Episode 40: How to take time off in your business. Eight Practical Steps To Actually Make It Happen
Are you planning to take a break from work? While it may seem impossible to do these days, you actually can! All you have to do is plan and prepare for it properly. In this coaching episode, Fiona shares with you her eight practical steps (which she applied when she was about to take 3-4 months fully off from her business to focus on her newborn son) to actually get some time off from her busy schedule. Listen now and apply these tips whenever you need a breather!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Taking The Time Off
Fiona on Starting Her Business
8 Practical Steps To Take Time Off
Decide on the dates
Book it!
Plan it out
Prioritise!
Do the work
Set up the automations
Test it all works
Actually take the time off
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 40 of My Daily Business Coach.
I can't believe it's 40 episodes already. Wowsers.
Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and for sharing it with friends and tagging me on Instagram. I've seen a whole bunch over it at My Daily Business Coach. Thank you so much.
I started this podcast just a few months ago and I've already made so many new connections with small business owners across the world as a result from this. And so just massive, massive thank you. And if you're new here or listening for the first time, welcome, welcome, welcome.
My name's Fiona Killackey and I run a small business called My Daily Business Coach. I'm also a mum to two young boys, and I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, where we have been in some kind of lockdown now for about seven months. So I hope wherever you are listening to this, you are safe, you are healthy, and your loved ones are as well.
Now, today's episode is a coaching one, and that's what I do a lot of in my job. I run group coaching programs. I do 1:1 business coaching, and I do a lot of speaking gigs in other people’s mastermind groups and online memberships where I'm really coaching their members in a particular aspect of business, from branding through to setting up your systems.
Now I'm recording this in mid October 2020, and I actually had a different coaching episode to publish today, but I figured I would postpone that because I think what I'm gonna talk you through now in today's episode is just a little bit more pressing given the time of year it is. Given the type of year that we have had, I mean, 2020 has to be one of the most challenging years that we have ever faced, especially as a small business owner and given how much I believe in the idea of freedom, it's one of my core values as a brand. I felt that this episode had to come out next. So what am I going to be talking about? Well, let's get stuck in and find out.
Alright, so today's coaching episode is a really important moment because it's all about taking time off. Yes, OFF. Getting out of your office space or if you're working from home, you know, just having some kind of break. And I know that that sounds really scary for some of you listening. I can almost hear people immediately kind of shouting at their radio, loosening through their headphones or whatever and kind of going, “This is not possible. Or I haven't had time off in years. 2020 is not the year to start or even this year is challenging enough for my business, Fiona. And I'm not even, you know, making as many sales as I usually would. So it's definitely not the time to be thinking about taking time off.”
And hey, if you're in Melbourne like me, you might be thinking, well, we can't even go anywhere. So what's the point? I'll just keep working. Well, the point is to have some downtime. And if you've read my book, Passion Purpose Profit: Sidestep the #hustle and build a business you love, you'll know that I am a massive advocate for the anti-hustle. I actually think the word hustle has done so much damage to our culture, to the way that we work, whether we run a business or we were employed. But yeah, I'm a huge anti hustler and I just believe that every single person needs downtime. You need time in your life to recharge, to reconnect with people and places and passions outside of work.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying, oh, you need a work-life balance, because I don't necessarily agree with that. Well, not necessarily. I don't agree with that. I don't think that there is this perfect work life balance that you can have. But I definitely think that you need to make time, dedicate a time for time off. And this belief, it really comes from my own periods of hustling in employed roles. I have definitely been someone in the past who didn't switch off, who didn't know how to relax. I didn't even realise how often I was checking my laptop or checking my phone after hours.
You know, I'd go on holiday sometimes when I was working in these employed roles and we'd even, you know, spend all this money and would go overseas to these exotic, beautiful locations. And I would find myself unable to fully unwind for the first few days, at least. Sometimes we'd go for, say, a 7-day vacation. And it would take me like until day five to actually feel like I was on holiday and I would find myself in that position. And I definitely am someone who loves and commits to working. I love problem solving. I love figuring out things I love. It's almost like a puzzle to me. I love finding frameworks. I like processes. And sometimes I can get deep into this work. And in the past, especially in, you know, a couple of the employed roles that I had prior to starting my business, I definitely neglected other things, important things.
