It is so important that every affiliate protect their personal time and that they actually schedule personal time. But most affiliates work 10 – 14 hour days, sometimes with multiple jobs. They are no good to their communities and families with that type of daily work commitment. Burn out is fast approaching and I don’t mean the burn out you feel after 150 wall balls.
Most affiliates don’t take the vacation time that they should. So I’m here to tell you that you should take that vacation time and I’ll give you an easy to follow format to pull it off. In fact, if you follow the format, you will set yourself up to be able to take months off at a time.
Where do you start?
You first need to figure out all the tasks you are doing. Then sort those tasks in order of easiest and least expensive to outsource to hardest and most expensive to outsource. Then chip away at the list. As you start with the least expensive things first, you free up time that can now be spent on higher value activities. The time spent on those higher value activities will help you afford outsourcing the more expensive tasks.
The next thing you need to do is take a week off. One entire week. Go completely dark. I find a week is perfect for what we are trying to accomplish first. You see, this week off is going to identify for you the areas that drastically need help because you weren’t there to make sure shiz got done like usual. So fix those things. You will probably be documenting some of your processes, providing training to team members and asking them to document stuff, contacting vendors that should be doing things differently than what happened, etc. That first week off will give you a lot of new items for your “to-do” list.
And the beauty with the week is if everything fell apart while you weren’t there, a week is short enough that you can fix whatever damage really easily.
After you feel like you have fixed the issues that happened the first time you took a week off, take another week off. As you continue this process, and things appear to run smoothly while you are away, extend the length of time you take off.
I think the goal should be that every affiliate could take at least 4 weeks off and the box continues to thrive (not just survive) while they are away.
Remember though that this is a process and not an event. It’s more like a sunset and sunrise and not like a light switch.