Reprioritising to Avoid Small Business Burnout

It’s finally time for some warmer weather. That should mean, for most businesses, that it’s now time to take a break. The sunshine heralds the time to relax and reap the rewards of your hard work – or does it?

For lots of small business owners, the summer is almost a tease. We feel like we want to take more time off, but we can’t afford to let anything ‘drop’. As business owners, we’re constantly juggling many different tasks and responsibilities. Anytime you get a new idea, you’ll either try it yourself or shoot it to your team, adding to the overall pile of spinning plates – which you can’t afford to let drop.

But what if you did?

That’s my challenge to anyone reading this article. To let a few of those plates drop. To put some of the tasks to one side, giving yourself some breathing space that not only gives you the space you need to take a break, but may also lead to genuine growth in your business.

That sounds a little counterintuitive – how can letting plates drop possibly drive growth? The answer, really, is all about prioritisation and avoiding the dreaded small business burnout that can plague any owner juggling too many things at once.

How better prioritisation gives you more freedom

If you feel like you’re stretched thin, trying to do everything all at once, you’re not only overstretched and overworked, but you're also putting your business in a sort of stasis. To return to my juggling analogy, it might feel like keeping all the plates spinning is the most important thing in the world – but that means you can’t actually go anywhere. You’re just stuck, doing everything but gaining very little or nothing at all.

Anything new that you do manage to achieve is just going to add a new plate to your ever-mounting juggling act. Do you know what happens when you’ve got too many things to juggle?

That’s right.

CRASH!

So, how can you pull it all back and begin to work more efficiently and effectively? You need to reprioritise based on what is actually going to move the needle. This means reviewing three things:

• Vision: review what you originally considered to be your overall business direction. Has it changed? How are the tasks you’re doing now contributing to that vision?
• Core focus: why does your business exist, and who does it exist for? How are your current projects and new ideas aiding this core focus?
• Goals: you need short-term and long-term goals to achieve growth in a business, so either review your existing ones or set some now. Then assess your projects against the goals.

I think it’s important to state that I don’t intend for you to miraculously discover you can drop lots of things completely, suddenly being free to take holidays or lessen the burden on your team. What I do intend is that you will find some things which aren’t actively moving your business forward. These tasks and projects are likely still important, but when you consider them against the three points above, they’re not as growth-orientated as the others.

As a business owner, your role is to focus on growth. The tasks you pull out of this exercise can be passed to other team members or outsourced. The important thing is that you strip down your own workload to give you the freedom to pursue the tasks that actually ‘move the needle’ and push your business forward.

When you own your business, letting go of tasks can be frightening. You might be afraid that a freelancer will make mistakes or that something else will go wrong – but I guarantee you that pushing ahead whilst overburdened will only lead to burnout.

Put in what you get out

As a business owner, your tasks must be those that achieve maximum output against your limited resources. The ‘shiny’ new things you want to add to your business need to be carefully managed, and placed into a waiting room until the timing is right to deploy them.

Everything else needs to be reprioritised, which will then require one of the following:

1. Just stop doing it: Sometimes tasks and projects that are not moving the needle, can just be dropped completely. You are wasting either your own time or that of your team doing things that aren’t contributing to the overall vision and goals of the business. Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate and JUST STOP.
2. Outsource the task to a freelancer: choose a specialist to handle the task for you on a one-off or ongoing basis. This may have a cost premium, but you’ll generally save time and money due to their skills and experience. Read more about how to hire a capable freelancer here.
3. Invest in automated tools: lots of the biggest drains in the business world are tasks that can be better handled through digital tools. Task allocation, diary planning, customer sales journeys and more – all of them can be taken out of your hands and placed into purpose-built platforms like Asana, ClickUp and more.
4. Utilise an Operations Director: this might be cheating a little, since it’s about me and what I do – but you’ve read this much, so let’s go with it! An Operations Director role is designed specifically to help you, an owner, scale your business. We achieve this by taking many of the most time-intensive tasks you’re burdened down with and using resource allocation and strategic planning to free up your time.

With my help, you can drop some of those plates I mentioned earlier - because I’ll be there to catch them. If you’d like to learn more about what I do and how I can help, get in touch here.