But when I started my own business around five years ago now, while I was still employed, I vowed that freedom was going to be much more than just a value that I wrote on like a brand values checklist. It was going to be something I was fully aligned to both externally, you know, to help my clients and help inspire others to find freedom and time in their in their lives and to just, you know, find freedom in their work and find things that they enjoy. But also and this is the big one to be aligned to it internally.
So, you know, internally, how am I having freedom in my life through my business? It's one thing to talk about it externally, you know, to put it all over social media and time and get time management frameworks happening and share it with my clients. But it was another to look at my own life and be like, “Okay, what does freedom actually mean to me? And how can I align to that internally and externally in my business?”
For that reason, I don't tend to work nights. I rarely, if ever, work weekends, you know, unless I'm running a workshop. And even then, if I'm running, say, a workshop on a Saturday, then I'll schedule a replacement day off during that coming week or the week prior. I also have every single Wednesday off, I have every Friday off. I only work three days. Sometimes I work two days a week. I also take holidays and I schedule time off regularly, even just, you know, half a day there, half a day here to go and see a friend or to go to the movies.
Oh, my gosh. Remember that. That is one of my all-time favourite things to do - to go to the movies, particularly when you can go midweek. It's just fun. And when my dad was alive, I used to go and pick him up and we'd go to like the first screening of the day. And I had set my business up in a way that sometimes I'd go to a movie with Dad at like nine, 30 or 10 a.m. and during the movie I'd be making money and I'd come out and be like, “Oh, my gosh, Dad. I just, you know, made X, Y, Z from these online products while we were in the movies.”
So, I mean, that's a totally different episode. And I will do an episode on that whole kind of passive income idea. But my point is that freedom is a huge thing. I mean, it's not just something that I waffle on about. It's something that I actually have set my business up to be able to achieve. And I can hand on heart, say I am living up to that brand value internally and externally.
Taking time off isn't just about, you know, your mental health or being able to see loved ones. It's also about having the headspace to come up with really creative ideas that could really impact your business in the future. So it's scientifically proven that when we actually relaxed, we can trigger off parts of the brain responsible for those, you know, what Oprah calls Aha! moments.
This is why you have such great ideas when you're in the shower or in any other situation where you're completely relaxed. And I came up with my entire business plan while I was on holiday in Bali five years ago. And I definitely have had massive breakthrough moments for my business since that time, like while I'm literally floating in the ocean. And that's not to say, oh, my gosh, I'm floating in the ocean and all I'm thinking about it is work. But it's just I might be floating in the ocean and thinking about something completely different. And then like, oh, my gosh, that would completely work in my business. Or, you know, I've been on a bike ride and I'm thinking all these things. And it's like, aha!
Because you are giving yourself that space. You're giving yourself that downtime to just relax and really think about things in a different way. So taking time off can be so incredible in just so many ways. But I can hear you saying. “But but but…” then having all your excuses ready to go. But it's one thing I guess, to say, “Oh, you should take some time off or have a four week break or go here, there or, you know, wherever with your family or your loved ones.” But the question that I hear from clients is, “Well, how? How do I actually do that? Like, you have no idea how much work we have on or how much of a mess our business systems are. And we can be so up to our ears in work and putting out fires all day and figuring out tasks and even training others, that it can seem absolutely impossible to figure out how to take the time off.”
So today I really wanted to dive into eight practical steps that you can take to actually take time off and why this is so worth doing for your mental health, but also for your business itself. And I should mention here that I have a 15-month old son, my youngest, and I worked through these exact same steps that I'm about to go through with you last year when he was born so that I could fully commit to taking the first three to four months off after I had him without being on my phone, without worrying about work stuff really at all.
So if you're considering having a baby, but you're worried you're going to lose your business, you know, take note of these steps. While there's no perfect time to have a baby, there never is, these could maybe help you feel a little bit more confident if you're in that situation in life. So before I kick off with step one of the eight steps that you need to go through in order to take the time off, just a reminder that if you're on the go or you're listening to this and like, oh, I need to come back to these things later, you can definitely go and find the full transcript, including all of the links and everything else I'm going to talk about over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/40.
All right. Let's get started with the eight steps that you'll need to go through to take time off in your business with confidence.
