The Importance of Time Off
It’s no secret that the life of a creator is constantly busy. In my case, I not only film, edit and post content almost daily, but I also manage my online orders with the dessert mixes, plus the recent addition of dessert orders, weddings included. Those are 3 completely different and almost full-time jobs that I’ve combined into one massive job for one person to tackle. On top of that, I’m still a flight attendant and have actually flown a little more the last couple months to make up for some slower sales. So, when you put all that together, you wonder “how does one person possibly do all of that”.
To answer that, I think it’s important to point out that so many online creators deal with the same situation of having to balance multiple jobs at once because in the beginning phases of it, it’s hard to make a lot of money with just one of those things. Content creation pays off over time, but that’s only if you gain the following and interactions required to make your content get picked up by the dreaded algorithms, so the public actually gets to see it. I know so many talented people who post great content, but it seems to go nowhere and can often be very discouraging, because all of this content takes so much time, money, and effort to produce. So, when you have that in mind, you feel like you have to constantly be pushing out quality content so that your page has what the algorithms want in order to appear on search pages and whatnot. Think about that, recipes every day, pictures, and videos every day, website updates every day. It’s a lot. Granted a lot of big creators can afford teams to break up the workload so they can solely focus on the recipes and filming. However, a lot of us don’t have that luxury, and now it’s more difficult than ever to get to that point because there are more and more of us every day, trying to do the same thing. It’s become competitive.
Getting caught up with all that makes it easy to neglect your personal life and health. This all eats up your time, and in my case, I’ll be in my kitchen from 10am to 7pm without eating, sitting down, or even thinking anything else because I’m so drilled into crossing off all my to dos in order to have enough good content for the week. Taking a day off or allowing myself to do a little less one day is always a struggle because I feel like that’s me slacking. I feel like if I miss a day or even a whole week of content, then I’ll fail and ruin my hard work. This “industry” creates the mindset that you have to constantly be busy, creating, brainstorming, filming, posting, etc. You see an upcoming trend and want to jump on it and post something including it in the hopes it’ll gain you more following, and in the long run, more business. In order to make good money off social media, it takes a lot of hard work and patience in the process of growing. So, you can see why taking any time off in that process is hard for someone like me. It’s like I’m ok with delaying that process and affecting my income.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m tired every day even though get enough sleep. Currently, I’m in bed sick. I’ve actually made myself ill because of how much I’ve been trying to do. I’ve been eating less, going to the gym less, and pretty much only allowing myself time to sleep every night. The rest is spent constantly working on the multiple things I’m trying to accomplish at the same time. Even the last couple days where I’ve been forced to do less because I’m sick have been difficult, because it has become so normal in my head to not allow down time. If I have down time, it doesn’t last. I create more to do because I feel like there is always something else that can be done, to either contribute to my goals or make more money. That mindset is important if you are trying to be self-made and successful, however, beating yourself up at the thought of taking a day off or even allowing one day to have a couple hours of down time is very unhealthy. None of what I’m doing is easy by any means. It’s not easy to put yourself out there in videos on every social media platform for the whole world to see. It’s not easy to continuously come up with new recipes that work and are easy enough for others to make themselves. It’s not easy to post videos every day and keep them all looking better than the other videos on social media. It’s not easy to add cake orders, weddings, dessert mixes, and keep looking for more business opportunities in the process. Out of nowhere, I’ve found myself doing all of this at one time, and there are times when I don’t even know how I pull it off, but what I can say is that it’s completely passion driven. Yes, I’m trying to make money doing all of this because it is my career and way of life, but I do it because I genuinely enjoy it all.
The holidays this year are going to be trying. I’m going to have more dessert orders than ever, I’m going to be selling a lot of my seasonal dessert mixes, and I’m going to be posting lots of content. I have feeling that by the end of the year, I will no longer have my flight attendant job, and that was the goal all along with what I’m doing. Regardless of all that, my point with all of this is that our lives are busy, now more than ever. No matter what you do for a living, I urge you to realize the importance of your own health and wellbeing, because if those start slipping, so does your work. Take a day off every now and again, because I’m willing to bet that one little day can be so beneficial to your mental and physical health and have little to no effect on your long term goals and growth online. The world can wait for a day. You deserve down time.
