Business Advice: How to Focus When You're Almost Burnt Out

I have some advice for myself that you may also find useful, depending on where you’re at with your business, and if your personality is at all like mine. The funny part is that I know I’m going to need this advice over and over, because I keep getting caught in this trap of my own making.

What happens is, I start to feel sort of “crispy” (on my way to burnt out), and I realize that I’m trying, once again, to work on a dozen different projects at once! I might spend weeks chipping away at each of them for 30 minutes or so per day. Then, since I’m being pulled in all directions, and of course not getting ANYWHERE, I start feeling stressed and unmotivated.

As a business owner, even if you get everything working just right for a while, something inevitably comes along to scramble your plans. For instance, I took some time in 2019 to be a student of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. They emphasized that the coursework was going to take us ten to twenty hours per week for a few months, so in advance of the course, I worked on my business so that I would be able to delegate all of the day to day operations of Aeolidia to employees and contractors, leaving me with just the visionary work that I am needed for. I told myself that after the course was over, I wouldn’t take these responsibilities back, but would remain in my role of storyteller and idea-hatcher for Aeolidia.

This worked! It was great. Shortly after graduating from the 10KSB program, I took a two week vacation to Hawaii with my extended family, and I didn’t check in on work once. Everything went fine; nothing caught on fire. I felt like I had this CEO thing handled.

Naturally, this didn’t continue uninterrupted. A global pandemic, loss of employees, and all kinds of things happened to put me back in the day to day. There were many months where I took on an operations role in my business, and at times I had fewer people to delegate to.

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It’s good to get back in the weeds of my business from time to time. It helps me see where processes can be adjusted, and puts me more in touch with what we do for our clients and how it works for them. I just don’t want to stay fully in the weeds all the time (although here’s a great argument for staying in the weeds of your business).

When I do find myself spending most of my time working in the business instead of on the business, I clear the decks, outline my top three priorities, set aside some time to do some deep work on each of them, and leave the other things be. It’s always such a relief when I do this, and things start working again. I can’t figure out why I can’t learn this lesson once and for all, but it seems to be part of the process to get bogged down and then reset over and over. Maybe I can just accept that!

One thing that helps is that we set new priorities every quarter like clockwork at Aeolidia, and this is a good time for me to reset myself and start being effective again. You can learn more about the Entrepreneurial Operating System and Rocks (top priorities) in my recent blog post: Entrepreneurial Operating System for Shop Owners.

Want to get focused yourself? I have book recommendations. The first book that helped me notice this pattern of getting distracted and fix it is called The ONE Thing. You can read about my experience with this book here: Kill Your To-Do List and Focus on ONE Thing.

The perfect book to pair with this one, if you find yourself unsure just what your ONE thing is, is Fix This Next, by Mike Michalowicz. Do yourself a favor and read all of his small business books, but for now, you can go to his website and take the quiz to figure out what your next thing to fix is. The book explains in more detail and gives you the entire pyramid structure to use to evaluate your business. If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this book creates a hierarchy of business needs, which made perfect sense to me.

Finally, if you’re already feeling burnt out, or have a tendency towards burnout (or just want to avoid it!), I couldn’t recommend the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle more.

I’m wishing you the best in using this year to push your business forward and get yourself in a place where you can feel serene building it. Where are you at now and what are you working on next? Let me know in the comments!