Business burnout! You may not know you're affected - until it's too late! Commonly associated with the first stage of business growth and development - Core Business Development, business burnout doesn't happen overnight. It slowly creeps into your business after an extended duration of the passionate pursuit of your entrepreneurial dream. Left to smolder, it can extinguish your small business dream.
It's not uncommon to work extended hours when you first launch your small business. Your passion and excitement for what's to come removes all sense of time. Your eagerness wakes you before dawn and finds you working long past the time the family has gone to bed. Over time, the extended workday turns into extended workweeks and, before long, what fueled your start-up passion, has turned into a deadly habit that's killing you and your business.
Am I being too dramatic? I think not! Researchers have found that burnout has reached epidemic proportions. The negative consequences of burnout are well-documented, included coronary artery disease, depression, and autoimmune illness (Plus, I've got a personal story about a health crisis caused by burnout. It's wasn't pretty.)
Things Are Heating Up
Burnout is quite insidious. It causes decision fatigue, erodes confidence, drains your energy, infects attitudes, amplifies cynicism, promotes inflexibility, and encourages procrastination. Before long, you're unable to focus at the task at hand. You're easily disrupted by email and distracted by the simplest of thing. You waste valuable time poking around on Facebook or daydreaming about working at Starbucks.
Plan to Stop the Burn
Fortunately, small business owners have control over their work hours and can implement these strategies easily and effortlessly to put a stop to business burnout.
1. Establish priorities based on goals. Rather than focus on your to-do list, the "squeaky wheel", or the biggest fire, prioritize your day based on the actions needed to achieve your business goals. By being goal-oriented rather than time-oriented, you'll eliminate unnecessary tasks and achieve much more.
2. Perform in 40/20 cycles. Pierre Khawand, author of "The Results Curve: How to Manage Focused and Collaborate", discovered after a decade of research that the best results are achieved after 40 minutes of focused work following by 20 minutes of collaboration.
3. Stop multitasking. Once the sought-after skill of the 80's - 90's, researchers are now finding that multitasking is not all that it's cracked up to be. Although walking and chewing gum is still an acceptable form of multitasking (it's automatic), responding to email while talking on the phone adds to inefficiency. Plus, its just plain embarrassing when you're asked a question that you're unable to respond appropriately to because your attention is divided.
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