-Georgie-Ann Getton
Small and medium-sized businesses make the world go round. Yet their owners are exhausted, understaffed, have outdated technology, and don’t have enough systems to create stability.
In 2019, when I started my business consulting business, GSD Solutions, it was to tackle this problem. We work directly with businesses and their owners to implement new technology, hire fractional staff, and put operational systems into place. Our services were making a great difference for business owners and companies, but there was still a problem.
The business owners were able to boost their productivity and work more efficiently, yet they suffered from extreme burnout, which manifested mentally, physically, financially, and emotionally. It wasn’t just the business owners I worked with who suffered from these problems. I also experienced this.
In 2021, I experienced two severe panic attacks that were directly work-related – one of which resulted in overnight hospitalization. At that moment it became clear that I needed to take a deeper look at the relationship between productivity and burnout.
After taking the last few years to study psychology as it relates to business, human behavior, and work culture, I have identified these three strategies that have been proven to help entrepreneurs increase productivity and decrease burnout.
- Schedule Time Off
As business owners, especially small business and startup founders, it is easy to fall into the trap of never clocking out. “Just five more minutes,” we lie to ourselves, before missing out on dinner, TV, dance recital, or even sleep, in hopes of completing a task that could and SHOULD have been moved to tomorrow.
Scheduling time off can look like taking a 5-day, all-inclusive vacation, but it also looks like scheduling breaks of 15 – 20 minutes throughout the work day. It looks like – starting and ending your day at a pre-planned time. It looks like taking an entire weekday off just to relax with no pre-scheduled commitments. Taking a sick day or a day to do personal errands doesn’t count. Take just one day to do absolutely nothing.
Scheduling time off will allow you to take a step back from work and give your brain a chance to refresh, allowing you to come back with a clear perspective.
- Brain Dump
Get it out of your head! Having business-related information that lives only in your head is dangerous. In business, a stakeholder such as a customer, employee, or investor may need specific information and if it only lives in your head, then you are required to be available upon request. But what if that request is during your scheduled time off? Well, you can combat that by being proactive and doing a brain dump.
A brain dump is essentially taking the time to get everything out of your head and into a document or mutual location where other parties can also interact with the information.
My favorite way to brain dump is to write things on my whiteboard or notebook. Anything that comes to my mind, I write it down. After most brain dump sessions what I’ve written often looks like a jumbled mess, which is okay and expected. Next, I take that mess to the computer and make sense of it by organizing items into lists, tasks, data, and instructions.
What once lived only in your head is now in the appropriate locations for action to be taken.
- Delegate
Delegating is the next leg of this triangle. Delegation is simply shifting tasks and activities to someone else. There are two ideal ways to delegate. The first way is to delegate to an individual (full-time, part-time, or contractor). The second way is to delegate actions to technology (automation software, AI, etc).
Delegation allows the task to get done, while simultaneously removing it from your direct task list. When delegating, I highly recommend creating a process for the task. This can look like documenting (written, audio, and/or video) the steps that need to be taken to complete the task. Then you provide that documentation to the person or technology you have delegated to. This decreases the room for error by providing additional clarity around how you expect the task to be done.
Congrats, You’ve scheduled time off, freed up some brain space, and delegated tasks. These are just three of the many ways that you can increase your productivity while avoiding burnout. Being a business owner can bring a lot of stress and overwhelm, but there are many ways to decrease that stress and set yourself up for success internally and externally.
Georgie-Ann Getton is a NY-based tech ecosystem trailblazer, execution expert, mom of two, and the CEO of GSD Solutions. She has worked with companies like Girls Who Code, CUNY Startups, Black Women Talk Tech, and many more. She is also a multimedia content creator and speaker for her brand, GSD with Georgie.
