MBA2210 Q&A Wednesday: I am burnt out but I can’t afford to stop working. What do I do?

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Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. On today's Q and A, Wednesday's question, Rose asks, how do I take a break? I'm burnt out, but I feel like if I take a break, my business will suffer. I feel like I can't stop working. I want to start by saying something that may sound obvious, but you need to make this a rule in your life. Everybody who's listening, not just roast. And that rule is non stop work is not sustainable. You just can't have this as a habit in your life and in your business. You need to take a break because otherwise your business won't survive and won't continue to grow forever. So you have to stop this habit of saying, go, go, go. I have to hustle until I drop and then I have to hustle some more working because I don't have A choice. You do have a choice. And that's the real essence of today's episode. You have a choice. And we're going to carve out what you can do with that choice. I've been in businesses where I do everything. I am doing the marketing, the sales, creating the product, doing customer support, doing the finances, paying the bills, all that kind of stuff. I know, but the cost of not taking a break, the cost of burnout, can be your business actually losing your business. Why? Because when you're tired, when you're burnt out, you. You're not going to make the best decisions. You're going to make mistakes, unconscious mistakes. Some of these mistakes can be catastrophic for your business. Some of these mistakes are small, but add up over time, like a death of a thousand paper cuts. But worst of all, your business really can't make leaps. It really can't grow and expand and scale because your brain is not rested. You can't think of creative solutions and ideas and make breakthroughs when you're totally burnt out the time. So in today's episode, we're going to get practical. We're going to talk about how we can carve out some breaks so we don't get burnt out. Then we'll talk about how we can readjust our business a little bit, retune it so it's not so dependent on us working all the time. Especially when you're doing all the jobs right, you're creating the product. It sounds like that's what Rose is doing. She's creating the accessories and then selling them online on her business website, on our E Commerce store. So let's start off with carving out a break. One of the easiest ways to carve out a break is around a national holiday or a holiday that most people recognize, like Christmas or New Year's or Easter. Now, I understand not everyone around the world celebrates Christmas and Easter, but for the most part, there's going to be some holidays that you can sort of bridge to allow yourself to have an extended break where there's not a lot of expectations. A slow time in your business, maybe your customers are not as demanding or not really going to be active. This is the case with our software company, Webinar Ninja, where we actually take a good amount of time off during the Christmas and New Year's break because it's a very slow time for us, for our customers and our partners and all that kind of stuff. So we take around nine days off during that break, and that is very, very good to recharge the batteries. Not just me and Nicole, the founders, but everybody on the team. I'm asking you to do the same for your small business, whether it's this holiday or the next one coming up, or even just a long weekend where you can just tack on an extra day or even half a day. Now, in my experience, the quality of your time off is actually more important than the quantity. What does this mean? Well, if you take a week off, but you're on your phone constantly, still looking at your emails, your messages, sneaking in work here or there, you're not really recharging your batteries, you're not really reducing your stress levels or helping out with your burnout. It actually would be more helpful if you took a half day on Friday, took the weekend. So you had two and a half days and totally shut off. Didn't look at your email, your notifications, Shut off your notifications on your phone completely and immerse yourself in an activity that took you away from your business, whether that's going on a hike, camping, snowboarding, skiing, a beach weekend, being out in nature, whatever it is. The point here is, is that you are totally removed from the office. This will actually recharge your batteries faster. It's like a supercharger. This is why I personally love immersion activities. Immersion activities are activities that you do that totally require your full attention and really put you in a different world, in a different state of mind, and gets you out of your routine of thinking and working on your business. Some immersion activities are like travel. Even travel locally within your country or your state even, or local area. If you could travel internationally and go to a country with a foreign language, that's even better. You're totally immersed, trying to learn a new culture and language and get around. And the best distraction is another distraction, really. It's being immersed in other activities. Another example of an immersion experience is snowboarding. I love snowboarding and skiing because when you're snowboarding, you can't think about anything else. You have to focus on what you're doing so you don't fall, so you don't hurt yourself, so you don't die, right? This is why I love basketball. I play basketball on the weekends. It allows my brain to shut off, totally focus on something totally different and live in the moment. And after I play a couple hours of basketball, I leave the court feeling refreshed. My brain had like a reformation because I wasn't thinking about work or business for a good two hours. I get perspective. I just feel better about everything. So I highly recommend looking at your Weekends, looking at your upcoming schedule, holiday schedule and bridging some days. So maybe a day at the beginning of the holiday and one after or something simple. Like I said, half day. Like half day Friday and the weekend. If you need a lot of recharging, you've been burnt out for a while. This might be a good practice to do every other week, every other Friday, half day Friday, you finish at noon, you shut off and you go out, you have a good time. You do some immersion activities. You go for a walk in a park, call up a couple friends, play some board games. Uno. Do you like video games? Get lost in a video game. This is not a waste of time in my book. This is a chance for you to recharge. But this is not going to happen by accident. You have to put in the time. You have to put in your calendar and you have to commit to it. Like any appointment that you would have for your business. Now, I know that you might have anxiety right now. Say like, what about all the stuff that's pending in my business, the things that need me? How do I change things so I don't feel like my business is so dependent on me? Well, you need to separate tasks that you do into urgent tasks and not so urgent tasks. Urgent tasks are things that have to get done in a timely MANNER, like within 24 hours. Not so urgent tasks are things you can do and take your time. It doesn't need a 24 hour turnaround, maybe a week turnaround, a few days turnaround, a few days turnaround. Meaning that you don't need to do this during the weekend or during your break. You can wait a few days and get to it. But if you have things that are urgent, and I'm going to tell you right now that most businesses don't have urgent needs. We don't work in an ER right. 