Where do you dump your brain at night?
I like to leave mine in a jar on the shelf next to the pickled eyeballs. Kidding, but with Halloween approaching, it seemed appropriate to discuss body parts in a jar.
The truth is that it’s common for a solopreneur to have a brain jam-packed full of ideas and conundrums and situations at the end of the day. If you don’t dump it somewhere, it goes home with you and festers. You have problems sleeping, you’re snippy with your family, you drink too much wine after dinner and then mindlessly scarf down a pint of Ben and Jerry’s…it’s a ripple effect. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking about work 24/7, you know what I’m talking about. It’s just not a recipe for happy entrepreneurs, family bliss, or good mental and physical health.
How does one effectively dump their brain? It’s not as hard as you’d think. Many people journal. You can have a private online journal (not to be confused with a blog – don’t blog all of your business woes to your competitors!), you can note it all in your phone, or you can just get out your pen and scribble it into an old fashioned 99-cent notebook. The point is that you get rid of it for a while.
The next day you look back at your dump, it will look different. It’s not magic – it’s just the way brains usually work. That’s where the phrase “sleep on it” comes from. Does that thing you were so fired up about yesterday really matter today? Is that to-do you don’t want to do something you can offload to your virtual assistant (you have one, right? If not, call me already!). Does that other thing have anything to do with you at all? Can you write a blog post (or ask your VA to write) about that note in the margin? Often the next day’s perspective is an entirely different one. You may even find that a lot of the mess from yesterday is entirely insignificant today.
It’s important to step away from your business on a regular basis, even if you can only really do that from 7 pm to 6 am. (Again, if you have no time, delegating tasks to a virtual assistant will free you up!) Entrepreneurs wear so many hats that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and stressed out. Give nightly brain dumping a whirl – you may never know what you did without it.
Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Angie
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