Solopreneurs and burnout

Burnout is a very real risk for solopreneurs. We wear all the hats in the business, and it’s so easy to just get caught up in the treadmill of never ending work. It’s easy to buy into the myth that if you just work harder somehow it will all get done. However, it’s simply not possible to ever get everything done. No matter how much you do, there’s always more you could be doing so the work is never actually done.

What you can do is set limits on how much you work and make good choices about what to leave undone. Otherwise, burnout is a very real possibility. Over the long haul, burnout can sap your enthusiasm for your work and leave you tired, worn down and unable to focus.

The long term effects are tragic, but what about the short term effects? Sure it’s fine to push yourself for a short while but working long hours and not taking time off has a very real risk in the short run. In the short run, not taking time off can cause you to temporarily lose focus. You might find yourself forgetting why you walked into a room, going to the store for 3 things and not being able to remember them, sleeping poorly or feeling lethargic. These minor effects might not seem too serious, but expanded into other areas of your life the lack of focus might mean you don’t pay attention while driving, miss appointments, or skip medications. These effects can be serious or even deadly.

One of the recurring themes I come across in my work is that business owners work too hard for it to be sustainable. As I’ve mentioned, a short push is okay but when you get into months of long weeks there are very real risks. Sometimes when I point this out, I get the impression that the other person thinks I’m patronizing them or trying to butter them up about being such a hard worker. The truth is when I see someone working too hard for their own health and safety I feel like it’s important to point it out. I feel like sometimes I spot it because I’ve done it to myself as well. I’ve never had a serious incident, but have had more than my share of absentmindedness due to burnout. Two people close to me have had car accidents because of burnout.

I talk about burnout and working too hard a lot. Please don’t think I’m patronizing. It’s a very real risk in the long run. If you burn out and leave your business, the world won’t get what you have to offer. You also put yourself and others at risk when you can’t focus. Take regular breaks, take days off and take vacations. Always remember that the work will never be all done.

Have you had burnout? How did it impair you? Share it in the comments, and tell me how you’ll prevent burnout in the future.

Step 1, Set a Deadline

I’ve recently made a significant change in the way I manage projects and it has helped my productivity greatly! In this article, I’ll share the change with you and how it’s helping me.

First, some background…

I used to decide on a project to complete for my business, figure out the scope of it, outline the steps to complete it and then set a target completion date. I based the estimated completion date on how long I thought the project would take and how much time I could put in daily or weekly. This worked pretty well, but I found that it didn’t always lead to spending the right amount of time on a project. How much time you spend on something should be proportional to the importance of it, and not necessarily proportional to how long it could take if done perfectly. Deciding what to do and how to do and THEN setting a time target meant that I could easily decide to spend weeks making a small website tweak that didn’t increase sales, profit or customer satisfaction. I didn’t really put this together at the time I was doing it. In the years I was a corporate project manager, this is more or less how we did it and it worked great.

The impetus for change…

I’ve had a big project I’ve wanted to complete since last fall. When I say big, I mean big both in terms of scope and in terms of how it will change my business. (Stay tuned, details coming soon!) It just dragged on and on, and in the meantime it isn’t available for people to buy so nobody is benefiting from it. It kept growing in scope as I worked on it (sound familiar? : ) ). I kept finding more and more to include in it. Finally, the exasperation got too great and I took a hard look at the project and decided to make some changes and get it done.

What I changed…

I picked a day on which to complete it and then downsized the scope so that I could meet that deadline. I realized that this project was something that could grow without any natural limit, so I had to place a limit on it myself. Once I picked the day it would be done, I worked backward to put some milestones in place. I’m just a few days away from that first milestone, and it looks like I’ll make it but only barely.

The Result…

The results of this one very small change (picking a deadline and adjusting the project to meet it) have been amazing. I feel so much more energized on this project because I know it will be out in the world soon rather than at some distant date in the future. It’s easier to get to work on it knowing my time on it is finite. Somehow, just knowing I’ll get the satisfaction of having it done in a short time makes it so much more enjoyable to work on.

Conclusion…

Even though I had years of experience as a project manager, this was a big shift for me. If you aren’t managing your projects at all, I invite you to try setting deadlines and milestones to help you get some big things done.

What do you have lagging that you need a boost to complete? Share it in the comments and tell me if setting a deadline helped you get it done.

