Taking Time Off to Get More Done

See if you can relate to this. You push and push and push, burning the candle at both ends – the early bird meets the midnight oil burner. Day after day – six, seven days a week – week after week. Finally, you reach a point where your mind and your body say, “Enough already!”

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We recently experienced this, so we listened … for a change. We crashed! We took some time to decompress. We often don’t realize how tired we are, how much we need the time away from our work.

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When I was a graduate student, I worked in the Undergraduate Advising Office. As one weekend approached, I asked the Dean how his weekend was looking. He replied, with a little frown on his face and his shoulders drooping slightly, “Ugh. It’s not good. We have plans on Friday night and again on Saturday.” Or he might say, “Oh, I can’t wait. We don’t have anything planned for the whole weekend!” I didn’t understand his thinking at the time, but now I see the wisdom in it!

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So that’s how it went for us last weekend. It was great to wake up in the morning and realize there was nothing on the to-do list – nothing we had to do, nowhere we had to be.

We work crazy hours like many, if not most, business owners … especially those of us in the early stages of our businesses. But at a certain point, it becomes counter-productive.

We spend time doing what we do, but we don’t do as much as we could if we got a little rest, some time away to decompress. So we realized that we needed to learn from this.

As bigg goal-getters, we push ourselves to extremes. But we learned it can be counter-productive. On top of our business keeping us busy, we’re pretty social people. But sometimes it’s good to say no to just about everything and just have time to yourself.

We admit that we aren’t so good at work-life balance. We do a relatively good job of integrating our personal and professional lives. We can turn on a dime – talking about work one minute and moving to the personal the next. But we need more than that as we learned this past week.

We realized that the only way that we will take the time off we need is to treat it like everything else we want to get done. We put it on our calendars!

We’re saying “No” to seven days week. We need a day off every week. God did. Why should we think we don’t? Every other week, we’re setting aside two days.

Now it doesn’t mean we won’t work per se. It just means we won’t have a to-do list chockfull of things that we must do.

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I love to do research. I find it very relaxing. While I try to fit in a little research time every day – and to some extent I’m always in research mode looking for show topics – it’s great to do research at a leisurely pace.

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And I’m a gadget girl. I love to play with my techie tools. That’s one of my roles in our business. I enjoy looking at new technologies and seeing how we might use them in our business. When I’m just searching and having fun, it doesn’t feel like work.

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So we’re still integrating work and play. We’re just planning our play better so that it feels more like play and less like work. Because you know what they say about all work and no play!

When we work, we want to be highly productive because our work is still a means to an end, not an end in itself. We love our work, but we love it more when we’re refreshed.

And we get more done. This week, we’ve accomplished a whole lot because we had more energy because we took time to decompress. So that’s your motivation … take some time off so you get more done!

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When it comes to our personal finances, we hear a lot about savers and spenders. But there’s a third category we rarely hear about. And it’s the one we really should strive to be. Join us next time to see what it is.

Thanks so much for reading our post today. Now plan some time off! Until next time, here’s to your bigg success!

 

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00335-022009.mp3

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(Image in today's post by biewoef)