End the Feast or Famine. It’s No Way to Live.
Despite best intentions, you seem to get swept into the pattern again and again, and it’s really wearing you out.⠀
Feast or Famine
I used to get panicked calls from my friend periodically, almost like clockwork.
“I seriously can’t do this anymore, I’m dying. What kind of life is this anyway, working 12 hours a day and never ahead, how can this be worth it?”
Alternating with:
“I’m so screwed. I have no new business lined up and I’m running out of cash. I’ve spent the last two months buried in client work and now I just got my head up to see that I’ve got nothing in the pipeline.”
She would swing back and forth between feast and famine, always in one and then the other. Beside high cortisol levels and new worry lines, she wasn’t getting much from her business other than stress.
Of course that’s not worth it. What person in their right mind would want to live like that?
Well, no one.
But everyone does it at some point.
I bet you have too. Maybe you’re there right now.
Despite best intentions, you seem to get swept into the pattern again and again, and it’s really wearing you out.
Worst of all, you’re not delivering well for your clients because you’re always worrying about what you’re not doing for your business.
It’s no way to live.
Thankfully, there is a solution but only you can make it happen.
When I work with my clients who are experiencing the same thing, they are often unclear about their own goals for their time. We start by setting those on a monthly basis.
How many hours do you want to work, total? (Make this fit your vision for the life you’d like to have). How many of those do you want to have for client work? How many for all the other hours (admin, business development, marketing, professional development)?
Then we take those monthly hours and work them into a weekly schedule, making sure the same ratios exist.
Finally, we build a capacity plan using those hours so that at any given time, you are able to know exactly when you have available time (Goodbye, overbooking).
Now it’s up to you to stick to the schedule. Because here is what I know…. if you do, all your buckets stay full and you no longer wake up wondering what you’re going to do today (which usually ends up as client work).⠀
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Tell me in the comments…
How are you managing feast or famine?
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