no tv. There's nothing to distract you, there's nothing to listen to. It's just you and the laundry. And what happens is that you actually get the laundry done a lot faster than you normally would if you were distracted. Now what doesn't work? Well, one of the things I wasn't doing for a very long time is questioning what's on my plate. Like thinking I have to do everything that needs to get done. And I know some of you are going to be listening to this and say, Omar, I know you're going to say, you're going to say delegate. But right now I can't hire anybody, you know, I can't afford it or I haven't time to hire. Before you even delegate, okay? Before you even go down that path, eliminate. I say eliminate first. Okay, look at all the things. Do you really need to do all this stuff? Can any of this stuff be done later or not be done at all? Just cross it off, not important. It's not going to move the needle to the point where it's significant. It's not going to really help my business in a big impactful way. I'll work on something else that will really impact my business. Bring in sales, bring in revenue, bring in customers. So eliminate first. So you can be like, okay, this is a little less overwhelming. Not that many things anymore. I can fit this in in the time I have today with my heart. Stop. Stop thinking you have to do everything that you think you have to do. Okay, you might have a list, critique this list, question the list, figure out if you can eliminate, and then of course, delegate. If you can hire somebody out, get somebody on our team to do it. A lot of us, we get lazy. We're like, oh, I don't want to show somebody how to do this. It's going to take more time than doing it. Maybe, maybe it will take more time. But guess what? You'll never have to do it again after you show them, right? You're actually making an investment so that in the future you'll never have to do this task again. Think about that. Never have to do that task again. Wow. Okay, so empower yourself to delegate tasks to somebody else. And if you're starting a business and you can't afford a 500, $600 virtual assistant that you can hire from the Philippines to delegate a lot of your tasks, a lot of your admin tasks make more sales, make more money so you can afford that. Another thing that I did that really worked is I actually put up a post it note as a reminder on my monitor that said, you are a marathon runner, you're not a sprinter. And it's actually true because I ran cross country in high school, I ran the mile, was my event in track. But it's a metaphor. It's a reminder that business is a marathon. Okay? And in order for you to complete a marathon, you gotta pace yourself, okay? You can't burn yourself out, you can't run full steam ahead constantly. And to be quite honest, you shouldn't be sprinting all the time. Sometimes you're gonna work hard and have little sprints. But often as the decision maker in your business, you can't rush decisions. You need to allow yourself time to think about things, to process them, to make the right decision for your business. So understand, hey, I am trying to build a business that's going to be around in five, 10, 20, 30 years, that's going to last the test of time that's going to serve me and my customers for decades. Having that long term view allows you to just take a deep breath and say, you know what? I need to think about what my life needs to look like. Because a lot of us just think the immediate future like, oh man, I got to get all this work done. I got to work, work, work. I'll rest later. No, let's set up the practices now so that your business runs smoothly. Not just today, but tomorrow and years to come. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus. With customizable tools and charts you can access across all your devices, try our most powerful trading platform yet@fidelity.com TraderPlus investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE sic To wrap up today's Q and a Wednesday's question from AJ how do I stop myself from working 24 7? It's just like anything in life and in business, you need to practice a little discipline. You need to force yourself, okay, to have a hard stop. My opinion is you need to make sure you're not working more than 10 hours. That's a lot of hours, okay? If you can work less than 10 hours, 8 hours, 6 hours, that's even better. But. But if you're like what it sounds like, somebody who can't stop working, you got to force yourself. That means shutting off your notifications on your phone. That means making sure that you step away from the laptop. That means try to step away from your office and your home. Go for a walk, go for a hike, get into nature to just disconnect a bit. Take at least one day off if you can to make it happen. And lastly, stop looking at edge case scenarios, at unique unicorn examples like the Elon Musk's of the world who like sleep under their desk and work every single day of the year. Elon is not typical, okay? And to be quite honest, if I'm going to be totally honest with you, I don't want Elon's life, okay? Elon does not take a break. He does not relax. He doesn't enjoy the fruits of his labor. He doesn't look particularly healthy. I'm hoping that he is taking care of his health, but he looks absolutely exhausted constantly. That's not something we should aspire to as somebody who's working towards a goal but understands what this is all for. We're trying to build a great product, a great business so that it serves others, but also serves us. Yes, you have to sacrifice to make a great business. But one of those sacrifices cannot be your health. Okay? Because without your health, you cannot work, you cannot produce, you cannot serve, sacrifice other things, netflix junk food, wasting time doing things that don't bring you joy or happiness or enrich your life. That's my take on making sure you have a little bit more balance in your life and your work. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. If you've got a question you want to ask, I can answer it. For you right here on Q and A Wednesday. Just email me over at omar@100mba.net make sure you hit subscribe or follow on whatever podcast app you use to listen to podcasts. Go ahead and do that right now because tomorrow I'm going to be sharing the five biggest lessons I learned in 2021. This year has been a roller coaster for me in my business. I've learned a lot of hard, hard lessons and instead of just keeping them close to the chest, I'll share them with you so you can learn from my own experiences as well. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode tomorrow before I go, I want to leave you with this Many of us, we love what we do. We love our business. We love what we do to create our business and serve our customers. It's something that we enjoy doing. But just like I mentioned before, I love basketball, but I can't play basketball 24 7. I have to rest. I have to allow my muscles to recover. I gotta have time to fast playing competitively, study, film and strategize for you and your business. It could be taking a new course or reading a book or biography to expand your perspective when it comes to being an entrepreneur. Think bigger. Widen your perspective when it comes to what an entrepreneur is and give yourself the rest you need so you don't burn out, so you don't get sick, so you're there for you, your loved ones and your customers. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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