1. Decide on the dates
Now, you may have already decided, “OK, we need to go away on a specific, you know, at a specific time of year.” So summer or Christmas or something like that. But if you are more in the mindset of I need a break, but you're not really sure exactly when you're going to take it. Then you want to consult your plans. Now, I often discuss having a basic 12 month at a glance plan, which I call your awesome year or yay. And that is literally an overview of important dates and milestones for the next 12 months. It's literally it can't get simpler. It is 12 boxes on a page. You can draw it really quickly and you just want to mark each of those in the next sort of 12 months coming up. Or you might have one right now. And you're kind of in the midst of your 12 months and you want to look at what are the important dates. Is there anything big coming up? Do we have a new collection? Are we launching a physical space? Are we launching a rebrand? Anything else that might be just you know, you can still take time off, but it might actually be putting more pressure on you to take time off at that stage. So you kind of just want to have a look.
It could also be worth if you've got staff just checking their annual leave. I have sometimes gone into consult to clients and we do a quick overview of their 12 months. And it'll be surprising because, say, like four out of the five team members, like, all taking July off and nobody's talked to each other. So you want to have a look first at your dates and you want to decide, okay, when are we going to go away or not even go away? It could be a staycation, but when am I actually going to take time off? And how is that going to interrupt the rest of my calendar kind of plans as a business? So if you haven't already, definitely. Go and just make yourself an at a glance 12 month calendar. It's something I talk about in depth in my book, Passion, Purpose, Profit. But you don't necessarily need to go and buy the book. You can literally just map out 12 boxes on a page and look at the year or maybe look at your Google calendar. Or if you have a physical calendar, just have a flick through and think about, okay, when would be a good time for me to take time off?
It could also be that you take time off just prior to a huge thing happening so that you can come back really refreshed or just after. So you can get a bit of downtime after a huge collaboration or collection or something else in your business. So step one is decide on the dates.
2. Book it.
So, book it. Book it so we can really often have these ideas like, oh, I'm going to take time off. And yep. And I've definitely done this as well, where you like even, you know, a couple of days you're like, I'm going to take those days off and then you don't actually book it out. And so inevitably work happens or something comes up or a client comes, you know, calling with something or a customer complaint comes in or someone. The staff member needs you. And it just goes to one side and you're like, well, there goes that idea.
Too often we can let these dates slide or we can just forget about having this time off altogether if we don't take steps to let other people know this is what we're doing and to book it out. So depending on what your business is or what you do, this will look different. So for me, it's about making sure my clients literally can not book in during the time that I'm going away. I make sure that I update Calendly, which is the online tool I used to book in business coaching sessions. I also factor this into calls with new clients so that they know, you know, you won't be able to book in at this time because I'm taking time off. It's also factored into my group coaching program and we update our website where necessary so that we might update our website and say, you know, you cannot book in at this time.
I'll also try when it's possible, and it's definitely not possible right now in Melbourne, but to book an actual holiday and get away. So I will scour an Airbnb and I'll book something. Now, like I said, this isn't really possible right now from where I am at. But even so, I can still book it out with my clients. I can still work it out in my calendar.
I can still plan some interesting things to do on those days or, you know, even some small things. I don't know when massage places open up, go and get a massage, go and do some things that will make it feel as if I'm on holiday now. Way back when I was working at a digital agency years ago, before I started my business and before my last employed role, I had about two weeks between finishing up at one company and starting at the next company, and we hadn't booked a holiday. My husband was working. My son was in childcare, but I did things like I joined the local library and I was like, you know what? I'm going to go get all these great books. And I made it like a little ritual that I went. Go and get coffee in the morning from this cool place in Northgate, and I'd read my books and I'd go to a park and I kind of had a really relaxing time, even though I was at home.
So booking an out doesn't necessarily mean go and splash a cash on a beautiful holiday. You know, definitely 2020, a lot of us effect to rein that stuff in, but you can definitely book out time and plan something. So that is step 2 - book it.
