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BUSINESS SKILLS TIPS 17 – HEALTH AND FITNESS
Who is the most important person in your business, why you are! So, are you taking care of your greatest asset and looking after your health and fitness? You owe it to yourself to make sure that you are fit and healthy, rested, refreshed and that you adopt healthy habits in terms of work schedules, time off for good behaviour and spending time relaxing with friends and family. If you don’t do this, and look to your own health and fitness as well as the health and fitness of your business, you are likely to burn out, dry up or just be too stressed to cope.
Firstly, think about whether you get enough sleep. When you are asleep your body does all of its healing and mending, the stitching together of strained muscles, the rewiring of brain connections and nerve damage and the general internal needlework that renews you and prepares you for the next day. If you do not get enough sleep then the work is only partly done. I know this to my own costs. When I was young and full of energy I would get so engrossed in my work that I did not notice the time speeding by. I would often work 12-14 hours without breaking for rest, and when I finally dragged myself off to private quarters I was totally shattered with a worn out body and a mind that just would not switch off.
I used to give counselling and therapy to business people, men and women, who suffered from burn out and I would give them very good advice, but not take it myself. Eventually things had to move on to a healthier time plan, and it was a very good lesson, well learned. Managing your time well is imperative if you want to be at your best and get the best out of your colleagues, employees, outsourcers, and yourself.
Time for relaxation and time spent enjoying yourself (even if your business is one of the most enjoyable things that you do) means that you have a complete break from your business and it gives your brain time to work unconsciously on outstanding issues. Solutions may just pop into you mind when you do get back to work because you have had time to refresh and renew bodily, physically and mentally.
Do a spot of research into your own work patterns by timing each job you do every day and write it down. So this for a full week and you will get a better idea about how long jobs take you, what moves your business forward, what are the time wasters and what are the things you do when you fill time to avoid more important tasks. You will learn so much by doing this regularly and then allocating special time for planning your business, attending to interruptions and queries, making phone calls (keep an answer machine on for a few days and monitor calls, phoning back when you decide to make your phone calls). Let it be known the times you are available for phone calls and stick to that. Let others know the times that you are available for queries or feedback and stick to it. You may find that you need to have meetings online between groups of staff or all the people working on a project and this will save time over dealing with people one at a time, and you can use Skype for this, GoToMeeting.com or look up other project management software to use.
The health and fitness of your business is tied to your own health and fitness and using techniques to cope with stress and using techniques to cope with work scheduling and time management is the secret to healthy key personnel and healthy business productivity.
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