Work/Life Balance Tips for Creatives | 4 Ninja Steps to Take More Time Off

You shouldn't feel like you have to ask your boss for vacation time off when you are the boss. I'm a few weeks out from my annual sabbatical time, something that I've done every year as a small business owner, and today I want to tell you four things you can do to take more time off work as a creative entrepreneur. So here's the deal. I have to learn how to work and rest well. My story is out there on the internet, but I struggle pretty openly with anxiety to this day. In 2015, I was partially hospitalized for anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder, and a lot of that was a catalyst to wanting to go on my own and start a business. It's messy, but as you can tell, me at my worst is not dealing with stress well, and all of that has really impacted how I've set up and run my business. I feel as if I have mastered setting up a creative small business that is both profitable, but allows me to walk away from it a pretty good bit. Even before I had a team in place, I did this. Disclaimer, yes, I am 100% still learning how to walk into my own advice, as they say, and figure out how to work from a place of rest, not hustle, but I'm passionate about setting up a business that can run when I can't. I have to Ashland-proof my business. I create videos about stuff like this each and every single week, so if you haven't yet, look down below and hit that subscribe button so you can join this tribe and be first to know when these videos drop. Elephant in the room, but I actually don't even really believe in too much of work-life balance. I've never liked that phrase because I feel like it separates work from life, and I believe that if you view your work as your calling, like so many creatives do, it's part of your life. It just needs to be put within constraints like anything else. When I worked in corporate marketing, I would hear the more senior-level members and owners of the business talk about taking their sabbatical. It was something that they were awarded after about, it seems like a decade in the business. I love work, but I thought that would be pretty cool to step away from the business and the operations and just be able to think and have white space. So when I started my business, I decided I was going to implement this. I was going to take extended time away from my business every single year, but it has been a complete process over the years. Do I batch all my content and schedule it to go out even though I've told people that I'm off? So should I be posting when I'm off? Do I need a budget to pay someone to do things while I'm out, or is everybody off and the business kind of shuts down? Do I pay myself every single week that I'm off or not? Then I realized I was over-complicating it. The whole point of starting a business was to run things my way and create a business that answered to the enough and whatever enough looked like in my life. If I showed up for my people and continued to provide the content that they thought that they were going to get by coming along with me, if I showed up for my clients and did the things that I said I was going to do, and if in doing all of this, I was continuing to hit those revenue goals, then it was okay to play hooky from my business and step away for an extended time. This gave me space to think again, to dream, to actually set the vision for what I want to do and have that white space. Then I would be able to come back and make an even bigger impact. Does that resonate with you? Click like below if it does. And one more thing I want to challenge you to do. I asked my Instagram people lately, what would you do with some more extended time off or with a sabbatical? People were commenting there, so I want to encourage you. Can you comment below and let me know, what would you do with more than just a weekend off work? I'd love to hear what different people do and how they spend their time. Basically, there are four categories to think through as you're planning for your time off. Mindset, content, clients, and automation. With mindset, the first thing here is to actually realize that time off will serve your business. You've heard it. Working more hours does not make you more productive. Working 12 hours every single day is not as fruitful as working six more dedicated hours a day. It's like the U.S. women's soccer team. They don't train seven days a week, they have off time. Just like if you're an athlete, as an entrepreneur, you've got to have that time off to rest and recoup. You've probably heard this, but I included it because when you do take extended time off, it's like a trust fall. You've heard it, but you're putting it into practice and it's a completely different thing, at least it was for me. A tip here is to use a mantra or a vision statement. My Art of Efficiency students know I like to tell them to do this by setting up a time stewardship vision statement. And it reminds me that I have more time than I think I do. That busy is a decision. It reminds me that there's no way, even if I never slept, that I could meet the expectations of all my clients, all my customers, all my followers, all my friends, my family, and the expectations that I'm putting on myself. There's no way I'm ever gonna be able to live up to every single one of those expectations. Instead, I have plenty of time to do the assignments that God has for me. So keeping a mantra or a vision in mind as you're planning for your extended time off can really help you out. Plan for what you're gonna do when you're off. So pretty simple, I'll break this down to what it's looked like for me. So every week, about Wednesday or Thursday, I do what I call weekends planning. That sounds fancy, really it's just a journaling exercise. I get through a few letters to plot out what I'm gonna read, how I'm gonna recharge, when I'm gonna sleep, that kind of thing. Before sabbatical, I do this a little bit more. It's more of an extended journaling process. If that interests you, I have a shop item that I will link below down in the resources so you can see kind of the things that I journal through before extended time away. We work so hard to get time off to recharge so I don't wanna squander that time by binge watching an entire season of Stranger Things or Downton Abbey. Step two, content. Here, the secrets are batching and repurposing. Now in the video coming next week, I'm gonna take you behind the scenes and show you what a day-to-day batching system looks like in my business. Make sure you watch for that one. Again, subscribe if you haven't yet. But what content looks like for me, especially while I'm off, is creating one piece of hero content every