How To Relieve Stress In Business (The Truth)

If we want to talk about burnouts we need to talk about stress because stress contributes to burnouts.

How do people get stressed?

People get stressed primarily when they are going to do something, they procrastinate and then their mental RAM it’s filled up with all these projects and things that they were going to do and it becomes super stressful. This is because you know you have to do something, you haven’t done it yet, you are procrastinating, you aren’t doing it correctly, and you are judging yourself and adding stress. That helps drive you toward a burnout.

Utilize calendars

My solution to stress is to be a slave to the calendar. Being a slave to the calendar basically means that you commit to listing out everything that you do, all your habits, all your activities, every little detail, and everything that you have to do on your calendar, or Google calendar, and then following up with that. Because you put everything in a Calendar you cannot make it boring or only work, but it also has to include fun activities. And that brings me to the second point that helps to avoid going out.

Use one day per week to de-stress

The second point to help avoid burnout is to celebrate your successes and have days off. On Sundays I do not work. I may film some videos but I do not do some of the hard and stressful activities that I usually do. You need that day to let go, think about other stuff, and do other stuff that is fun and relaxing like laying on a beach, going to a spa, or filming a video in my case. That helps you to reload and balances out your life.

Preferably you do this without Internet as Internet is very stressful – especially when replying to messages and looking at your Facebook notifications. Disconnect from that for at least one day per week and that will contribute to you having resistance versus burnouts and stress.

Pay attention to how you spend your time

Another tip for avoiding burnouts is really paying attention to what you spend your time on in terms of the process and activities in your business. If you are spending half your day handling refunds and trying to get people to pay you and dealing with things that haven’t paid yet and refuse to pay, it is super stressful. If you are spending half your day doing taxes, it can be very stressful and these activities are inherently stressful because there are many things that can go wrong, it is out of your control, etc.

Outsource or hire

What you can do is you can very easily outsource a lot of the stressful tasks like customer support, receiving payments, and doing tax stuff for the government. You can outsource that very cheaply. You need to ask yourself what is worth more: $100, or the stress that you are going to save that can prevent a burnout by having this task done by someone else? For me I always try to outsource stuff like that. I try to outsource stuff that is currently stressful in my business.

Scale at a reasonable pace

A final tip I want to share to avoid burnout is to refuse projects once you are working at capacity. Stop accepting projects at a certain point because greed takes over and if you take on more than you can chew, that causes a lot of stress, you can’t handle it anymore, and you can’t hire people fast enough.

What happens is you are going to get burnt out, all your projects will fail, and you will have even more stress. The best way to have a burnout is to pile everything up and have everything crash and burn. Do not do that guys. It sounds very scary, but all these things can completely be avoided by scaling slowly in your business, not by 150% per month, or per week, for every week of the year. That would be too crazy. Slowly scale, increase the capacity at which you can work, your company can work, and increase the amount of people you hire slowly.

I know everyone is always focused on growing fast and exploding their business and scaling. This is true, but you need to know how fast you can scale. For a six-figure company, 4% to 10% per week, or per month in some cases, depending on if it is a brick and mortar business or if it is an online business, that is the maximum. If you go past that what tends to happen is stuff tends to break too fast for you to fix it, people quit and you can’t replace them fast enough, and so on.

Tailor this advice to your situation

Of course I often get proven wrong with this number so do not obey this number blindly, but really use your brain. These are relatively arbitrary numbers based on experience but not based on knowing your business. Make a decision how fast your business can grow and don’t exceed that number. Reject projects at a certain point because when you can’t handle them it is more stressful than not accepting the projects in a lot of cases.

You will be thankful that you are doing just as much as you can and still growing than if you are doing too much and burning out.