Rethinking Your Work Week
Are you exhausted?
If you’re like most of my female clients, you are – and that exhaustion is not just physical. Most of the women who come to me are mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausted.
We make it halfway through the year, and then we look at the calendar and think, How am I supposed to keep doing this for six more months?
In order to start to recover from that exhaustion, I think it’s important to understand the particular circumstances of being a woman entrepreneur – because entrepreneurship can be very different for women than it is for men.
I want to share three examples of situations my clients have experienced.
These experiences may not be entirely exclusive to women – but it’s helpful to look at them through a feminine lens in order to give ourselves the time and grace that we deserve.
These three clients were denying themselves the rest and recovery that they needed – because they didn’t think that they had “worked hard enough for it” or that they “deserved it.”
But that’s because, for so many years, we have been trained to believe that the only work that really “counts” as work is what we do for a business or a job – which is not actually true at all.
We do so much work that goes way beyond what we’re doing in our businesses or our jobs.
One of my clients, June, has three kids under the age of seven. I recommend that my clients make every Monday a Money Monday – a day to work on building revenue and generating activities for your business.
June said to me, “Monica, I just can’t seem to get anything done on Mondays. I am distracted. I’m unfocused. I end up watching videos on Instagram and Facebook. I feel like I don’t have the discipline that I should and that I’m doing something wrong.”
When we got further into the conversation, I learned that, every weekend, from Friday morning through Sunday, she had no childcare and very little support from her husband. He worked on the weekends and, when he was home, he was resting.
That meant that she was the primary caretaker of her kids for those three straight days when they were out of school and daycare. That took up a lot of her energy and time, and it left her exhausted.
She didn’t really get any rest and recovery on weekends – which is true for so many parents.
To resolve this, we gave her full permission to take Monday for herself: to watch TV, to write in her journal, to sit on the couch and zone out, to stay in her pajamas all day. The kids were at school and at daycare, and she finally had the time to rest and recover.
When she made that change, the rest of her week became so much more productive. She got three to four times more work done and was able to build a very successful business.
The time you spend on your business is more about quality than it is about quantity. It’s about focusing on the right activities instead of trying to do a hundred activities.
But you have to have energy in order to figure out what to prioritize. June was starting every week so exhausted that she couldn’t even prioritize her tasks, much less get them done.
So if you’re a caretaker like June – whether you’re a parent taking care of kids all weekend or you’re taking care of an elderly parent or sick family member all weekend – know that you may need to take some time or the whole day off on Monday. And that is completely okay.
My second example is a client who wasn’t a parent. She came to me and said, “All weekend long, I’m enjoying my time with my partner, but we’re often out with friends. And then on Monday, I have meetings with my team all day, and by Tuesday I feel completely drained.”
When we started talking, I realized that she’s an introvert. And while she loves being with people and managing her team, by the end of three or four days spent talking to people nonstop, she’s out of energy.
To resolve this, we made Tuesday a quiet day. On Tuesdays, she planned no client meetings, no team meetings, no family meetings – just time to work quietly on her own tasks.
She could write her newsletters, get ahead for the week, and do all kinds of creating and organizing – but there was no talking. That refueled her and gave her so much happiness and momentum for the rest of the week.
So if you’re an introvert who loves managing people but needs to recharge afterwards, give yourself permission to schedule some quiet time or even a full quiet day.
The third situation is exemplified by my client Mary. Mary came to me after a few (pandemic) months of spending lots of time alone rather than networking and seeing family and friends the way she used to.
She couldn’t figure out why she was feeling depressed – it was starting to turn into full-blown sadness every day.
Eventually, we realized that she’s an extrovert. Mary gets her energy from being with people, and she had been spending way too much time alone. So, for her, we found circles of friends and networking events that she could engage with online to replenish herself.
Now, we didn’t overdo it. We made sure she still had plenty of time to actually work on her business. But in intentionally taking time to socialize, she started to feel like a wilted flower that had finally been watered again.
If you normally spend a lot of time with people and find that energizing, but you’ve fallen out of that pattern and are suddenly starting to feel anxious or sad, consider that you may need people in your life again, and that you’ll need to find a consistent way to engage with them.
The most important advice I can give you is to unabashedly do what works for YOU.
It may take some trial and error to figure out what that looks like. But know that you have permission to try new things, even if they go against the norm of 9 – 5, Monday through Friday work weeks.
If you’d like some support in planning out more structure for yourself – please join us at our upcoming Breakthrough Planner Day on June 24. We’ll be coming together to plan out your next 90 days in a way that works for YOU.
The Planner Day is a free bonus that you’ll gain access to when you purchase our Breakthrough Planner ($32), which you can check out here.
Wishing you grace, rest, and rejuvenation for the week ahead!
