Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done in a long time. I mean, a very long time. It’s been at least a year or more since I’ve actually done 100% absolutely nothing towards building my business. This probably goes against all the people who recommend hustling day and night to build your business and against traditional wisdom for growing a brand. However, I tend to test things out a lot and do a lot of experiments to see how well things work.
I’m going to start off by telling you about why I did absolutely nothing to grow my business yesterday and then I’ll let you know about how I feel today.
On Saturday night I was bar-tending at a friends bar. It’s not your average bar either, more of an upscale wine bar that sells only beer and wine. This means I don’t have to know jack about mixed drinks or proper ratios to making drinks. I tend to put too much alcohol in mixed drinks so it’s probably best that I just open beers and pour glasses of wine anyway.
At the bar, I ended up working until about 2:30AM and then getting home around 3:30AM. When I got home, I ended up being pretty exhausted and just fell right asleep. When I was driving home after work, I decided that I would take the advice of one of the people I met at the Extreme Business Makeovers event that I attended last weekend.
Eliminate 70% of Work?
He had told me that to become more fulfilled in life, he’s eliminated 70% of his work load and found a way to only do work for focused periods of time. He did this by actually finding when he was doing actual “work” and when he was just “acting like he was doing work”. You’re probably familiar with this, I know when I actually do things and accomplish stuff versus when I just sit around and act like i’m working. We’re all guilty of this at some time or another so don’t feel bad.
I’d read about doing this and have been implementing this for a while. I’ve found I tend to work best for 2-3 hours straight and then take a break for 15-30 minutes to let my brain relax. He also mentioned that because of this, he has been able to dedicate all of Sunday to doing fun stuff and hanging out with his family the whole day.
The guy who told me this is older and has a family so that was extremely important to him to spend time with them. He’s also EXTREMELY wealthy. I’m talking about him working with people to build an island in the Caribbean in the next 5 years wealthy. I personally am single and don’t have my family down here yet. They’re all still living in NY and I recently moved to Orlando, Florida so my Sunday’s would consist of me doing some work to grow the business and hanging out with friends for an hour or so.
What did I do yesterday?
This Sunday I decided to do absolutely no work at all and it was actually extremely difficult for me to do this. I actually had to force myself not to read a business book while I was hanging out with my roommates and watching a movie. I tend to read more than I watch tv/movies so I almost always have a book on me. After a little while of this, we decided to go out on the boat for a little bit.
We ended up going out on the boat at around 1pm and ended up staying out there until about 7pm. I learned how to sky ski and got to drive the boat while my roommate was riding and doing crazy flips and tricks. I’ve included some pics so you can see what sky skiing is and just to document this for myself.
There are more pics on my new Flickr account —-> http://www.flickr.com/photos/whoschrishughes/
What did this day off teach me?
Haha I think it’s funny how I still managed to use my “day off” to learn a valuable business lesson. I found it was extremely difficult to not log into one of my niche blog sites and write another blog post, to not call anyone to talk business, to not write a blog for Brain Smart Success and even struggled with not writing this blog post before I went to sleep last night.
I actually sat down at my Macbook Pro ready to write out this blog post last night at about 11pm and realized that I had gone the whole day without doing work and wanted to completely take the day off, so I read a fictional book and went to sleep. It really was difficult for me not to do anything related to growing my business.
This day taught me that I’ve become fairly obsessed with building my business and doing “work”. It really is hard for me to relax and unwind and turn off my “business brain” and just enjoy the day. As you can see from the pictures it was an absolutely gorgeous day out on the lake and we had great company on the boat the whole day.
Today I actually woke up ready to rock it. I woke up with a smile on my face, went to the gym, came home and started doing some work. I wrote a blog post over at BrainSmartSuccess.com , am going to write another blog post for 2 more of my niche blogs. This is in addition to me writing this post for my personal blog. It was originally in my plans to follow up with some business owners to sell a blog that I created and took to the #1 ranking on Google for my keywords as well. However, I was asked to work tonight again at the Wine Bar so I’m going to do that so calling those business owners will have to wait until tomorrow.
The day off really helped me to get away from it all and just live life. This was extremely difficult for me, but I’m going to test out taking 1 day completely off of work every week. I’m also going to start recording how long I do certain tasks and when my optimal times are to do the work I need to get done. I feel like by doing this, I can really get my schedule down to where I’ll be able to get more work done in less time. It’s crazy how taking a day off can really renew your outlook.
What Are Ya Gonna Do About it?!?
Because this is my new way of blogging for my personal blog, I’m going to start getting you more involved in this part of my life. I think this will help us both out because if something has helped me out, it’s my hope that it will also help you out. This means I’m going to start asking YOU questions and giving you little tips or tricks that I’ve used to improve.
My question to you is simple. When is the last time you took a complete day off of work and did nothing but enjoy the company of your friends or family? Have you done it yet this week? This month? This year? If you haven’t, pick a day this week and do nothing to grow your business. After you take this day off, come back here and leave a comment on what you’ve learned and how you feel after taking the day off.
Leave your comments below because I look forward to seeing how you feel after doing this!
Talk to you soon,
Chris