Episode 135- Deciding what is enough so you can stop overworking

Good morning my lovelies, how are you all?

I hope you are all amazing and enjoying some of the spring weather we’ve started to have. Boy I can’t wait for some proper decent weather. I am sooo fed up of winter now.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to you today about deciding what is enough. 

 So this episode is for you if you find yourself working into the evenings (after you’ve worked all day), you maybe sneak work into the weekend too.

Or maybe you are disciplined with stopping work leaching into your personal time, but you feel behind, and guilty about the work you aren’t doing in those times. The things still left on your to-do list. You don’t feel accomplished with what you did get done. Maybe you simply can’t switch off from thinking about them in your time-off. Maybe you don’t actually enjoy your time off because of this. And you find yourself thinking – you might as well be working. 

Is this you? It sure as hell used to be me. 

Even after I had cleaned up my campsite business and hired some fabulous people to take a lot of that work off my shoulders, so I wasn’t having to work in the evenings and on the weekends to get the bare essentials done, I simply filled that time with working on my coaching business. 

And actually even before the campsite business, I used to do a sort of mixture of property development and construction project management – and I was in the middle of developing a huge stone barn into several holiday let’s. And even then, when the builders weren’t working over the weekend, I would be in there working. And not just doing the bare minimum to prep ready for them to come in. But I’d be full on building. I’d be doing things that had nothing to do with them. That they weren’t waiting on me for. That had no deadline. That was just a random job that needed to be done at some point. 

If I did take time off over the weekend – say we went to a friends for a weekend away,, I always felt better if I’d worked a bit in the morning before we left.  And even when I was there and supposed to be off – I had a constant rolling to-do list going round and round in my head. I wouldn’t properly switch off. And if my time off wasn’t fully engaging me, I wouldn’t really be enjoying it. And so I would find myself thinking things like “I’m wasting time here”, “I’d rather be working”. Or “I might as well be working if I’m not enjoying it”. 

In my evenings, if I had some energy left after I’d eaten, I’d be thinking “I should probably get some more work done”…

Or “I could be working right now”

Now the simple thing that really was the root cause of this problem for me…was that I had never decided ahead of time – what was enough. What was enough for me to have done in the day. Or in the week. I just had this open ended ginormous list of tasks which I’ll have to say was the biggest to do list I’ve ever worked on – because it was basically create 6 holiday lets out of an old stone farm building. But it was just never ending. Enormous. And had no deadlines. No timeframes on any of it. 

And because of this – it felt like I was on this hamster wheel. There was always more to be done. And whilst I obviously had these little hits of dopamine from ticking things off from my list, I never felt really great about what I’d accomplished in the day. It never felt like it was enough. I always felt behind. So I never spent any time feeling proud of myself of what I’d achieved. And I was always seeking this feeling but never actually feeling it. 

 Which meant i was always trying to squeeze more in. I was constantly in my head about what still needed to be done – so I wasn’t present with the people and situations around me. You literally can’t be in both places at once. And because I wasn’t really present or engaged, when I did take time off, I wasn’t even allowing myself to enjoy it. So of course, I considered it a waste of time, and I told myself I could and should be working instead which made me feel anxious and guilty. 

 And the same will be true for you if you also don’t decide ahead of time what is ENOUGH. 

 Without this simple decision being made, your brain will always default to “I should probably get some more work done”…

Or “I could be working right now”

This robs you of feeling accomplished with what you did get done. 

It robs you of enjoying your time-off, guilt-free.

And when you give into the temptation to work those evenings, and sneak in work at the weekend too, even when you’ve promised your kids you would take it off – it robs your family of time together where you could be making memories they’ll cherish for life. 

 Now the real danger to this pattern, if you don’t break it – is that you will either burn out. 

 Or you will spend the entirety of the life of your business, working yourself into the ground, neglecting your health, sacrificing time with your loved ones, and never truly enjoying your time-off. 

 

Now I want you to have a successful business AND a life that you love outside of it too.

And it starts with figuring out what ENOUGH looks like for you.

 Now the challenging thing here – is that sometimes you won’t know what “enough” is to create the result you want. 

Especially when it comes to marketing in your business. 

So whilst you might know how many clients at your rate you need to be seeing per day to make the money you want, you might not know how much marketing is required to ensure you have that many clients. 

Or you might have a project that doesn’t really have a deadline. And so you could do as little or as much work on it as you want. 

Or you might have a project that does have a deadline – and yet still not be sure of how much time you need to allocate each day to get it done by that deadline. 

This all makes it tricky. 

It’s often an arbitrary amount of tasks or time that we are choosing per day to work on. A figure we have simply plucked out of the air. 

But the truth is – we have to start somewhere with a guestimate. 

AND we do have a limited number of hours in the day. And we still need to eat and sleep and take care of ourselves, and our other responsibilities. 

So what I want you to do is always decide FIRST what hours in the day we want off. To do those things. To rest and look after ourselves and our family. 

And then look at the remaining hours you have left. 

Then you decide what goes in those remaining hours. So which tasks – and how long are you allocating to each. 

And then finishing your planning with a check – to confirm to yourself – that you are deciding that “this is enough”. 

Which does require you to accept the risk that it might not be – but the trouble is – if you are always doing above and beyond what is actually “enough”, you will never really be able to find the sweetspot where it is actually “enough”. 

So you decide first. 

And then you do your best to honour that plan. 

To allow the urge to keep working on beyond that, to be there – allow the feeling of temptation to be there – without giving into it.  

Finishing when you said you would. 

Evaluating what you did get done – and over time assessing whether or not it is actually “enough”. 

And if it’s not – to create the results you want, then we look at how can we create more time for it, or uplevel your productivity to get it done faster, or we look at alternative ways to get more done, that don’t involve more of you. 

So that is how you do it. You start with trial and error around simply deciding what is enough. And then you revise it as you go. 

 

Now if you are still struggling with the concept of what is enough because you feel like there is so much to-do, and it all feels urgent and important…

Here are four things that I want you to mull over and find the truth in for yourself, that might help you get on board with this concept: 

1. In the world that we currently live in, with all the connections, and opportunities, and potential projects and tasks, and things we could be doing with our time – that are available to us – there will always be more to do than you can fit in.
2. No matter what stage you are at in life or business, there will always be improvements that could be made. 
3. There will always be opportunities for moving ahead faster, and achieving more. 
4. And lastly, both personally and in business, not many things constitute an emergency. And if you aren’t convinced – think of it like this – if a loved one of yours got hit by a bus today and was in a critical condition, would you really care about any of the rest of what you are trying to get done today? I’m guessing probably not. And as morbid as it sounds, sometimes facing the reality that we won’t be here forever, and our loved ones won’t be either – helps us see that not everything is urgent and important, and that we can simply decide what is “enough” on any given day – and it usually not be life threatening for us. 

 Ok my lovelies, so that is it for today. So if you haven’t ever made the conscious decision around what is “enough” each day – now is your time to play with doing that. 

Let me know how you get on. 

And if you want further help with this – make sure you are on the waitlist for the next round of Time Masters – just go to my website kirsty knight coaching. Com and you’ll find it on the work-with-me page. 

Have a wonderful week. See you next time.