Hey, we're going to actually start working toward our visions and learning how to live already! What is your time off goal? Pull out yourlifestyle and business visions from the challenge. Your business vision had an ideal work schedule on it. Is that a schedule that will allow you your lifestyle vision?
Since we need to have the end in mind from the beginning, take a few minutes to get back in touch with what you really want to be doing. You probably decided you wanted to work for yourself so you would have more freedom right? What are you going to do with that freedom? It's all too easy to let business take over your life. When that happens, it becomes your identity. You forget how to have fun, or lose touch with what you like doing that isn't associated with business. Your business's job is to take you where you want to go, not become a multi-armed octopus that won't let you go.
If you don't have a clear motivating reason for taking time off, you will fill up your days with busy work. If you leave it to "someday" it might as well be never. By actually prioritizing, planning and scheduling time for family, friends, travel, hobbies, spiritual pursuits, you will have to get very creative about how to be efficient in your business. If you can only be "on it" for a certain amount of time, you'll stay focused and you'll make it work. You also have needs that are going to need to be met outside of work, however fulfilling your work may be. If you are spending time getting those needs met, it enables you to be super focused and productive, fully present with your work.
You will need to work on your "big why" again this week. Why do you need this time off? What will it make possible? How will that make you feel? How will it impact your family? You need to sit down and actively plan some fun things to do, because if all it is is some downtime, as soon as you get bored, you'll go back to work. When you understand the why, you will often find activities that are more attainable and will work with your timing and budget in the present.
What I'm actually suggesting here is that your business comes second. This week, we are going to create and start living the lifestyle you want, and your business will just have to fit within that framework.
If you build a successful business by working 80 hours a week, odds are, you'll have to maintain it at 80 hours a week. If you build a business from the ground up that supports your lifestyle, you'll have much more freedom in the end. Every seed bears after it's own kind. If you base your business on patterns of overwhelm, frustration and chaos, expect a bigger, more consuming version of that in the future.
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the amount of time you can give it. If not in terms of actual work, then the stress and tension as if it were actual work. By giving yourself firm time boundaries, you'll be more effective in less time.
If you give yourself only so many hours a week for business, and you have certain income goals you are committed to reaching, you'll have to go all out during your work time and get creative, innovative and resourceful. You'll also be pulling the feeling of success into your "now" because you'll be enjoying your life while you're working. It won't be forever out there on the horizon. In turn, that will help you with your mindset issues around vision work.
You need to go to your office supply store or Amazon and buy either a planner or a year at a glance calendar and either the colored sticky dots or use 3 colors of markers. They do have dry erase year at a glance which might be a little less scary permanent. You're going to make a schedule. Your dots or markers are your color codes. A time off color, a doing business color, and a 20% day color.
First you need to schedule trips, events, retreats, holidays and the like that you know you want to do. Put in all your vacation times. Then put in your weekends. If your vision was pretty audacious and you feel like that's not feasible for this year, then dial it back for now, but this should stretch you a bit.
If you don't have set times that you know you want to do something, the schedule with this class has some holes in it. We have assignments the 1st and 3rd Mondays, and Zooms the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays. There are some 5 week months scattered about in the year, and we plan to take those weeks off.
Next, decide how many days per month you want to spend working on your business. This is different from the daily grind. This is strategy, projects and the 20% activities. 4 days a month would be a good goal. Mark those days in.
The remaining days are days to conduct business. These are where you do the day to day. In my business, these are the days for bottling product, errands, inventory orders, custom combo consultations, ad campaigns, website updates and communicating with my customers.
I also used to fill orders any day, (got people for that now) but I made sure everything was ready to go and easy for me before I started my weekend. There is a big difference between "take product off shelf and stick in box" and "oh I'm out of M&M, need to bottle some, where are the labels? Crap, I have to make labels. Never mind, you guys go ahead without me, I'll just stay here and work today."
You can't just drop off at the end of your work week if you want to implement this well, you have to set yourself up.
