Life is busy. I tend to constantly feel overwhelmed at the plethora of activities facing me and my family. And that’s just looking at all the good stuff; it doesn’t include little detours like getting sick, needing to pay the bills, and relationship struggles. Add in job responsibilities? Whew. I feel tired just typing that.
We all face busyness and overcommitment; these challenges seem to go hand in hand with life in the modern world. As an entrepreneur, you are especially susceptible to burnout for several reasons:
- You are highly committed to what you do.
- You are driven to make your venture a success.
- The buck stops with you.
How can we avoid overcommitting ourselves, drowning in busyness, and succumbing to burnout—while still striving to make our entrepreneurial endeavors successful?
It’s a matter of priorities.
A few years ago, my husband and I moved to a different state for his job. We knew no one, had two small (and rambunctious) children, were thousands of miles away from family, and were starting a new professional adventure. To top it all off, it rained nonstop for the first six weeks after we moved.
Challenges abounded that year. Even so, I look back on that time in our lives with fond memories. To be sure, time has a way of softening things, but I also experienced some sweet moments that were pivotal in my own life journey.
One particular lesson stands out vividly from that phase of our lives. My husband and I were having a conversation one day about how to balance all the responsibilities we had with work, home, family, health needs, marriage, etc. We felt incredibly overwhelmed. Where should we spend our time? What should we focus on most? It felt like something or someone was always falling through the cracks.
I recalled a phrase someone (I can’t even remember exactly who, now) had once told me, and I repeated it to my husband:
Focus on the things only you can do.
It was a light bulb moment for both of us. The great thing about this principle is that it can be applied to any aspect of life. In this moment, only I can be a good spouse to my husband, only I can parent my children with a mother’s love, only I can tell my Mom how much I appreciate the way she raised me.
The idea bleeds over to our professional lives as well and can bring with it some startling clarity. As an entrepreneur leading your business, what are the things only you can do? Make a mental list of those things now; perhaps your list might include setting the vision, developing the product, determining the target market, hiring the right people, communicating the idea, or raising the funds.
Your list is unique to your situation, but, without a doubt, there are specific things about your entrepreneurial career that only you can do.
There are also thousands of things facing you in your job that absolutely must be done—but that can be done by someone else. This is tricky in entrepreneurship, because there is often no one, especially at the beginning, to whom you can delegate. This is when you have a choice: let it go completely, or hire it out to someone else. I know I personally am guilty of wasting time on tasks or ideas every day that someone else could easily do to the neglect of the things that only I can accomplish. When I operate this way, it comes back to bite me every single time.
Take some time today to think about what it is that only you can do. Then make a plan for how you can spend most of your time doing those things.