Long form articles about Burnout for solopreneurs
Shorter articles about Burnout in a solo business
A honed routine is a safeguard against chaos and overwhelm
My entire life has changed after baby.
Once I was a highly optimized solopreneur,
Now, a dishevelled moosh.
I spent years designing a highly optimized routine like an addiction and now I crave all my daily habits.
Instead of crisps and chocolate I crave some quiet time to sit and read, or a slow lone walk to order my thoughts.
But although my routine may have been chipped away, but it survives and adapts.
Micro-versions of my old habits have emerged in the chaos, and I’m using a cut-down version of my routine to make a 4 hour workday (mostly) stick.
Instead of a 30 min workout in the morning I do 5 mins of rowing at 3am when I’m on babywatch.
Instead of daily reading, I’ll listen to an audiobook whilst cleaning bottles.
When I don’t have time to write, I’ll do a braindump instead.
My new mini-routine is keeping me sane, I think without these small nods to normalcy i’d probably go mad.
The thing about routines though?
It’s easy to ditch them when things are good:
You don’t need the dentist while your teeth are good.
But brushing your teeth everyday means you’ll never need the dentist either.
When the unexpected happens, or when things get tough,
A well-built routine makes the difference between stress and chaos on one hand and keeping your shit together on the other.
You see those people that look like insanos,
the power couple who have 2 kids and still somehow find time to go to the gym?
That’s the payoff of maintaining good habits.
And it’s a self fulfilling loop:
- When I’m healthy, I have more energy.
- So it’s easier to resist eating crap,
- So I’m healthier,
- So I have more energy,
- So I get more things done,
- So I have more time to rest or exercise,
- So I have more energy
- And so on and so on…
Like anything great it takes time, and effort,
and I know I slip, and I won’t keep up the routine everyday.
But I also know when you set out to design your lifestyle,
A good routine takes a long time to take root.
Routine,
becomes habit,
becomes a lifestyle,
becomes part of your identity .
So start building up your dam, one day at a time.
When things get tough…
Life is very beautiful.
But it can be hard to see when you’re living it
Like looking at a mole under a microscope instead of seeing the beautiful body.
Your too close
Zoom out
You don’t have to go far to get a new perspective
I find often just a short 5 minute walk up the hill is enough,
Then I can turn and lol back down on my life with appropriate perspective to see the beauty therein.
When it’s a tough day at the office,
just step outside…
It’s paradise out there.
It’s hard to be stressed when your looking at greenery and flowers and butterflies
You asked for problems
Last year I said to myself more big projects.
Yet I here am again taking on too big ambitious projects with the garden
I feel stressed to the eyeballs trying to take on this massive task.
I’ve pushed my body past the limits of endurance,
and my mind is juggling like a mofo.
Why do I always push myself so hard?
On the other hand…
I keep saying I want to free up time from work,
so can work on the garden and other personal projects.
Then when I work on personal projects I worry about not having enough time to work on DH!
When I have too little to do I crave a big project.
When I have a big project I crave stability.
These projects are hard,
they push you past breaking point.
But this is where the personal growth happens.
I have realised one of the main reasons I started my own business
was that I got bored with my day job.
I’d reached the cap on my growth in those roles, and needed a new challenge.
People seeking Entrepreneurship often don’t realise they are just bored and seeking new challenges.
They forget this as soon as they hit all the challenges of entrepreneurship.
Keep this in mind when you face problems:
You need this.
You wanted this.
You asked for this.
Slow ain’t sexy
Solve one problem,
the reward is a new set of problems to solve.
Move too fast,
and you have x2 sets of problems you don’t know how to solve lol
It’s a recipe for burnout.
Slow growth isn’t as sexy.
You can’t post about it on social.
But slow growth is much more sustainable long-term
Being busy vs feeling busy
Feeling busy is not the same as being busy.
Feeling productive is not the same as being productive.
My hours are the same.
my workload is much the same.
So why am I feeling burnt out?
I keep saying
“I’m too busy I have too much on” I moan.
but then I imagine how the stoic sage on my shoulder might respond:
“But Nick aren’t you forgetting that you’ve been for a nice walk today,
You also had enough time to spend an hour in the garden”
I’m focusing on the negative.
I forget that I do have time.
The issue is not that I’m physically busy,
the issue is that I’m mentally busy.
The problem is not volume,
it’s intensity.
Even in my downtime my brain is still processing problems in the background.
So my brain is too cluttered to enjoy even my leisure time.
This is the problem with burnout, it starts to seep into your leisure time too,
and makes it harder to dewind and enjoy life.
I have too many plates spinning and too many complex projects running at a time.
I need to balance mental vs physical work.
I need to set aside more thinking time
I need to reduce the no of complex projects I take on at a time by saying NO to others and to myself.
The more projects I have on, the more I need to make spare time as breakout space to process, for my mental health.
Rest isn’t always sedentary
Everyone has different forms of rest.
