How to Ease the Mental Load of Managing Your Business
Mental load is often talked about in regards to the mental tasks that women take on at home, but a heavy mental load can pop up at work too. Especially if you own your own business.
The trouble is, dealing with a heavy mental load at work can affect your productivity, your mood, and even your ability to experience lasting success.
It’s important to get your mental load under control. Here’s how to do it.
Transfer to the Cloud
It may come as a surprise, but the cloud can help!
A lot goes into maintaining data and keeping records when you’re a small business owner. Chances are, there are other tasks you have to manage digitally too, depending on the type of business you have. A public cloud enables you to operate efficiently without paying for and maintaining equipment, space, and utilities.
Not only do they maintain the equipment and systems so you don’t have to, they also offer security services, as well as the ability to scale your business up or down, depending on your needs. Using the cloud gives you the opportunity to forget about your data, so to speak, so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Hire a Personal Assistant
You probably deal with lots of little tasks throughout the day that may not seem like a big deal at the time, but they all add up. A personal assistant can take some of those tasks off your plate so you don’t have to think about them anymore.
Email is a great example. Most entrepreneurs send a dozen or more emails each day, but many of those emails don’t necessarily require a personal touch. They can just as easily be composed and sent by a personal assistant.
Personal assistants can also help with scheduling, conduct research, or even run errands, like grabbing coffee. They can free up a lot of time and room in your brain so you can show up to work as your best self every day.
Delegate Tasks
The whole point of having a personal assistant is so that you have someone you can delegate tasks to, but chances are, you’ve got other tasks you can delegate to other people.
It might mean hiring a professional. For example, you might hire a social media manager to post to social media or a copywriter to maintain the content on your website.
You might also be able to delegate tasks to members of your existing team. Do you spend time entering data or filing away information? Or maybe there’s an aspect of customer service you have always been involved in, but it’s taking up too much of your time? Chances are, there’s someone on your team who can take over the task so you no longer have to think about it.
Automate What You Can
Maybe you don’t have to delegate some tasks at all. Maybe instead you can automate those tasks!
There are a lot of ways to automate tasks yourself so you’re still in control, but you don’t have to do them every day.
Just a few business tasks you can automate include:
- Your email with automated messages, email signatures, and drip workflows that send content at certain intervals
- Social media scheduling that allows you to create content in advance and schedule when it is posted automatically to different channels
- Customer service tasks like using chatbots or AI tools that are able to answer simple questions quickly
- Accounting and expense system tasks like tracking financials and paying employees
Take Time to Find Helpful Apps
There are tons of apps out there that can help you automate business tasks, but the sky is the limit when it comes to apps that can make life easier. The trouble is finding the apps that will work for you.
Don’t put researching the latest apps at the very bottom of your to-do list. Make time to research the latest apps and see which ones can help you. It may take some time, but it’s time well spent if you find an app that can help lessen some of the mental load you experience at work.
Can’t find time to research apps on your own? Ask your personal assistant, a member of your team, or reach out to your network to see what’s working for your peers.
Batch Tasks
You wear many hats as a business owner. Instead of switching hats back and forth all day long, you can save time and some mental stress by batching tasks.
Task batching is simply the act of combining similar tasks and completing them together. For example, you might tackle all of your emails at the same time instead of sending a few emails at a time throughout the day. You might focus on social media for an hour and let it go the rest of the day, or concentrate on different aspects of the same project before lunch.
Batching tasks enables you to stop switching from one thing to another, increasing your focus and lessening the burden of a heavy mental load.
Streamline Things in Your Personal Life
Your personal life can have a big impact on your professional life. If you’re feeling the mental load at home, chances are you’re going to feel it at work too.
Find ways to streamline your personal life so you aren’t already exhausted when it’s time to get to work.
Food is a great one to tackle as meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking can take up a lot of time and energy. Create a weekly meal plan so you know exactly what you’re going to eat every day and exactly what you need to pick up at the grocery store.
Easing your mental load at work (and at home!) is all about looking for ways to take things off your plate and make life simpler. Even following just one tip on this list will free up some time so you can really and truly focus on the things that matter most to you.