Set Yourself Up For Vacation
When you became self-employed you might have thought personal vacations were a thing of the past. The reality is, the more successful you are, whether self-employed or higher up the employment ladder, the harder it is to carve out vacation time.
It’s no use preaching to you about how time away from your business is essential to keeping you healthy, sane, and liking the work you do because that doesn’t make it any easier to find the time. The bottom line is you’re so busy there are already not enough hours in the day or week to get everything done you need to do. Taking time away is a dream that never comes to fruition.
But there is hope for you. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do in order to fit a vacation into your business plan. The idea is to start small by taking back your weekends. Then you can go on from there to full-fledged one week trips.
You may be a one man operation and you like it that way, but you do need some additional help when you’re not there.
Set up an online support ticket system as a central location for all incoming requests for help and questions. Do some research and find one that has the features you want. You probably want one that doesn’t make the customer sign up and enter a password. No sense irritating your customer! You probably also want a help desk system that allows you to add a section on common questions and answers. Many people simply need to look here to get their answers and don’t need to reach you personally.
Once you have the system, you will need to find a live body to man it. Find someone who can be trained to answer all sorts of questions and handle any problems, and redirect the support questions to them when you’re unavailable. Often times you can hire a virtual assistant who already knows how to deal with people in this manner.
As far as your regular “work” goes, it does take some planning ahead to take time off. If there are deadlines looming, look them over to see if you can finish them up ahead of time. If they are self-imposed deadlines, ask yourself if it’s okay if you push the deadline back a few days or weeks.
Next, determine what else has to be done before you go and make a list of those tasks. Now, and this is the hardest part, give yourself permission to let go of the little, inconsequential, time-consuming tasks that can either be outsourced, done away with, or can wait. This frees up your time to work on the “have to’s” before you go.
The last thing to mention is your attitude. By allowing yourself to take a break it means you’ve realized your business can go on even without you there, and while you’re an important part of it, you’ve set up the structure so it’s not all about you.
Go on and take a weekend off and see how it goes. Stepping away and recharging will have a huge impact not only on you but how you successfully do business when you return.
Photo credit: rikahi