3. Plan the work out
And if you've worked with me, if you have come to anything that I have ever spoken to. If you read my book, you know that I'm a big one for plans. And so far we have covered the more fun stuff. You know, they're looking at holiday places and scrolling way too long on a tool like airbnb or checking out your saved images on Pinterest or on the ground. Now, this next step is to actually look at what you need to get done in the time that you're off. And big, big, big, big, big, important step. Not just the time that you're off, but the two weeks prior to you taking the time off and the two weeks after your return, because you don't want to come straight back into this mountain of work. You don't know, sort of be like, oh, I'll do all of that when I get back. And then the second you get back, you have huge amount of volume of work to get through. And it just kind of negates any kind of relaxation that you might have had on that holiday.
So when we had our youngest last year, my little son, Leo, I knew that I wanted to take three solid months off after he was born. So that's roughly 12 weeks. I also knew that I wanted some time off before he came. And I knew that I didn't want to go straight back into working three days a week, which is my standard at. Straight at the three month mark, I wanted to kind of ease back into work. And I had booked in my group coaching program to start at that kind of three month mark. And that was roughly around two hours of Face-To-Face time a month with this group. Plus a few more hours in preparation and creating things and chatting to clients between sessions. But I didn't take on any other clients for a while there. So I had my courses selling. I had group coaching programs, and I had sufficient savings to have that all work for a while. But let's say I had around 16 weeks off that, you know, I needed to look at. And I had to look at what was the work that needed to happen in that 16 weeks, because when you have a business, you can't necessarily just take time off. With my first son, we had him in London and I was working at Audible and I had maternity leave so I could take a full 12 months off and know that I had a job to come back to. You can't necessarily always do that with a business. And that's not to say that people don't take a full year off their business when they have children. And, you know, all praises to them. But if you're running a business where you know you're a solo operator or you have a very small team, sometimes that's not necessarily possible.
So you have to put in place ways that you can work if you are going to go down that path and still keep the business running. So I had 16 weeks off completely and I needed to look at things like my email responses, my inbox management during that time. What if people were contacting me to do business coaching, know how we're gonna get back to them? I needed to have at least 16 emails written because I send a weekly email every single Sunday. If you're not already on that, you can go over to mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe and get on it.
I needed to have processes written for my virtual assistant. And so I spent about a month putting all of that stuff together. And I did that in and around other work before I took my maternity leave. So how did I do all of this? Well, one of the best things that I've done this multiple times and I definitely recommend it to you is I took a full day with a business friend. We hired a venue and we literally sat down and mapped out the next sort of quarter to four, five months and what we would need. Now, she wasn't going on maternity leave, but she was like, yeah, I'm going to come in. I'm going to do that, too, because, you know, why not? And I know kind of that she could maybe take time off or or go back to, you know, see her family in a different country or whatever her reasons were. But we sat down and we thought, okay, what do we need to do? For me, it was like, okay, I have this 16 weeks that I want to take a clean break. What does that actually mean? Now, just for a holiday or, you know, you're taking a two week vacation or something. It's not gonna be as full on as that. You say you went for weeks off, then you just have to look at what's on your calendar for those four weeks and put that into a plan. Now, whether you're taking a longer period off, like I just mentioned, the 16 weeks or if you're just taking a week off, you want to have a plan and you want to divide that plan into key areas. So some of the most common would be marketing.
So under marketing, you'll be like, okay, for the four weeks and I'm trying to take off for the 16 weeks or the one week. What marketing needs to come out during that time? So this could be things like scheduling your social media, scheduling emails, looking at any ads that are running. And, you know, you might need to pause those, stop those or outsource those. So that's marketing.
Then you've got people. So in your plan, you want to have a look at your people. So this could be management of staff setting boundaries, you know, looking. When can they contact you while you're off making sure everyone is across things like an escalation process? So what happens if something goes wrong? What is our process? When do you actually contact me? Because I'm taking time off also looking at, you know, new hires. If you have a larger business and say somebody is coming into the business during that time you're gonna be off, you know. Do they have everything? Does their manager have everything to really onboard them properly? You want to be having a look at kind of if you use if you usually have like weekly one to ones with your team, then perhaps you're doing more of those in the lead up or you are assessing, you know, what do you really need from me and your asking your team to come back to you with priority one, two, three of what they need whilst you're away so that you can either get that for them before you go away or, you know, maybe do the odd call while you're away, but hopefully less of the latter and more of the former.
So that's in your plan. You've got marketing. You've got people.