A few Decembers ago, I had an interesting conversation with God about how I could not go into 2015 in the state I was in. I had a crack moment over the Christmas song lyrics "the weary world rejoices." Christmas season was always about just hanging in there and surviving in my line of work, so I might have felt it more deeply than some, but I was weary. It hit pretty hard that some of why Jesus came is to give us rest. So I got back on the "rest" topic.
Moreover, God had been talking to me about the year of rest. Remember, it's actually biblical to work 6 years and rest the seventh. That doesn't happen without you setting a strong intention to set up your business so you can do that.
The Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, “Tell the Israelis that when you enter the land that I’m about to give you, you are to let the land observe a Sabbath to the Lord. For six years you may plant your fields, and for six years you may prune your vineyard and gather its produce. But the seventh year is to be a Sabbath of rest for the land—a Sabbath for the Lord. You are not to plant your field or prune your vineyard. You are not to gather what grows from the spilled kernels of your crops. You are not to pick the grapes of your untrimmed vines. Let it be a year of Sabbath for the land. You may take the Sabbath produce of the land for your food—you, your male and maid servants, your hired laborers, and the resident alien with you. The cattle and the wild animals in your land—everything it produces—are for your food.
What the heck does that even look like in this day and age? To me, it looks like not plowing or seeding, your company is not in a growth phase. You're not hustling and marketing, going after the increase. For Freedom Flowers, it's kicking back, serving my existing customers and whoever happens to find me, letting my autoresponder nurture the newbies, and only talking to staff. Just coast.
But that's a big step, especially if you haven't spent 6 years building up to it. I looked it up in light of all this, and we were technically are in a Shmita year. (That would be the 7th). "You mean do it right now? I'm not ready for this."
"Ok, He says. What about working 6 weeks and taking the seventh?"
New concept.
So I started counting off weeks from the date I was given. I saw that the next week was my off week, starting New Year's Eve. No wonder I felt I need to get everything wrapped up and leave work at the door of 2015. I also counted up and see that my off week started the day before a retreat I wanted to go to. It felt perfect.
I also had to look around at who else is doing this, cause it's sure not in the bible, and found this guy. He is kinda like me, where we work hard at things out of passion for them and how do you not do that stuff in your down time? If you're interested in this, he has two posts that are worth the read, but in a nutshell, he is blowing off the regular commitments, slowing down, and engaging in secondary passions as well as stepping back, looking at the big picture of his business and doing some planning. We need big picture time and space.
This may or may not feel like something you need to do. It's challenging, and it's awesome.
http://seanwes.com/2014/what-if-you-took-a-week-off-every-7th-week/
http://seanwes.com/2014/from-working-100-hours-a-week-to-a-sabbatical-in-the-mountains/
Sean actually took 2020 off. I haven't tuned in to see how that went, other than I know it got a little rocky early on traveling with Corona going on.
These days I am not doing 7th week sabaticals. I'm enjoying having attained part of my vision, and working partial days. The seventh year off intrigues me. That would be a good hard reset. You would really not be able to come out with your worker bee identity in tact after something like that. It would take planning for sure.
If you have a day job:
If you've got your vacation time sorted out, block that in. Otherwise, the simplest thing with this is to pretend you don't have that job. You can choose time during the year, where all you do is go to work and not spend weekends or mornings or however you juggle it, working in the business. Rest, have a girls night, spend time with family, do hobbies instead. You are limited with what you can do, but look at this as practice for later.
Essential Homework
1. Review Lifestyle and Business Visions from the challenge.
2. Complete attached worksheet
3. Get your schedule on calendar and begin to put it in to practice to the best of your ability. You may not be able to get it all into place immediately. Make a commitment to live it up on your time off. What things on your lifestyle vision and your worksheet can you implement right now? I wanna see you living large. Post big plans below!
Optional Homework:
4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. Hopefully you like your business enough to stay there more than 4 hours, but lets not get carried away with work. Exciting possibilities and some entertaining reading in here.
Questions for Papa:
What things do I need to let go of?
What things can i implement to be more efficient?
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