Deciding what to work on and how much time to spend on it is one of my favorite things to coach on! Click here to set up some time for us to sort through everything that’s on your plate.

TechSmart Podcast appearance

I was a guest on the second episode of the TechSmart podcast and I’ve love to know what you think! Host Lee Schneider and I talked about Google calendar and online scheduling with Timetrade.

Find the podcast here:

TechSmart Podcast with Michele Christensen

How to schedule your day for flexibility and productivity

In my last post, I talked about how to keep your personal life from getting in the way of your business success. This post is about how to schedule your day to accommodate both business and personal tasks while being flexible and productive.

First, it’s important to commit to a practice of scheduling your day, so let me explain some of the benefits. You’ll be able to get a clear view of what you did and did not get done in a day and adjust your next day accordingly. You’ll be able to look at a bird’s eye view of the 16 or so waking hours you have available and decide how to use them based on your current priorities. If you don’t already have it, you’ll get a sense of when is a good time of day for different activities. You’ll keep activities that tend to expand, like social media marketing, down to an appropriate amount of time. You’ll be able to prioritize the few things that you really need to get done.

I do this as part of my end-of-day routine when things are fresh in my mind. For some reason, having my day laid out before I wake up lets me hit the ground running. If I’m feeling bad about something I didn’t get done, I can put it on my schedule for the next day and let it go for the night. Of course I give in to temptation and skip my scheduling sometimes, and I always pay the price the next day.

You can put your schedule wherever it suits you – paper, spreadsheet, day planner, etc. I like to use a spreadsheet with one line per activity with start and end times. I would not recommend your main calendar – this is far more detailed than would fit on most calendars.

I always start my day with the same things. I’m best in the morning, so those first few hours are set aside for high-priority projects, and that means whatever is most important to be working on will get some uninterrupted high-quality time before anything else can get in the way. Consider putting in some time on high-priority work even before you check email or other messages.

Next, add in the “big rocks,” i.e. those big things you have to work around like appointments, meals, errands, fitness, etc.

Designate some time for personal tasks and for miscellaneous business tasks and handling email, messages, mail, etc.

Schedule in your breaks with a start and end time. Taking breaks is critical to being productive, but you do need to set an end time or it’s too easy to waste a lot of time.

Just like the first few hours of the day are set, so should the last few. Give yourself some time to wrap up your day, schedule the next day, do any before bed tasks, and finally some time to relax so you are in low gear when it’s time to go to bed.

Sounds great, right, except for inevitable last-minute things that pop up? The irony is that having a schedule helps you to be more flexible. You have a plan to deviate from. You know what you are giving up (or have to make up) if you say yes to something new. Being your own boss means that not only do you make your schedule, but you can change it too.

How do you schedule your day? Does it help you to be more flexible? Tell me about it in the comments.

Happy Independence day!

I’m celebrating this week and won’t be doing a blog post. I hope you’ve had a great week and see you next week!

3 Tips for Keeping Your Personal Tasks from Ruining Your Business

One of the best things about working from home is that you can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. One of the worst things about working from home is that you can can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. 🙂

Having no clear boundaries between work and personal tasks can mean that the two tend to blur, and this can be great until it begins to cause problems. Sometimes it gets really hard to leave personal tasks undone and focus on the business. After all, if you are home all day why isn’t the house perfect, the papers filed, the fridge stocked, the mail sorted, the calls made, etc.?

I’ve found that if I don’t watch it, that my personal tasks can start to erode away valuable time spent on my business which can be detrimental. I’ve found a few ways to keep the personal tasks from expanding too much, and so I have 3 tips for you that will help keep those annoying personal tasks at bay so you can focus on your business.

Create systems for things that pile up and nag you. For me, the worst offender is the mail. For an unknown reason, we get huge amounts of mail that needs to be dealt with. I did all the recommended steps to cut down on the mail, and still it regularly piled up. What I finally did was designate the first 15 minutes of every day to deal with the mail. Finally, this has gotten the accumulation down and keeps in check over the long haul. If your nagging, piled up task is laundry then find a way to fix it – designate a day, do a load every morning, send it out or go to a laundromat for a big session monthly. If it’s yard work, do some every day to wake up when the afternoon lull hits, hire someone to do it, or take an afternoon every other week. The point is, create some system for whatever your worst offender is so that it doesn’t nag you anymore.
Designate time to crank out personal chores. Trying to do chores in small bits of time leftover from other activities often doesn’t work. You need time to get into something and finish it. If you only have 2 minutes, that rules out most tasks you could even thing about doing because it’s not enough time. If you start with half an hour, that’s enough time to not only start but finish many household tasks. I set aside some time right after lunch every day and just crank through the top few pressing things I need to do.
Find your mental and physical productivity times. When are you at your best mentally? How about physically? Schedule tasks in a way that takes advantage of these times. If you’re a night owl, can you arrange you schedule to get some turbo-charged time late at night? If you have loads of energy for physical tasks in the morning, use that time to get them done.