The next thing you want to put into your plan is processes. So looking at, you know, are there things that only you do in the business or only, you know, in the business and you need to document these or, you know, so that you can delegate them or you can outsource them or, you know, you can hire somebody in for a short period of time. One of the things I always remember from one of my first clients was he went on holiday. He went overseas for quite a while, maybe like six weeks or something. And he had a large company. And one of the people in there was like, oh, does anyone know the password for. I can't remember what it was, some sort of platform we were using. And everyone was just like, well, it's in his head, it's in his head. And they were trying to think, we should find him even though he's on the other side of the world and it's the middle of the night. And I just thought, you cannot run a business where the passwords to everything are in your head, like use a tool like last pass or something else. But the point here is in your plan, you've got marketing, you've got people and processes.
You definitely want to have a look at your processes. And this is a good tool to have anyway, even if you're not going on holiday, because nothing should always be in the person who runs the business head. Things should be down on some sort of documentation, Trello board, Asana, whatever it is so that the business can run without you.
The fourth point to put on your plan is communication - making a list of what do you need to communicate. So things like making sure that your clients know that you're away or that customers know we have reduced staff right now. So we may take a little bit longer. Getting back to things like that, once you have made that plan, it is on to step four.
4. Prioritise!
Now, whenever I work on a 12 month plan with clients, after we do all the mapping and all the fun stuff, we've mapped out their strategy and their objectives and their tactics and campaigns and ideas. I will ask them now. You need to cull. What can you take away? What do you not have to do? What is an absolute must do in your plan and what can wait? And this is such an important step because you just can't do it all. You want to know that you have everything in order to take a full break. And by fall, I mean, you're not checking your phone every few hours or you're not getting on in the morning every, you know, every single day of your holiday to do a meeting with everybody. You want a step right away and really have the downtime.
So you want to think in step four, which is prioritise what needs to get done and what can I cull or what can be held off until I'm back. Now, sometimes people will be here when I'm talking to them. Sometimes clients will say, “Well, everything needs to be done.” To which I'd ask you to review your top three goals as a business and cheque. Which tasks are relating really to these top three goals which have a serious impact on the business and which won't really have any impact. So for example, you might say, but I need to post on social media all the time. I need to stay relevant, you know, really ask yourself if you scheduled for post instead of seven posts, will it really make a huge difference? Probably not. Unless you are at peak season or you're having a huge sale or a massive collection is coming out. In which case you may refer back to my earlier steps where it was looking at the year and making sure that you're taking time off, where it's not going to have a really detrimental impact on your business, then it's probably not going to make a huge difference if you're not posting every single day, you know, do not let perfection get in the way of getting things done or get in the way of you being able to have a holiday or take time off. So that is step four, prioritise.
Now, before we get into step five, let me recap on the first four steps. And if you're listening to this on the go, remember, you can grab the show notes and a full transcript at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/40.
1. Decide on the dates
2. Book it!
3. Plan it out
4. Prioritise!
All right. Let's get on to step five.
5. Do the work.
Okay. So this is where it can feel super overwhelming. But I like to break any big task like this into a top 12 task list. And this is really 12 steps that can be taken. And you start with number 12. You start with what? What is the end goal? You start with what is the complete task? And then you work back. So what is the end step? The last step. You put that into, you know, number 12. And then you think, well, what's a step prior to that? What's the step prior to that step? Prior to that, until you go all the way back to step one and you're like, oh, I can do step one. This isn't so crazy or overwhelming. So to think back to last year when I was wanting to take time off after the birth of my second child, I had to do those 16 Sunday emails. So to look at, oh, my gosh, I have to write 16 Sunday emails. You know, that's a lot. Most of the emails that I write on a Sunday are between, say, eight hundred and twelve hundred words. So to write 16 in one go is, you know, 18000 words. That's like a short book. So that would have been overwhelming, like, oh my God, I don't have time. You know, I'm pregnant. I've got my own business going on. What I'm going to do, I've got another child in school, but I had to look at that and break it down into the top twelve tasks. So, for example, I might have thought, okay, what is number 12? What is what is the end point here? Now, the number 12 might have said, you know, 16 emails written, checked, scheduled to send prior to that in step eleven. I might have had scheduled the emails, you know, using I use convert it to sell mates in my emails. So schedule them in number 10. Could have been testing emails and to do a Q Jay on them, you know, making sure that links work, that things open, that, you know, we don't have first name, we actually have people's first name in the email. Step nine might have been finish emails. Eleven to sixteen or finish emails, 14 to 16. Step eight might have been finish emails. You know, Finnish writing emails, five to ten and step seven might have been finished emails one to four and so on and so on until I was at step one. And I could see the first thing that I needed to do. And that could have just been, you know, come up with the email ideas and so I could literally write out sixteen ideas. So that might have been step one.
