When you love what you do for a living, it’s hard to establish boundaries around your work.
I’ve never had a regular job where I could motivate myself to wake up at five in the morning and get right to work, but being a professional freelancer does it. I want to spend as many waking hours as possible (and sleeping hours, if I could work in my sleep) writing, editing, and brainstorming new pitches and marketing strategies. Hell, I don’t even need coffee that early — my adrenaline kicks in and I’m ready to dive into work.
But recently, I’ve experienced what happens when I don’t put boundaries around my work. When you’re working 60+ hours per week, even if it’s doing something you love, there is a lot to balance.
You’ve got a blog, you publish frequently, and you’re meeting your content goals every month.
You’re living the good life as a fancy, badass entrepreneur.
But are you living your blogging life to the fullest?
While you’ve been growing the content on your own blog, reaching the loyal audience who’s come to know and love your content, you come across a guest post on Fancy Small Business Blog written by one of your competitors. (You know which one I’m talking about.)
It’s an article about successful marketing strategies in a niche market, and it’s something you feel like you could’ve written yourself.
Sure, you might grumble a little bit (“How did they even land an article there?”), but that’s not going to help you get published on successful blogs.
Writing and creating new content for your website is fun when you’re just getting started, but once you’ve developed a habit, it all might start to feel a bit robotic.
Wake up, write, publish, go to sleep. Wake up, and do it all over again.
Or, if you’re not feeling like a robot, you may find yourself getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content there is to create.
Perhaps you run a blog or website that’s all about tips for traveling around the world and visiting tourist destinations. Well, there are 196 countries in the world today, so you’re going to be busy writing articles for a while.
Create. Measure. Improve. Repeat.
If you run your own business (or you’ve created your own app or software as a service), you may be familiar with the process of feedback loops — you create a product, study how it performs, determine any opportunities for improvement, and then implement the changes. This process might happen a few times before your product is at a point where you don’t need to make changes constantly.
So many organizations use feedback loops, whether it’s at the production level, the team level, or the customer service level. Having some type of loop of information can help a business make meaningful changes within their company and provide the best product possible.