Our mind and body regularly need time to recover and refresh from the working week. Your wellbeing depends on it.
However, when you're self-employed (especially working from home), it can be very difficult to disconnect yourself from your work.
The constant input from mobile devices doesn't help.
So, here are some pointers on making sure you take at least one day off each week. It'll help.
TRANSCRIPT
So, okay, what about this simple concept? Well, I've for many years now, been a big, big fan of taking a day off every single week. And we have this concept in the Western world called the "weekend".
And typically, for most people, that's Friday evening until Monday morning.
But it's not that simple for self-employed people:
What I find is that when you're self employed is that it's very easy, particularly if you work from home, to just slip into the habit of just doing a bit of work at the weekends.
And the problem with that is that your brain and your body (and your emotional state) never truly switch off.
Now, the concept of having a day off every week goes way back. And whether you believe in it or not, in the biblical creation story even God took a day off at the end of the week.
And I don't necessarily think that's a bad model. Whether you choose to believe in that or not, Jewish people always took a Sabbath from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. And it works incredibly well.
In the western world, we've kind of got to the point where we're always attached to our mobile phones and that can be very harmful.
The dinging and the blinging of social media updates, emails, texts and all this stuff coming through means that we never fully truly give ourselves the opportunity to have mental downtime.
I've been there and done that to the point where working seven days a week literally leaves leads you to physical and emotional exhausted. It really isn't funny.
But the point is, it's so easy to just slide into that. It's dinging, I've got to cheque the latest social media updates, oh, I've got to reply to this text, or got to respond to this email, et cetera, because it's there in our hands.
So what I would encourage you to do is to have a think about whether you truly take down time, whether you truly give yourself at least one day off in the week, whether you truly allow your brain and your body to recover from the working week.
Now, I for many years have taken Saturday off as my day of rest for a number of reasons, and a lot of it was simply because I was involved in my church, in the music group, I played the guitar, and so I'd get to church at nine-ish on a Sunday morning to get ready for 10:00 when the service started.
And whether I realised it or not, Sunday was not particularly a day of rest. Oftentimes I was refereeing rugby in the afternoon on a Sunday as well, so it was pretty on pretty much a full on day.
So I decided to switch that to Saturday and make Saturday my day of rest.
Now, the Jewish community takes Saturday as the Sabbath (Shabbat). Like I said, Friday evening till Saturday evening.
And I thought that's actually a great way of doing it. What I like about it is that if your week ends on Friday, it makes absolute logical sense for the next day to be your day off. And if you're going to go and do stuff like shopping and housework, postpone it until Sunday.
Now, this is only a recipe, this is what I do, and I know lots of people around the world do it as well.
But the key message here is to just take a day off.
Give yourself space to recover, recuperate, refresh, even if it is just one day a week.
Ask yourself, can you take a day off?
Now, I know from my own life, and having spoken to other people who've done similar, insisting on a non negotiable day off one day a week makes a massive difference. You can choose the day.
I prefer Saturdays. I know a lot of people choose Sunday as the day off and that's fine, it doesn't really matter what day it is.
But I would urge you, for the sake of your own mental and physical well being, to take a day off.
Switch off notifications on your phone, don't look at your email, certainly don't look at your business social media, because whilst you may feel it's fun, you are engaging your business brain and you are not allowing your brain and your emotions to rest. You're not giving yourself the chance to recover and recuperate.
And the saddest part about it is you won't give yourself the chance to refresh you'll constantly be on the go. And I promise you that it will catch up with you at some point, whether physically through illness or mentally, through mental exhaustion and possible breakdown and mental health issues. And I don't want that for anyone.
It isn't funny. I promise you. I know what it's like. So whilst you could argue this is a light-hearted topic, it is actually very serious.
This is a biggie : Take a day off, a minimum one day off, every single week.
I promise you it will help.
Got a question or comment? Write in the comments below. It'll be good to hear from you.
Want more on looking after yourself when self-employed? Check out:
Do something daring, it’ll help (blog post)
Do you really want what you say you want? (YouTube video)