Do You Live For Work? Why It’s Not Sustainable
What time did your alarm clock go off this morning? Do you even like getting up well before dawn? The chances are if you’re an entrepreneur or in charge of a small business of some kind you have an alarm clock that’s set for 5 AM. It seems that you only had a few hours of much-needed rest before that darn clock is rudely awakening you from your slumber, once again. This is a picture that is repeated all over the world as people who are “living the dream” devote all their waking hours to their work. To them, there definitely are not enough hours in the day and they seem to devote less and less time to their family, or to their friends.
There is no such thing as a 9-to-5, Monday to Friday work week for anyone who has their own small business or is in charge of one. For these people, working at the minimum between 60 and 70 hours per week, life goes by in a whirl. They don’t have enough time to devote to all their daily tasks, especially as they have to backpedal from time to time to put out fires and to deal with unexpected complications. The business may be turning over nicely, in terms of the amount of money coming in, but is it really growing? There is a good chance that you can’t see the wood for the trees, due to everything that you have taken on.
If you do manage to get one day per week away from the office, there’s a good chance that you have taken work on and find that you have to do certain administrative tasks on your Sunday morning. You may have a loving spouse, but they must be secretly upset and frustrated with the way that things have turned out.
Is this kind of lifestyle sustainable? Understand that it’s putting a great strain on a number of areas. None of us is supposed to work under pressure for extended periods of time, no matter how well the business may be doing. Your personal relationships will undoubtedly suffer if you don’t have time to devote to leisure time and to the more important things in life, after all.
If you’re working all the hours possible because you have so much on your plate then the chances are that, in the broader scheme of things, you are just spinning your wheels. It’s very difficult to see the bigger picture and to plan for the future success of the business when you’re so involved in the day-to-day and nitty-gritty stuff.
This should be a wake-up call before something comes along to create a real problem for you. You need to be able to clear your desk of many of the more mundane tasks and a virtual assistant can help you to understand what you should outsource and how you should do it. You may be a successful entrepreneur or business person, but if you’re not careful you could lose everything and not really understand why.