The Need To Prevent Stress At Work For New Business Owners
August 16, 2009
You left corporate work to come out and start your own business because your day job is no longer inspiring. You dread hearing the alarm clock in the morning, and look forward to enjoying more time with your loved ones when you want and experiencing less stress.
But hold it right there. Working from home may not necessarily have less stress. And initially will involve a lot more work than you think. Certainly you may not necessarily be working shorter hours. In fact many solo entrepreneurs and small business owners very soon find out that they work longer hours than those who trudge to the office. And it is not hard to imagine that these business owners are plagued with work stress without even realising it.
In this article we want to look at the importance and need to address the issue of work stress faced by small business owners, independent coaches, consultants, speakers, authors who start their own businesses.
Work stress manifest itself in so many ways, and if you are not careful it will start affecting not only your business acumen and decision makings, but your relationships and networking with your prospects, your clients, your partners, your family, and even your own health. In prolong and serious cases can lead to extreme exhaustion and depression, it can cost you your health and your life. And you will not be functioning at your peal performance.
One thing I highlight recommend is to take preventative measures.
No I do not mean regularly monitoring and checking your stress level. I mean going one step further beyond that. I suggest you spend some time understand and putting in place structures and methods that you can set up as your start or run your home business so you are able to minimise the effect of work stress.
Much like taking care of your personal health, merely doing medical checkups yearly will only tell you if you have reached the unhealthy threshold so you can begin taking corrective actions. Taking preventative measure is like taking in the right nutrients, supplementing your diet with minerals and vitamins, consuming enough water and oxygen, taking good rest and keeping an exercise routine.
When you do this, you are truly preventing yourself from going in the wrong direction and not just noticing that you have come close enough to danger that you should switch course.
Applying this to your home business, to prevent yourself from burn out and exhaustion, start on the right foot. Make sure you have a well thought through business plan with focused, measureable and achievable goals. You want to minimise mistakes and shorten the learning curve and cut out the unnecessary stress due to overload or work and unrealistic goals or attempting too many ventures all at once. You also want to put in place best practices, systems and processes to help you organise and automate as much manual work as possible.
Therefore you need to be constantly learning from those who have succeeded. You need healthy input of strategy, processes and systems of best practices and continual improving. You do that either by continually immersing yourself with trainings and self development in the area of your business with master mind groups and by having a trusted mentor or business coach to guide you through the many dangers of a start up business.
Statistics shows that 80% or business fails within the first year and of the 20% that survives, 80% more fail in the next 5 years.
You also need prior communication and understanding from your family on your work and time demands when you work from home. They need to know what you are doing and why you cannot be disturbed at certain hours of the day. You will chart in plans for work life balance as well as time for exercises and regularly spread out breaks and a yearly vacation.
And then on a regular basis, monitor your stress level to see how you fare and make immediate adjustments before you to too far into the wrong direction. A stress free work life is achievable but does not just happen, you need to plan for it and work towards it. You need to lay a firm foundations, and cultivate habits of sticking to your routines that works to eliminate wastes and errors. That will put you in a much better position of reducing work related stress and experience work life balance.
If you want to consider starting your own business, I recommend you get into a mastermind group so you can bounce off ideas with others, network and integrate with others as well as tap into some collective intelligence. Just sign up for a free mastermind report here. If you like to experience what masterminding is, just send me a mail at Contact@AbundantLivesCoaching.com before 23rd Nov.
2 Effective Time Management Techniques To Ease Your Stress
August 13, 2009
If you are feeling stressed because you have too much to do and too little time, then know that you are not alone. If you don’t know where to start or how to approach the pile of work in front of you then read on for tips to help you achieve more in less time.
1. Have a routine and stick to it until it becomes habit. It is strange but having a routine helps free up more time for you. Instead of wasting time deciding what to do and finding ways to do the task, having everything done the same way, regularly helps to bring in efficiency.
It also helps to build a habit so your body and mind go on auto pilot naturally. It takes up less and less energy from you to do the routine tasks and you free up your mind to concentrate on the creative parts of your work.
