The summer is now in full swing and the weather has been beautiful in the last couple of months. If you’re anything like me you don’t get the chance to stop and enjoy the weather until its too late! Whether you’re a business owner or a working mother, it can feel like you have a million jobs to do, and even on your day off you’ll find yourself catching up on emails, doing the housework and working until late just to keep on top of things. This is why I think we should address getting well-earned rest and taking the time out of working and how you can take this time out and turn it into positive energy to fuel you for the rest of the year.
By allowing yourself to take the time out and having a little rest and recovery, it allows you to bring perspective and give you the opportunity to step back and reflect on how your business is going. Doing this will give yourself the chance to look at how your business is growing, and maybe implement any procedures to manage this (see here for more information on how to do this).
Reflection may be needed in many areas, such as to look back on why you decided you set up the business – if you had the vision to have a better work/life balance and now you find yourself not being able to do so, this may be the ideal opportunity to decide how to change this. Or reflection may be needed to look at the direction that your business has taken, is this a positive one, or do you find that it is not headed in the way that you visualised it to be. It is as important to take this time to look forward and think about where you want to grow, this may be providing more of a certain service or trying something completely different.
As for the benefits of doing so, it has been countlessly proven that giving yourself time out, whether its a holiday or at least a day off per week will allow you to expand your creativity, think outside the box, get more done when you are working and become more focused.
It should not be dismissed the importance of being able to have time for yourself, and doing what you want to do. If you’re worried about how the business can carry on running smoothly whilst you’re away, check out our free resource ’10 top tips on getting things done’, published on Tuesday, which allows you to help prepare things before you go away or generally allowing things to get done more productively.