Hustle culture has you thinking that you need to be working until early morning, and be up early in the morning to be the best small business owner. The early bird gets the worm!! To hustle culture I say, no no! Working rest into your small business schedule will keep you from hating the business you built, and leave you better to do the work you love.
Schedule your Rest
What is rest? Well, rest looks different for everyone. It should NOT be your business, I don’t care how much you love it, everyone needs time away from their job. Put it down and walk away for a day. Spend time with your family, take a day to take it slow, a day to spend on your hobbies or to spend with your family. You didn’t start this to work yourself into the ground. You do not need to be hustling from sun up to sun down, 7 days a week.
Being your own boss also means being the boss of your own time management, and you’re the only one that can tell yourself to rest. If that means that you have to schedule the rest in, then you’ll have to schedule the rest in. A day, a few hours a day, a weekend, schedule the time in that you do no work related things during that time.
My rest day is Sunday. I will log on to the computer, but I do not open the browsers I use for my work related tasks. I will make myself break out my Nintendo Switch to play a game, or I’ll read a book, or watch a movie with my kids. I do not focus on work things, and focus solely on myself and my needs and hobbies. If I do open work related things its not until the very end of the day, and its only for a few hours max, only if I really need to.
I also make it a point daily to walk away from my computer for at least an hour, its usually longer. I am a napper, so I will use that time to take an hour nap. My families schedule runs on second shift, so I’m up at odd hours at night, so I need an extra nap in the middle of the afternoon to make it to the end of my day.
What Happens if you don’t Rest
Even if you’re doing something you love you still need to rest. You know what happens if you don’t take a rest? Burnout. Burnout is your body’s way of telling you that you pushed it past the breaking point. Burnout takes a long time to recover from.
I was a preschool teacher in a former life, before I stayed home. As a preschool teacher, I loved the job and everything to do with it, but I was under a lot of stress, daily. There was no real escape from it. When I finally left that career, it took me a long time to feel normal again. My depression made it hard to function normally, but being burnt out meant that even the simplest tasks felt like mountains. I desperately needed rest and the ability to recover from the amount of stress I had been under for 10+ years.
Scheduling rest into your small business, making sure you’re eating well, sleeping well, keeping your friendly connections can help you not burnout. Keeping health boundaries between your job and your life is the best thing you can implement in your small business to keep yourself going in it for as long as you need and want to.