Having a routine can be as simple as doing your networking or marketing on specific days of the week. You will lock those times downs and these activities do not get washed out when your production work increases. Draw up a plan and get into the habit of a routine and you will get all your important tasks attended to.
Creating a routine can also mean scheduling creative work on certain time of the day or certain day of the week. Some people works best in the early morning while others prefer to stay up late. Find out what works best for you and stick to your routine. That’s your date with yourself.
Follow the structure week after week, until it becomes second nature to you and you will save so much time that you would have spent on in-decisions, forgetting the tasks and having to make up for it at another time.
2. Break up bigger projects into a series of smaller tasks. This will make the entire project easier to tackle and you can also celebrate the little milestones along the way. It also keep you focus on doing only the small task in front of you so you are not overwhelmed and frazzled by the size of the entire project. And by chunking it down to doable pieces, you are able to fit these little tasks into your daily schedule more easily.
There are always 10 or 15 minutes here and there as you wait in line. For example, you can break down your 1 hour audio class into smaller files of 15 minutes each so you can listen to the audio as you drive around on the road for errands. It is amazing how many 15 minutes you have lying around not utilised which slipped away unnoticed.
Alternatively, you can keep a small scarp book handy and every time you have a 10-minute slot, you can start jotting down ideas for your own business. It is found that when you are away from your desk that you sometimes have the most creative ideas.
Try these 2 tips and see if you are able to get more done with less stress.
You can also sign up for free tips on managing work stress here and start implementing it for results.
Time Freedom For Those Who Work From Home
August 11, 2009
Have you noticed how long it takes for you to settle down to work? You need a cup of coffee, and you may want to have some background music as you attend to your emails. And as you replied the last of the emails, you may just want to update your status on facebook or twitter and check out statuses of your friends.
Before you realised it, half a day has gone by. Then you begin to flip through your appointment book or to do list to see what needs to be done today. You realise you need to refer to some research you did some time back and you start looking for the document – which you cannot find. You spend 15 minutes searching, and then decided to give it up and redo the research.
As you do that, your desk calendar caught your eye and you realise you have bills you need to pay. Because you don’t want to furnish late fee, you decided you better go on line and make that payment now.
When you went on line you receive different text messages and you replied the messages. And by the time you entertained them you felt hungry, it is already noon time. You went to the kitchen and what do you know? You had not stocked up on groceries.
So you went to the grocery store to get some food. Then you bumped into a friend at the mall and you chatted a while as you caught up.
When you come back, it is close to 3pm and you feel a little tired by now and needed a break, so you turned on the TV to relax. And then you went back to your desk or home office and realise that you have not started on the work you need to do today. You were easily distracted and scattered and you had not started on your work.
By now you panicked because you had committed to work that needs to be delivered but you really have not started on anything. So you frantically sat down to work and you down another cup of coffee to concentrate. In the mean time emails still come in and your phone range periodically. You worked till steam comes off your head and miraculously you managed to come up with a draft for your client or prospect. Now you need to put that together into some kind of presentation format.
At the end of a long day, you are stretched to your limit and stressed out. You wonder why you ever made the decision to work freelance or work from home. And whatever happened to time freedom?
What happened to time freedom? You are supposed to have flexible workings hours so you wake up when you like and work any time you like and have lots of time left over.
To be a successful home business owner you need to put in routines and processes to help ensure your productivity and efficiency. You really cannot afford to waste time and energy. You need to follow the structures and schedule you set. You certainly can have time freedom but it is a freedom you achieve and earn when you follow the structures and routine.
You need systems and processes to streamline your tasks. You need a system for filing your documents, you need a process to manage your emails and phone calls, and you put in structures so you can work at your peak without distractions – these are all necessary elements that contribute to your time management and efficiency.
If you do not have these structures, you can be very busy, very tired and stressed out, and not be effective. Because you are not working under optimum conditions and are just wasting your time and your resources. And do that over time and you will be taxing your body and health.
So start managing your work routines and habits if you want to avoid stressing out your body and achieving a lot more in your personal and business life.
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