24 hour turnaround, that's pretty, pretty urgent. But even for those tasks, I got your back. You need to make a hire. I know that you might say that things are razor thin, but you're going to get a lot more done and this hire is actually going to help you have more time to work on things that bring in money. And that's an ea. You need an executive assistant or a va, a virtual assistant. Even if it's part time, you can get a part time EA for $250 a month. There's a lot of great talent out of the Philippines. You can go to onlinejobs, ph great job board to find a great va. This person can be Sort of your firewall. Any customer inquiries, anything urgent, they're the first to know. They can handle things. They can actually reply to somebody and say, hey, we got your message and we're working on it. This buys you time. Absolutely killer. They can text message you or WhatsApp you and say, hey, we have an absolute emergency. And I'm going to tell you, most times it's not an emergency. This EA can fulfill things that need fulfilling most of the things that are urgent, especially in E commerce, like fulfilling an order or checking, checking or answering a customer. Whatever it is can be done behind ea. They can do it for you so that you can shut off a little bit and take care of most of your absolute emergency tasks.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want to make sure that I give you a few more strategies when it comes to setting up your business so it's not so dependent on you and your time so you can take a break and not burn out. One tip that is easy to implement is to use technology and automation to help your business out, right? Sometimes you just need to get back to the customer to let them know I got your message. So for example, when our customer service team is not working, they're not on like a holiday. We have an automated message that goes up when anybody messages us and says, hey, we're currently off. We come back to the office this day. We will answer your email, your message, your chat as soon as we're back. So this allows the customer to know that we got their message and that we'll get back to them. Then you can do the same with automation, with an out of office reply to your emails like in Gmail, or with any customer service tool that you're using, or ticketing tool where there's just an automated email that goes to anybody who sends you a message during your off hours. That way during the weekend, during a break where you're recharging your batteries, they know they're going to be taken care of. Most customers are okay with that. They know that sometimes you need to be off, right? They just want to make sure that their query has been received. Now you can also include if this is an absolute emergency, you can email this person and this person can be your ea, your VA that I talked about that can answer things while you're away. That's their job. Their job is to be basically the wall between you and urgency. And they can either handle it themselves 90% of the time, 95% of the time, or they can reach out to you and say, hey, what do I do in this situation? You give them advice in two seconds, they can just give you a call and it's done. Next, build a library of SOPs, standard operating procedures for your business. And this is going to be the first thing your VA is going to do is document the procedure to do anything in your business. Whether it's processing a return or answering a customer service message, or publishing a blog post or whatever it is, There should be document for every task explaining how to do it. This is a must for every business. This is something that we did in our business early on, thank God, because it made our life so much easier. When we hired somebody, we just gave them the sop. They knew exactly what to do. This also increases the value of your actual business because these SOPs is part of your intellectual property. If somebody wants to buy your company one day, these SOPs are gold for them. They're like, wow, they know exactly what to do, how to do it. Weld oil machine. This also allows you to just tell your VA, hey, just follow the SOPs if you're not sure how to do something. Lastly, if you're worried, hey, I just can't take a day off. My whole business is going to collapse. I challenge you to just try, okay, take baby steps. Take an afternoon off and see what happens. Does everything just go berserk? Probably not. Tried half a day. Try a full day. Try two days, three a week. the end of the day, you need to be able to step away from your business and things continue to go, to continue to function. That's a business. That's an investment you made so you can free up your time. But let's take some baby steps. Let's test our hypothesis and say, hey, let me take a half a day off, see if this works, see if everything's okay. Nothing can't be solved the next day. You can just check up on the next day if things are okay, fine, great. Try a full day. You got to give it a try so that you can give yourself the rest you need so you can go back at it fully charged. Thanks, Rose, for your amazing question on Q and A Wednesday. And thank you all for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts or leave us a rating on Spotify. It means a ton of I read every single review and rating. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if you're starting a new business or you're interested in revamping your existing one, think about how to build one that's not reliant on you. That's self serve for your customers. That requires minimal input from you, the creator, the founder. This includes finding the right people to fill in the spots. Start seeing your business as as an investor. If you're an investor in a business, how would you make this a well oil machine? What people would you put in what spots? How would you revamp the business model so that you're not chasing customers and customers are just reoccurring and coming to you? This is going to require for you to just step back and step away and think big picture. But a lot of us, we build businesses with no strategy and then we feel trapped. So don't let that happen to you. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.