My wife likes to unwind by watching something familiar like The Office or Friends on repeat.
This saps my energy & leaves me feeling lethargic and antsy.
The background laughter track grates and makes my head fizz.
I’ve found over time my tolerance for tv degrading to the point where I struggle to watch anything longer than 30mins without wanting to do something else instead.
I don’t think this is a bad thing.
If I had to define rest as downtime, then my form of rest would be walking or reading.
But this weekend we had a rare spot of sun in Scotland.
I got my pasty white arms out and got stuck in with the garden.
I spent the weekend caked in mud,
digging drainage trenches,
we reroofed the shed,
laid some paving,
Cut up some timber to build a new plant bed.
I should have been exhausted.
And yet this was the most wholesome and restorative weekend I’ve had in ages.
Building things, letting my brain switch off and my body work is a form of rest for me.
I entered the new week stiff and sore, but energised.
My brain felt like it was functioning at a higher level of creativity and output.
I like to repeat this pattern at a micro scale too;
I try to theme my days with mental tasks, follwoed by physical tasks, alternating to rest both respectivley.
Everyone has different forms of rest.
It doesn’t have to be watching tv or vegging out.
My ideal form of rest is hard work.
Work your mind, then work your body. Then reverse.
x3 ways to make more money as a freelancer
There’s a few ways to make more:
1 Do more.
Get more leads, work with more clients.
This will work at first, but there’s a low ceiling to this.
If you work by yourself then there’s a limit to your time.
You don’t want to just burnout chasing more and more money.
2 Charge more.
Raise your prices,
increase your value or percieved value,
Speak to better clients with bigger budgets,
Get better at sales (sales is probably the biggest thing)
3 Achieve the same result with less input
I’m not talking about cutting corners.
I’m talking about building leverage.
Systemize your process, automate your admin.
Half the work for the same money = double the profit.
This means you can double your money (or half your workweek)
Once you have enough money, then you can free up your time.
Once you have enough time you can consider your higher purpose.
Is balance always positive?
People are always chasing balance.
It’s assumed balance = good, extreme = bad.
An ironic truth:
To achieve great things requires imbalance.
- Edison obsessively tested 10,000 failures before he invented the light bulb.
- Van Gogh chopped his own ear off in a fit of artistic delusion
- Abraham Lincoln attributes his own success to his depression.
Focus, by definition, requires ignoring the unimportant.
But these are the extreme of the extremes.
We don’t need to take such an extreme path through life.
It’s possible to focus on a specific objective, for a defined period of time,
then rebalance your life in phases to achieve an overall balance.
I often feel at war between two versions of myself:
- my ambitious self who wants to build something great and lasting
- my self who wants a simple, unfettered life
I have no wish to live an extreme life.
I must balance ambition vs contentment daily.
It’s a spectrum,
and we all must decide for ourselves where we sit on that spectrum,
between greatness and extremity,
or normality and mundane.
🙏🏻 balance in all things.
You can’t have everything. Sometimes focus requires letting other things slide
Exhaustion is Endemic.
I ventured out from my mancave today to do a skip run.
Everywhere you see potholes in the road, houses are unkempt, projects started and abandoned.
It’s not just my neighbourhood.
I see the same thing every day online.
People are too numb from life admin.
Too worn down for persistence, resistance or insight.
Glued to Netflix and doom scrolling,
Too tired to resist the lure of addictive dopamine hits.
Blasted by endless onslaught of unhealthy options.
Who can fight that?
No-one has the will or ability to fight for life anymore.
The life is being sucked out of us by weapons of the addictive & seductive attention economy.
Resistance to this is futile.
The best minds in behavioural science are paid obscene amounts to manipulate our attention.
Our only weapon is control your attention.
Throw away your phone. At least for a few hours a day.
Easy paths = a hard life
The straightest road is never the best path.
In fact, unexpected roadblocks are practically guaranteed.
Whenever I hit roadblocks, I think about The Obstacle is the Way – Ryan Holiday
The best walks aren’t just a straight line to the summit.
The real adventure starts when the bridge has collapsed and you have to cross the streamor the path is blocked and you make your own way.
We don’t rage at these detours on a hike.
The point of the hike is not to get to the end of the path, the point of the hike is to hike.
So why do we get so frustrated when these things happen in our business or life pursuits?
Do you want a shortcut straight to the end of your life?
No, you want a rich, varied life well lived and full of experiences.
This ties in nicely with my first thought regarding time.
A long, straight motorway to the end of your life would be a very boring life indeed.
Not only that, a straight, easy path builds no resilience.
Every obstacle is an opportunity to learn, to harden yourself, to expand your mind, to tell a story.
each time we get stronger, and the next obstacle gets easier.
And there will ALWAYS be another obstacle…
So I can choose hard paths now, or easy paths later.
stopping at the roadside to see some wild stag.
Obstacles might seem like a negative at the time, but they add up to the rich experience of life as a whole.
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