Knowing your limit – Eliminate Small Business Burnout
Your reasons for becoming an entrepreneur is unique to your own personal situation. For me, I decided to start my own business because I wanted to be home to have more autonomy when it came to my workload. I just recently had a baby and wanted to be able to spend time with the baby (and my two other children) but also be able to keep myself busy during downtime.
So I decided to build upon the strengths that I already possessed and started VAMDs. As with any small business the work trickled in and then started gaining rapidly. Soon, every moment that I wasn’t spending with the kids I was doing work and finding myself up until all ours of the morning trying to make sure that deadlines were kept. I guess it goes without saying what started to happen, the ball started to drop and my clients were starting to wonder if my quality of work was starting to slip.
In actual fact, it wasn’t my quality of work it was me starting to loose track of my clients assignments because I was taking on more than chew. I was trying to balance my workload all while taking on more assignments believing that I could handle it and not considering the fact that not only was I doing my client’s injustice but I was slowly buring myself out.
It was at that point that I knew I had to start fresh, so I cleared up all my projects that were time sensitive and advised my clients that I was going to concentrate on current projects and unfortunately would not be able to assist with any new tasks until further notice. My clients were very understanding and as much as it felt like I was disappointing clients I knew that this is what I needed to do in order to provide the type of service that my clients were expecting.
So whenever it feels you are running yourself into the ground trying to accommodate new and current projects, you need to think about either:
- Stepping back and completing the projects that need to get done before they become outstanding
- Adding another member to your team to help aliviate the workload.
Remember, there is no need to take on every job that presents itself, your clients will appreciate someone who is focused and can get the job done rather than someone who is scrambling for time and thus producing work that lacks quality.
Until the next time!!!
Tags: burnout, small business, work life balance
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