Ever felt mentally and physically exhausted that you just want to give up everything?

People say that having your own construction business makes you lucky because you get to do whatever you want, whenever you want and just leave the work to your employees. As much as contractors want that freedom, most of the time, they experience the total opposite.

One way or another, we all probably have experienced burnout either because of work or personal life. However, study shows that it is more common for business owners or self-employed contractors because you oversee everything in your business.

WHAT IS CONTRACTOR BURNT OUT?

Burnt out is the mental, emotional and physical exhaustion brought about by stress and pressure which leads a person to have lesser interest in work.

Sometimes, you’ll think that you’re not experiencing it, so you take in more work than what you currently have while at the same time trying to finish everything faster. You do this again and again until suddenly you’re burnt out… unmotivated, unproductive, and unhappy.

Being anxious is one of the signs of burnt out. It is understood that you as the business owner is expected to worry about everything. But when you are burnt your anxiety takes over everything in your life. You’ll overthink everything, until it’s all chaos in your head which might lead you to other signs such as getting frustrated and angry over the smallest things.

Another symptom of being burnt out is fatigue and illness. You always have trouble going to sleep from overthinking everything and have no energy to go to work the next day.

SO HOW DO YOU OVERCOME BEING BURNT OUT?

This may sound alarming to you, but to overcome being burnt from work, you need to get some time away from work, even if it’s just on the weekend. A little time off can go a long way. Use your ‘mini vacation’ to re-energize your body and to clear your mind so you can prepare for the coming days.

Remember that one of the causes of being burnt out is from thinking too much. Therefore, it’s important to relax your mind for it to work better, just like changing oil in cars!

It also works to have a schedule or plan. This way, you’ll know:

what you’re going to do,
when to do it,
how long for

Without a plan, you’ll get easily overwhelmed by too much tasks or forget them altogether. Also, with proper planning and scheduling, you don’t have to pressure yourself to finish tasks or projects earlier.

Set up systems:
You’ve probably heard this before, but you can’t deny the importance of
systems. Systems take care of the minor details in your business so that you can spend less time figuring out how to approach minor tasks and more time
on bigger tasks.

Set realistic goals and stop taking in too much:
We all want more money coming in our business that’s why we always want to take every client, every project that comes our way. However, you can’t expect to finish 30 big projects in one week.

Set up a goal and create a plan to make that goal into smaller tasks that you can do daily without burning yourself out from stress, chaos and disorganisation.

You don’t have to take everything on at once. If you have a goal, plans and systems in place, all you need to do is work the plan bit by bit, tweaking where it needs tweaking.