Let’s Talk Burnout and Breaks

Work-life balance isn't a new topic, especially since 2020. But the traditional methods of focus, relation, and de-stressing don't work for everyone. Nyasha and Rob have their own approaches to burnout and breaks.

Episode Transcript

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue.

Monet Davenport: Work-life balance isn’t a new topic, especially since 2020. But the traditional methods of focus, relation, and de-stressing don’t work for everyone. Nyasha and Rob have their own approaches to burnout and breaks.

Nyasha Green: Hey, Rob, how are you doing today?

Rob Howard: Hey, Nyasha. Very good. How about you?

Nyasha Green: Doing well. Really excited to talk to you today about, well, these two articles that we did, breaking... Taking breaks and vacations are my favorite things in life. So just really excited to talk to you. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about the article that you wrote. It was titled Vacations Make a Business Stronger. And first, what inspired you to write this article?

Rob Howard: So this concept for me dates back probably 15 years, right? In the near term, what I’ve discovered both when I was running a very small agency with one or two people. And now all the way up, we have 18 or 19 people. What I’ve discovered is that by essentially forcing yourself to exit work for a significant amount of time, maybe a week or two where you’re truly not checking email, not checking slack, it’s not a working vacation. It is truly like you are out of the picture, right?

Rob Howard: It really forces me to run a more efficient business. Right? So what I joke around about with my family is my business is way more efficient when I’m on vacation than when I’m actually here. Right? And obviously that’s intended to be a little bit of a joke, but it’s really true because that compels me to train and systematize. Right? And I think the trap that a lot of people whether they’re business owners or employees of a business gets stuck in, is they, for various reasons that we can talk about, perceive themselves to be indispensable to the business that they run or that they’re part of. Right?

Rob Howard: And while you can be important to the business, being indispensable to the business can actually be a very unhealthy mindset because then you can never let go. Not only does that stress you out individually, but it also in a lot of ways prevents you from leveling up, right? Because part of leveling up your business is actually taking that owner or the initial founding team out of the equation for some of the important business operations. Right?

Rob Howard: So if you’re never willing to do that, then you’re stuck because you can only do so much as one individual human being. And eventually, if you do want that business to grow and get bigger, you got to be able to train, delegate, document. And in my experience, vacations are a really fun way to force you to do that. So that was kind of the near term inspiration. And going farther back, I’ve always been in that digital nomad, four-hour work week mindset.

Rob Howard: I don’t work a four-hour work week and I don’t necessarily endorse everything in that book and in that sort of worldview, but one thing that I do think is really smart and sensible is this idea that you shouldn’t be waiting for retirement or for some distant point in the future to enjoy your life and do the things that you want to do.

Rob Howard: So I think what I take away from a lot of that four-hour work week perspective is not that you should literally be working one hour a day, but that you should also not be deferring your life until some point in the future. Right? So a lot of people say, “Well, I’m going to work really hard in my twenties or work really hard for the next five years or whatever that is. And then I’ll go to this vacation destination. Then I’ll do this thing or that thing that is on my bucket list.

Rob Howard: Of course, work has a tendency to be infinite if you allow it to be, right? And what a lot of people discover is that someday keeps getting pushed back. Right? So the philosophy that I try to take is you got to do stuff now. Right? I have a son who’s eight years old and we’ve done a lot of fun things and fun vacations in eight years of his life that we could have easily pushed back and said, “Oh, well, now maybe we’ll do that when he’s older, when we have more money, when we have more time, whatever.” Right?

Rob Howard: But you got to sometimes do the thing in life that you actually want to do. And I think that applies to vacations. It applies to other major life decisions. It applies to moving to the city you want to live in, right? All these things that they are really easy to put off. And you do that...