single week. For my business, that's now morphed into this weekly YouTube episode. In the past, it was an epic blog post that may be what it is for you. Maybe it's a podcast episode. So I take that main piece of hero content and I tease it out for about 30 days after the fact. I take the full video, the blog, gifs from the video, any imagery, and I stretch all of that out. I repackage the copy, the images, the content. I wanna spend 30% of my time creating and then 70% of my time pumping that out. So I rework and repurpose this hero piece of content for Instagram, Facebook, and even a little LinkedIn. All of that's done before I step away. And I also plan for things like weekly referring posts that aren't related to that hero piece. If you're in my Prime to Launch course, sorry, you've heard me talk about this, but basically I like to go ahead and set up themes for days of the week. So on Sundays, for example, I always post on Facebook a quote that has struck me lately and that I'm thinking about. I just share that with my audience every single Sunday. I know that that's what the post is gonna be. So when I'm creating content to go up while I'm out, I'm really just sticking to these routines that are already in place. Now, I don't schedule out every single moment of every single day content. Every time I've gone on vacation or sabbatical, I make sure that I have some windows in there so I can post in real time what I'm doing. It's 2019, I think that people are accustomed to the fact that in this day and age, about everything that goes up on the internet has happened in real time. I'm okay with that. But I do like to update people with where I'm traveling or what I'm reading. If I can give you one tip here, keep in mind Hofstadter's rule. The rule that it always takes longer than you think it's gonna take to do anything, even if you keep Hofstadter's rule in mind. You know how when you've budgeted and planned for client work, it's usually best to look at the time you think it's gonna take you and double it and charge them for that because it always does take you double the time. This is that rule. And I wanna mention it here because content planning and prepping can be a huge mammoth of a task to do before you plan to take time off. But it is worth it. It makes it so much easier to pump out content when I have a repurposing and a batching system in place. Now for client work. As you may know, I am a big believer in wise financial stewardship. I believe you should pay yourself as a creative and that's gonna be what enables you to go out and do more of that work. I've come to really enjoy figuring out my business's finances, even as a words girl, not necessarily a numbers girl. I also like to get a paycheck when I'm off. I want to treat it as paid time off, like in any company, and still be able to collect a paycheck while I'm off. I've worked up to this point. The first year I took a sabbatical, I didn't pay myself, but now I do. To dealing with clients before I had a team in place looked like this. I would communicate that I'm going on vacation or taking a sabbatical far in advance. I would put it in my marketing. I would include a blurb on my website about it. I would send emails to clients far in advance and then closer to the day and then right before I left. Now, Sarah on my team manages all of our client relationships so I can really focus on the vision and the work of the business. So now I don't have to worry about over communicating that I'm going on leave because they're still going to have somebody listening to them and available. Now, I do make sure that I don't book any clients for the projects I spearhead, day rate clients, launch copy clients for the time when I'm off, obviously. I plan out my client spots before the year starts with my team and I always make sure that I leave a hole around the times that I do want to go on vacation. While we've grown to a point that I no longer spearhead every single client project in the business, we do have a double touch system and copy chief one another. So all clients are touched both by me and by Sarah. But it's important to know before the year starts exactly how many client spots you can take on with your team or just you. Can you take on 24, 42, just 12? Having that all planned out month by month is helpful before you take leave. Then, the way payment plans are structured for our clients, paychecks don't miss a beat. One more tip with client work, I have found that sabbatical is a great time to do any pro bono work that you've been looking to do. Maybe it's for a ministry, a non-profit, for a family or friends that you would really like to help out. Sabbatical can be a great time to do that. That brings us to step four, automation. We've talked about content creation and automation there but there are other things that you need automated so you can take that time off. Having things like an email autoresponder in place so you can tell everybody when they email in that you are taking time off is helpful. I want you to see how you can automate as much in your business as possible. From tightening up your initial inquiry process with a tool such as HoneyBook to scheduling automation with a tool like Acuity. So when people want to book time to talk to you, they can do it on their own and you don't have to be a part of the process. That's like a digital secretary that handles all of that back and forth, which time works for you, so on and so forth. This also includes content scheduling that we talked about. A tool that I love for this is CoSchedule. Automating as much as possible with tech tools is a great easy way to make sure that things are running and spinning like a top while you're out. But still check in. I can't stress this enough. Things go awry or don't post correctly. You also may need to pull the plug if something goes amiss. One time I had things scheduled to go out and there was a tragic national shooting incident and that probably wasn't the best time for me to have things scheduled to go out that were talking about the things that I talk about in my business, so it was nice to be able to go in and hit the off button and turn it off. Now you know how to prep for your time off, but what if in doing that you run into a task or two or 12 that aren't necessarily on your favorites list? I've got a checklist of the top five things that you can outsource in your business to lead to greater profits. Check below, grab that freebie, and get a little lighter load. Now if you don't feel like you're being productive enough with the time you do have to work on your business, then watch this video next where I walk you through seven habits that I've implemented to help me be more productive.