So can you see how when you break it down, it doesn't feel so overwhelming? It actually is like, okay, I can do that. And so once you have your 12 steps kind of mapped out, then you want to assign a duration for each of these. And a deadline. And that is really important, the deadline. So perhaps, you know, you might think, well, one of the tasks on my list, more take around two hours. And so you set yourself a deadline to get that done this week. And you might be like, I don't have two hours. Yes, you do. You know, turn off Netflix, turn off something else, stop scrolling on social media. And if you just scheduled for 1/2 hour sessions to get it done, maybe even four to four thirty, you know, four nights a week or four afternoons a week, you can get that done. So remember, you know, you've had this incentive, you have this holiday, this time off to keep you motivated.
Another tool that I often use to keep myself motivated and to just get this kind of stuff done is tomato-timer.com? And I've talked about that before in a previous episode, so I'll link to that in the show. Notes But tomato-timer.com, it uses the Pomodoro method. You literally it gives you a 25 minute countdown to get stuff done. So I use that a lot when I'm writing my Sunday emails or I'm doing my Trello boards for clients post coaching sessions. But the point is, you want to start start planning out. How am I going to get this done? How much time is it actually going to take me? And often we over think the time would not everything, but we imagine that it's going to take far longer than actually does. I was actually just talking to my sister about this, about I was talking about something in my business that I always put off and she was talking about something in her business. And we were both saying, actually, when you sit down to do it, it takes like 15 minutes. So you want to have that list of 12 and then assign yourself a duration goal and a deadline for that. So this is going to take me two hours. I'm going to dedicate every afternoon from 44 thirty to just getting this done and I'm going to put boundaries in place to actually get the stuff done. So doing the work can feel like the hardest step. And this is usually where most people will give up. They'll just think, oh, I'll just do it while I'm on holiday. But really, I urge you to think about future you the you that is taking a break you that doesn't have to sit on a laptop and write an email or get on a call when everyone else in your family is swimming or, you know, just hanging out or reading books or relaxing your future you is gonna be so happy that you took the time to break it down, to schedule the time to do them, and you just got it done, you know. So think about that future self.
Even if you have to stop and visualise for a minute and be like I am on a beach, I'm enjoying myself or, you know, even I am at a pub with friends outside, it's safe. But think about the future you and try and use that as incentive to get it done.
6. Set up your automations.
So part of doing the work will be setting up automation's and scheduling things like social media content, email marketing, things like that. So some things that you might want to automate could be
· Initial customer service emails, i..e thanks for contacting us we will be with you soon or we are off for the next X days but will be back asap
· Your out of office
· Your scheduling of social media posts using a tool like Planoly or Hootsuite
· Setting up pay runs if you have staff or making sure your bookkeeper is across this
· New content to go live on your website
· Podcasts to go live etc
So number 6, set up your automations and if you don't have things automated, definitely start looking at what you can automate. It will save so much time and it allows you to be able to do things like go on a holiday or take time off. So that's number six.
7. Test it works.
The absolute last thing you want while you're on holiday is for something to go wrong, for an important emails, not go out for a social media post, not upload or for a client to just have no response from you at all. So after steps 6, you want to test that everything works. And the way that you can do that, especially if you work for yourself, is to get someone else to double check for you, whether that's, you know, a friend, whether it's somebody in your family, a loved one. Yeah. Or just a business friend, like I mentioned.
So I've definitely had to ask my friend Natasha. She's one of my closest friends to check a few things for like this for me. And I've done the same for her. And even things like even when we're not going on holiday, stuff like I'm about to launch a course. Can you check that the sequence works correctly? And that has been super helpful. So after you've set up your automations, you want to cheque that it works and you can do that by asking somebody else. You can also obviously cheque it yourself. But we sometimes see what we want to see, especially if we close to it. So it's really useful sometimes to just have somebody completely different to look over it and be like, yep, that works. Or to, you know, send an email to your account and see what comes back. Number 7 - test that it works.
