Six months ago, we started Yard Couch.
It’s the first startup I’ve ever helped create outside a few failed lemonade stands in middle school. And unlike those lemonade stands, I wanted our business to put forth a quality product.
During the day, I split my time between freelance writing and blogging on Medium; the night for contributions to The Couch. But it wasn’t long before I burnt out.
I gave myself an ultimatum: Either you go all-in on your own site and half-ass Medium, or vice-versa. Well, I’m here to tell you that I chose the third option: Managing both without any added stress.
It took a lot of trial and error on my part, but I have the process boiled down to something sustainable. Here are four practical tips to make life easier…
1. Be sharp and clear about your goals
“Often people will keep their goals fuzzy. One of the problems with specifying your goals means specifying your failures. Make your goals sharp and clear and you know what to aim at.”—Jordan Peterson
In the beginning, the goal of my blog wasn’t to put out quality writing, it was to… well, do it, I guess. I wanted to write content so badly that I became narrow-sighted. There wasn’t a particular goal in mind anymore, I was doing work, just for the sake of doing it.
The quickest way to lose interest and energy in your work is to forget why you’re doing it. Instead of having a purpose fueling us, we think an ambiguous goal will fit the bill just fine. I’m telling you it won’t.
Speaking as someone who’s quit learning how to code, Jiu-Jitsu, and speaking Spanish all in one-year, it’s because I lost track of why I set out for these goals in the first place.
You can commit to any series of projects once you have a clear-cut purpose driving your goals.
2. Write down your schedule
“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”—Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Keyword: “write” your schedule down. Walking around with a schedule bouncing around in your head with other fatuous ideas will always set you back.
In sixth grade, my school handed out planners to every student. The first thing I did with mine was rip out the pages and make tiny little paper airplanes out of it. They were cute airplanes, but it certainly hindered my productivity (probably lead to all those interim reports I used to get).
Planners were for nerds I thought, and everything I needed was stored in my head. This can work to an extent, but even a photographic memory will lose to the person who writes their schedule down.
There’s neuropsychology behind writing our thoughts and schedules down. When we listen to someone speak or lecture, the part of our brain responsible for listening and language is engaged. It passes on this information to our memory but doesn’t discriminate in doing so;
Your brain stores ideas for your future Fortune 500 company next to what you’re thinking for lunch.
When we write, however, our brains link the abstract information to something much more concrete. Research even suggests that our brains view writing our schedules and ideas down as actually completing said action.
If you can already visualize how your day will be, managing multiple sites will be much easier. I personally make my schedules short and to the point, usually breaking it down into five major tasks I want to tackle in a day.
3. Relax! Or you will burn out
“Dear Stress, I would like a divorce. Please understand it is not you, it is me.”—Thomas E. Rojo Aubrey
Whenever I look at my idols like Kobe Bryant, Stephen King, or Navy Seal David Goggins, all I see is their uncompromising work ethic. They’ve inspired me to trade in an excuse-driven mindset for a ‘why aren’t we working harder’ one.
“Pushing past the brim until there’s nothing left on the table,” are the words I want to be written on my epitaph.
As a blogger/website manager you’re likely cut from the same cloth. I love it, I hope we can grab a coffee one day and maybe go run 20-miles after. That said — chill the hell out every now and then!
You will be more productive the more you relax. It’s a hard idea to beat into our heads because we’ve come to think relaxation is tantamount to laziness. Studies even show that more than one-third of employees eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More work doesn’t always lead to more productivity; you have to find a work-life balance.
Relaxation and increased productivity go hand in hand — and the studies prove it.
An internal study by consultancy Ernst & Young demonstrated that every 10 extra hours of vacation that an employee received, added an 8 percent increase in annual performance reviews.
And a Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity. Simply taking a nap when you’ve hit a wall will make work so much easier.
Remember, even God gave himself a day of rest.
4. Accept that you are a fool
“The fool is the precursor to the savior.”—Carl Jung
Do you know why I quit coding, Jiu-Jitsu, and learning Spanish? Because I couldn’t handle being a fool.
When it came to Jiu-Jitsu at least, I was progressing fairly well. I never won a sparring match, but I did choke out a petite Asian kid once (never thought I’d put that in a sentence but here we are).
Then, for some reason, I started to feel more afraid when going to sessions. Doubt crept into my mind and I began to think I was wasting my time going there. I couldn’t accept being a fool any longer. I wasn’t good and I wanted to go back to comfortability and the status quo.
We’ve all been there before: giving up because we aren’t comfortable enough with being a fool.
When starting out on Medium, I was an idiot. I removed about five of my early articles to save myself the embarrassment. And when creating my own blogging site I was a moron. I didn’t know a thing about SEO or marketing. Now I’m getting a good grasp of both.
You will run into things you don’t understand when managing your Medium account or blog site. When you do, you will get frustrated. But don’t quit. Revel in the fact that this is another opportunity to learn and grow as a human being.
And if you do start to get comfortable, that means it’s time to shake things up and find something else you’re a fool at.