I used to think that having a successful work-at-home business was only about being a good business person. Now I know you have to manage your personal life well too.

How do you keep your personal life from ruining your business? Share your tips in the comments.

People to avoid

I was out socially during a recent weekend, and found myself talking business with some people that I didn’t know well. One of them was a very negative, naysayer, “can’t be done” kind of guy. He was the kind of person who feels like nothing in his life is in his control – whatever happens in his life happens to him not ever because of anything he did.

Because I’m so passionate and excited about my business and I love the people I work with, I got very excited to be able to talk business with new people. The more I described all the good things that come from my business, the more negative he got.

He also had a way of thinking that is like nails on a chalkboard to me – he made up his mind before having any data, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would sway him.

Later, I realized I wasted a lot of energy trying to share my excitement with him. He’s negative and has no sense of being responsible for his own life. He has no interest in learning new things or expanding what he knows of the world. In short, he was a fool in this respect and I wasted my time, energy and enthusiasm on him.

I can’t go back and get a do-ever on this one, but I resolved right then and there to be done with having this kind of conversation with this kind of person. It left me drained and frustrated, and left him no more informed than he had been before.

Sometimes, when you have a mission you want to share it with the world. I know it takes almost nothing to get me talking about work. The thing is, not all conversations serve us or the person we are talking to. In this case, neither of us got anything out of it.

Your time and energy are precious resources and the source of all you business success. Use these resources well even when you are not working. They are very limited, and you can’t get them back. Don’t waste any time or energy on any activity that doesn’t provide a return of some sort. The next time I feel myself being frustrated instead of feeling connected in a conversation I’ll stop the interaction.

What kind of people drain you? How do you know when to leave a conversation? What kind of limits do you set in this area?

Get creative in meeting your customer’s needs

In my last two posts (here and here), I shared some of what I learned at the Overnight Authority event with Adam Urbanski earlier this month. Today’s post is an expansion on one big thing I learned during a sales exercise we did in the workshop.

One of the points that was made during the introduction of the exercise was that our goal was to make a sale. This was a real sales situation, and even though it was an exercise we were obligated to deliver what we sold and pay for what we purchased during the exercise. We could sell anything we could offer that the other person wanted to buy. That opened up all sorts of possibilities such as selling something that you had never sold before, selling something you created on the spot, or selling something completely unrelated to your business. That was really the first lesson of that exercise – if you can help someone or provide something they need and they want to buy it, find a way to deliver it! Don’t let formalities get in your way.

There was no way to get prepared for this exercise, so I didn’t have any of my usual materials in front of me. I was forced to get creative in offering something for sale since I didn’t have any of my packages or products listed in front of me. I listened to my prospect describe her problems and then created something on the spot that I could deliver that I thought would solve her problem. In a way, it was better that I didn’t have my own materials to work from because I was forced to listen and create something that fit rather than try to fit the customer into my pre-defined pacakges.

People really took this and ran with it. One person offered a package that was turned down by her prospect, and she then offered one tip for $25 which was accepted by the happy customer. Another person created a package for her prospect that was something she could do but had never thought to offer in her business because it wasn’t part of her main work. I offered something that I had been thinking about for a while but couldn’t quite put together until I was under fire to do it.

The really big takeaway for me was that yes, it’s great to offer a range of products and services in pre-set packages but it’s also great to wing it when you have the chance to make a sale outside of those packages. Don’t let the fact that they don’t fit a pre-set offering cause a customer you could help slip away. It’s a disservice to you and to the customer.

Aside from just generally thinking differently about creating things to offer for sale, one way I’m going to implement this idea is to be more proactive at offering to create a custom package for someone who I want to work with. If they want to work with me and the issue is simply that I don’t offer a service package that appeals to them, I’m going to ask them “What kind of package would work for you?” and see if we can make it happen.