8. Actually take the time off.
So you've done all this work and it's time to really set some boundaries so that you can actually enjoy your downtime, whether you're going away or whether you're staying at home. So, for example, it could be that, you know, you don't wanna be looking at social media apart from a set short time each day so that you don't get wound up looking at, you know, client dams or something else. I also try not to look at social media in the evenings while I'm away or having my downtime, because that way you can actually sleep and relax, which is the whole point of having a holiday or taking time off.
So step eight, it's really down to you. And I know that can be hard to hear for some people because sometimes you're like, well, I'm on holiday and everyone at the office keeps emailing me or people keep calling me or sending me a D.M. But if you have let everyone know if you've worked through these steps, you've let people know you've set boundaries, you've written processes, you've scheduled things. You shouldn't have to get back to anyone. It should be pretty clear what is needed from your team or from your client. They should be well aware that I am away. I'm not going to get back to you during this time. You have future-proofed any kind of frustration or anything else that's going to come because you've worked through these steps. So that's not to say that if there's an emergency, that you shouldn't respond. But sometimes the boundaries can actually come down to you being the one that's like, oh, well, I'll just get on the call with them or I'll just respond to them, even though I'm on holiday. And I clearly told people that I was away. So you want to make sure that it's not you letting the boundaries fall down and that you are actually really clear about your boundaries so that you can have the time off. So really, just remember how much hard work you've put in to be able to take this time off and take the time off and enjoy it. So that is step 8.
Okay so let’s recap and remember if you’re listening to this on the go, you can grab the show notes and a full transcript over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/40
Decide on the dates
Book it!
Plan it out
Prioritise!
Do the work
Set up the automations
Test it all works
Actually take the time off
Look, this year has been full on. And I think if you can do it, taking some time off as we enter into 2021 is going to be hugely beneficial to your mental state and to your ability to meet the needs of your business as we kick off into a new year. Even if you're at home, even if you are like me in Melbourne, and let's just pray that we actually can have a holiday at the end of this year - if you're at home, whether by choice or through, you know, government restrictions or through financial restrictions, you can still find ways to step away from the screen, read a book, go for a walk, listen, dance to good music, have a glass of wine and have a barbeque and just generally take time off to recharge and reconnect.
When we realise that we can actually take time off and that the business is able to keep going without us, it opens up an entirely new way of approaching things. Most of us started our business to have some sort of freedom, freedom over our time, freedom over the kind of work we were doing, freedom over the way we were living our lifestyle.
Remember that if you're listening to this and you're thinking, “oh, it can't work for me, it won't work for my type of business, or I work for myself or, you know, it's been a hard enough year as it is, really.”
Remember why you started your business and think, what is the long term cost? If I don't take a break, isn't it worth just having a go at these eight steps that I've outlined and getting curious on how this could work, how it might work other than just being like it can't work? Blanket statement.
I have been unlucky enough to have both of my parents people. I was incredibly close to pass away, both unexpectedly. My mum very suddenly. My father not as suddenly, but very, very much unexpectedly. Both of that. Both of those passed away in the last three years. And a huge lesson that I have taken from that happening is that money can come and go. You can get more money. You cannot get more time. You absolutely cannot ever get time back. So look at the ways that you can make sure that you can get solid time off from your business even if you love your business. I love my business, but we all need time off from it.
Every so often you need time to rest, to reconnect and to spend really precious time with the people that you love most. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really, really, really hope that it helps you plan some time off. I would love to know how it's helped you. So send me a DM. I’m at @mydailybusinesscoach on Instagram.
As always, please hit subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you enjoyed this and you're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm totally ready to take some time off.”, I would love it if you're able to leave a review. Even just hitting the five stars on your podcast app really, really helps other small business owners find this and get help with their business. The show, it's like I said a few times in this podcast, will be up on the website at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/40. There's a full transcript there so you can take notes now, but you can also go there and just sort of print it out. Do whatever you need to to go back through this and make sure you get that time off. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time.
