Do This When Your Work-Life Balance Is OUT OF WHACK

0:00about three months ago I found myself feeling at the edge of burnout and this is a feeling that I've had before probably every two or three years I will either start feeling like I'm burning out or if I miss it if I'm not paying attention especially when I was younger I would go into full-blown burnout where I didn't want to show up to work and I needed to take months off in order to recover from it so about three months ago I realized I was thinking about work a bit too much I was grinding a bit too much and it was having a real impact on

0:27my mood a substantial impact on my productivity my sense of accomplishment and frankly my enjoyment of life so in this video I'm going to talk about how I felt and some of the steps that I took to fix that because when your work life balance is out of whack nothing feels good work sucks life sucks and I want to help you figure out how to potentially work through that because it's not if it will happen to you it's when and if you stick around till the end of this video I'm gonna tell you the best book I know for learning how to manage your own psychology as a Founder including

1:00working through burnout and how to maintain healthy work-life balance so big key to staving off burnout is to recognize it really early and when I started recognizing at this time I knew that I was still a few months away from it but I could feel the disinterest and the frustration building in me and those for me are the signs that I'm starting to burn out so when this happens I ask myself three questions the first is can I step away for a few weeks that is inevitably a way for me to recharge my motivation the second question is can I hire someone to do the work that's

1:32putting me out of balance the work that I don't want to do and the work that I'm frustrated by and the third is can I ease up on the throttle and at different times in your founder Journey sometimes that answer is yes and sometimes it's not so let's revisit those three questions and I'll talk you through how I was thinking about it a couple months ago so for me in the job that I have today the part that was burning me out is the content treadmill for those who don't know I put out 52 YouTube videos like this a year 52 episodes of started for the rest of us and we put out 52

2:02episodes of the microcomp podcast so there is a Content treadmill that my team and I are constantly running on to try to keep up to get that next video out that next podcast out by the deadline and in my entrepreneurial Journey the more that I find myself doing things where I'm not learning or growing or getting better at them that's when I start to feel frustrated and potentially start to burn out and so this first question of can I step away for a few weeks in this context I really can't because we have to put out a new video and two new podcasts every week but what I realized is in my situation I

2:33could work ahead and so what I did is I took a two-day stint and I recorded a month's worth of YouTube videos and a month's worth of podcasts and it was a lot of work but it allowed me then to take almost four weeks off from the grind and so for me it wasn't stepping away from work per se but it was stepping away from the exact work that was putting me out of balance or the work that I wasn't enjoying you may not be in a situation to be able to do that and that's why I have the other two questions the second question is can I

2:59hire someone to do the work that I'm not enjoying back in the day when I was running my last SAS app there were tons of operational tasks that needed to get done it was stuff like keeping espresso pods stocked and dealing with small legal things updating our terms of service keeping the office rent paid and any bills that came through it's just all type of company operations and I was doing all that because I couldn't justify spending thousands of dollars a month on an operations person I was putting every dollar we earned into developers sales people customer success support to try to grow the product and

3:33that was the right choice in the early days but as we scaled I made the mistake of not hiring an operations person and that led to me doing a bunch of tasks that I could do but I didn't enjoy and it sent me into burnout which I've talked about on this channel before so the question to ask yourself here is can you possibly hire someone to do the work that you're not enjoying oftentimes for Founders this is operational stuff it starts as admin things so you hire that executive assistant it eventually becomes more operational things like pay payroll like stuff that is maybe above an admins pay grade but that needs to

4:04get done and that you're not necessarily the best person to do and you're not going to enjoy it so this is something I think Founders should be asking themselves more often than they do and in fact when we started Tiny Seed since we were able to raise funding for it we hired an operations person as our fourth or fifth hire to take so much pressure off my co-founder and I to ensure that we don't burn out and then the third question is can I ease up on the throttle for the time being and the answer to this maybe yes it may be no if you're early in your journey and your

4:33pre-revenue you haven't launched yet and you're already burning out maybe take two or three weeks off completely from thinking about work I know you probably still have a day job if you haven't launched but from thinking about your side project and it can help clear your head and get you back in the mindset to ship and to grind because that's what it takes to get this off the ground now if you're in the middle of a launch and people are depending on you and you're supporting a product and building features the answer to this question is probably no you can't these up on the throttle but there are certain times

5:02during your journey during your product Journey or your founder Journey or your company's Journey where you can ease up just a little bit if you feel that burnout now if you're not burning out and your work Life is In Balance then there's no reason to ease up on the throttle I like to accelerate and push down on the gas when things are working to make them go faster but I'm talking right now about when you have that feeling of existential dread or the feeling of I just don't want to go into work today I'm completely unmotivated I hate this product I hate my job the job

5:29that you've created for yourself and at that point it's time to ask yourself one of these questions to figure out can I step away and give my mind enough of a break that I can break this cycle of my work life being out of balance and a feeling burned out all the time because burnout leads to lack of motivation and it can lead to you making bad decisions like shutting your company down selling it for less than you should get for it or potentially selling it too early in a minute I'm going to tell you about the book that you'll want to read if you want to learn more about managing

5:57work-life balance burnout and managing your own in Psychology but before I do that microcomp connect is our online community filled with thousands of bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped B2B SAS Founders just like you and if you're interested in the content on this channel microcomp connect is the online community for folks who are into the same thing think of it as this YouTube channels Community you can head to microcompconnect.com to sign up for our free plan and we host that in slack so you can get to know other Founders like yourself okay so the book to help you manage your own psychology it's called the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your

6:32together and it's completely focused on everything I'm talking about in this video but it goes so much more in depth it's actually written by my wife Dr Sherry Walling and I contributed some anecdotes and helped her structure the book a bit but it is a book that gets rave reviews from entrepreneurs who have been through the grind and usually when you're just getting started you don't realize how much you need to be thinking about your own mental health and managing your own psychology but this entrepreneur's guide is going to help you do just that so avoiding burnout out and staying sane while building a startup is tough if you've

7:02enjoyed this video this conference talk by Dr Sherry Walling dives into some other aspects of work-life balance that you'll want to keep in mind as you build your business thanks for joining me this week I'll see you next time