How can you be more creative at finding ways to offer what your customer wants? Have you ever created an offer on the spot? How did it work? Tell me about it in the comments.

Sales lessons from a hard exercise

In my last post, I mentioned that I had been to a live training earlier this month with Adam Urbanski called Overnight Authority. I learned so much there that I have several posts lined up and this is the next in the series.

One night of the workshop we had a bonus session that included a sales exercise. A big part of what I learned at the workshop is that sales is what makes a business. All the other things you do serve only to make sales possible and/or more likely. Sales is a real challenge to many solopreneurs because we love what we do and really want to help people. We’d do it for free if we could! But the truth is, without a sale you can’t help anyone. All of the greatness you have to offer is wasted if nobody buys it.

In the first part of the evening, we learned some of Adam’s techniques on consultative selling which is a way of conducting the sales process as a consultation not as a hard sell. Then, we did the next logical thing which is to pair up and try to sell each other something! Gulp. The thing was, this was not a role playing exercise this was for real! If you sold something, you had to deliver and the other person had to pay. There were also no requirement that what you sold had to be something you already offer or even something in your business.

What was hard for me is that when I have a one-on-one sales conversation I go in prepared. I’ve asked a few questions already and have looked at the person’s website. I also have all of my own material – prices, terms, etc in front of me for easy reference. In this conversation, I was totally unprepared! I have to say, I really didn’t want to do this exercise but I had already entrusted Adam with my time and investment so I trusted him here as well.

Here are 3 big lessons I learned from that exercise. Just for the record, I’ve already shared everything with the other people mentioned because it was a learning exercise.

If your prospect says you don’t understand don’t argue! When I was the prospect, my seller argued with me in this manner and all it did was make me dig in even further and argue back even harder. It completely shut off any possibility of us getting to an understanding. It felt condescending and frustrating, especially when the answer I got was way off base from what I wanted to communicate. At this point, my thinking is that if your prospect says you don’t understand, the only logical answer is something like “Can you help me to understand better?”
When you are selling, don’t be too attached to making a sale. I’ve heard several sales professionals say something like “Be committed to helping them make a decision, but not what that decision is.” This feels really good to me and I try to do it. When I was the seller, I felt close to making a sale at one point and got a little too over-eager and started spewing words out. When I was the prospect, I sensed this from my seller and it made me not want to buy anything that might be offered.
Finally, don’t be afraid to wing it! If someone is sitting in front of you with a problem that you can solve and they want to hire you, find a way to make it work. Lots of people in the room made sales that night of things that didn’t even exist when the exercise began. Create a package on the spot or do something unconventional. Don’t let a chance to serve someone else get away because you don’t have a package that fits.

What is your favorite piece of sales wisdom? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.

My top ten takeaways from The Overnight Authority Live Event

Last week, I attended a training given by Adam Urbanski called The Overnight Authority Live Event. It was an intense, demanding 3 days but I learned a lot. Not only were there strategies and tactics, but there was a lot of new ways of thinking presented which was the most helpful part for me. By “new ways of thinking,” I don’t really mean mindset, which is also important, but a new way of looking at how you do business that is focused on accomplishing important things quickly. I have lots more to share from the event and in fact have a few blog posts lined up already, but for today I’ll wet your appetite with just my top ten takeaways from the event:

Spend less time creating things to sell and more time selling them.
If something doesn’t work or sell well the first time around, instead of scrapping it and starting fresh, see if you can try again and tweak what you did. This is a shift for me because although I live by “test and revise,” I think I’ve been too quick to say something didn’t work and needed to be scrapped.
Don’t be afraid to wing it. If there’s a customer in front of you that wants to buy something you don’t currently sell but can provide, find a way to make a deal.
Don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask you’ll always get a “no,” if you ask you may get a yes or a no but the worst possible outcome is that they say no.
Don’t think first of cutting prices, think first of how to deliver more value so you can charge the price you want.
Having something for sale is useless unless people need it and know they need it.
Connect regularly with successful business owners and continue your own development.
If you refuse to stop you cannot fail.
There’s a lot of things that a lot of experts will tell you that you “have to” do. They are not always right.
Don’t let fear of looking stupid or fear of what other people might think stop you or even influence you.

What’s your favorite idea here? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.