Self-Care Tips for Entrepreneurs
Many people become entrepreneurs for various reasons. For some, they simply just don't like working for someone else while others want to be more spontaneous and have an increase in financial gain. Regardless of the reason you venture into entrepreneurship, there is a sense of routine that tends to get lost. Creating a routine will aid in your self-care. Think of it as a skincare routine. You can’t apply moisturizer to a face that hasn’t been cleansed. There are steps (a routine) to ensure your skin remains healthy and unproblematic.
Let's break down what a routine looks like for an entrepreneur with 4 tips.
Tip # 1 Your Time is Valuable
The first routine to create for better self-care is ensuring you create a routine surrounding your time. In most corporate settings, you work a 40-hour workweek with a designated start time, a break about 4 hours into your shift, and an end time depending on the workload and its completion.
Unfortunately as an entrepreneur, you don't always have this luxury which then leads to ultimately feeling burned out and unaccomplished. Whether you have a team of employees for your business or you are a solo entrepreneur, creating structure surrounding your time is imperative towards being more productive.
For instance, consider this:
Begin your day at 6 am and use 2 -3 hours to make a healthy breakfast, work out, meditate, get your family ready to embark on their day and get yourself ready to get to work. By 8 -9 am you should begin your tasks for the day depending on what needs to be done. Between 1-3 pm, take a break. Fresh air and lunch will always fuel the body to continue on. By 5:30 -6 pm the day's work of an entrepreneur should be (somewhat complete) and ready to begin the wind-down session. Use 7-10 pm to wind your mind and body down. Whether you do an evening walk with a loved one, game night with the kids, cook dinner for a party of 1, or Netflix and Chill; use this wind-down time to strengthen yourself for tomorrow's tasks.
Tip # 2 Daily Structure
The beauty of being an entrepreneur is the spontaneity of each day is different. Yet in order to ensure you are maximizing your time effectively, creating a routine by the day can aid in your self-care.
Use this as an example:
Mondays: Operations Focused by catching up on emails, checking the status of inventory, quality control, social media responses, and/or shipping out orders from the weekend.
Tuesday: Securing the Bag by sending pitch decks to brands, submitting and/ or paying invoices, negotiating contracts, meetings with the financial advisors and even scheduling out your deliverables per client (brands).
Wednesday: Social Media Content Creation day where you create all the content needed for the following week. After about 4 hours of content creation for your website, flyers, events, social media or even your portfolio; the editing session can commence.
Thursday: Family Day simply because they need your time too. This would be a great day to schedule your weekly therapy session.
Friday: Follow-Ups before the weekend mindset sets in which can be a half-day of work, opening up some extra time for self-care (grooming, shopping, dinner date, mini travel, etc).
Saturday and Sunday can be designated days off where you can get organic content and/ or do a mind dump in your favorite notebook.
Try it for 6 weeks. Get a calendar or a notebook, and write out each day's overview regardless of the industry. Knowing the overview of what needs to be done on a particular day, may help to create a sense of accomplishment and growth.
Tip #3 Turning it Off.
Sundays are generally known as a reset day where you can reset your mind, your body, and your household for the upcoming week. Get into the habit or a routine to use Sundays as a day to turn it off. You are your best self when your mind and body are rested. If you want to see growth within your business, allow your body to rest. Think back to when you worked in a corporate setting and how overly exhausted you felt by the end of the night simply because there was no time to allow yourself to rest. Yes, there are deadlines and goals but they will not happen if you are too tired to function at 100% capacity.
Tip #4: Automate your Life
The beautiful thing about technology is that there are so many services that are available to aid entrepreneurs to be better business owners. Creating a routine with automation will aid in eliminating additional tasks on days that are set for different functions of the business. Every business structure and industry is different. Whether you are in finance, music, law, or fashion several parts of the business can be automated to aid in benefiting you to have more time for yourself, ease the workload, and open opportunities for additional business growth.
Try these tips for a period of time and see how much your self-care will increase. Make strategic adjustments when and if necessary but always look at the longevity of the vision. You are the business. If you don’t take care of yourself now, how will your business grow?