What's your most important business asset? It's not your customers, your products or even your website—it's YOU.
Taking care of business is taking care of yourself. Here are three ways to nurture yourself and help your small business thrive.
Get Your Three Squares
SoupCycle will make its 50,000th delivery this week. Have nutritious, affordable and delicious soups and salads delivered to your business.
We meet with a lot of small business owners—usually over happy hour—and we regularly hear: "This [insert bar food] is the first thing I've eaten all day."
What the heck?!
Business owners cannot work productively on corn dogs alone. And we all know that, right? Yet, for some reason, we still don't make the time to prepare, purchase and eat nutritious meals. Our business is just more important than we are, right?
Here's the deal: What you choose to eat and when you choose to eat it are important business decisions.
STAY TUNED: In order to help you make the most of these important business decisions, we're going to enlist the aid of local experts to explore healthy food options, time-saving strategies and cooking methods, and locally prepared foods that are good in a pinch.
Make the Most of Your Commute
Biking is a great way to improve your commute and incorporate exercise into your day.
Your commute time is valuable. Rather than drive to work, consider walking, biking or taking public transit and claiming that time for yourself. Walking or biking to work will incorporate exercise into your day (and if you listen to a podcast while you walk, you can burn and learn simultaneously), and taking public transit will offer time to read that business book that's languishing on the shelf.
Work at home and don't have a commute? Create one. The transition time between home and work is valuable; it helps you ease from home to work mode (and vice versa). And it will force you out of those pajamas.
STAY TUNED: Not sure how to navigate the city by public transit or bike? Need a recommendation for a great book or podcast? We plan on covering all the bases.
Clear Your Head and Sleep Well
Write in your personal journal before work, and do a brain dump in your work journal at the end of your business day. Photo: Ecru Modern Stationer.
Busy Head Syndrome (my terminology, not an actual diagnosis) keeps business owners awake at night. Instead of sheep, we count all the the things we need to do the next day/month/year. And we lose out on much needed sleep.
STAY TUNED : Not sure how to manage your technology so you can get stuff out of your head and into a safe, saved place? Want to learn how to use technology to share what's in your head with other people? Need better boundaries between home and work? We'll share info that will clear your head and help you catch some ZZZZs.
Do you have additional questions about how to nurture yourself and help your small business thrive? Sound off in the comments below.
Ha! Speaking of making the most of your commute, check out "Taking the long way into work: a Forest Park commute" on BikePortland.org.
Great post!
Soup cycle check. My wife and I have also committed having a night where we cook for the other. With soup cycle and our dinner nights the worst case senario is that we get 3 dinners that didn't come out of the freezer a week.
I'm a contractor so I have to carry an inordinate amount of heavy stuff so this rules out the bike but being that everything I'm interested in that I never have time to read about can be put on an mp3 playor and listed to while I drive I actually now enjoy my commute most of the time.
Finding ways to deal with information has been huge in terms of me being efficient and happy in my life. I have pages of apps and shortcuts on my android phone so that anytime I think of something that's important to remember latter, a good thing to work on when I have time, something to look up, movies I would like to see etc. It all has a place that's easy to access and is actually remembered when the time comes that it will be useful. With out this I can never think as clearly because my head is full of things that I need to remember or remembering the things I've forgotten.
Every weekend, we make soups and stews that we can eat the following week for lunch. We also use our crock pot quite a bit for easy dinners. And our freezer is packed with goodies from our CSA. There's nothing tastier than warm tomato soup during the cold of winter!
It sounds like you're really well organized and taking great care of yourself, Jesse. Thanks for chiming in!