The Importance of Taking a Day Off
Blogging is very time-consuming and challenging. Either you want to break the story, or you want to be the one adding to it with brilliant thoughts and analysis. Or perhaps your income is based on how often you update, something that isn’t all that uncommon after all.
Do you remember to take breaks?
And more importantly, do you remember to take a day off?
I know it can be hard, because that ever present feeling that we need to update is tough to shrug off. That is partly because it is warranted, most of us are having the problem that we need to produce to make money, and we need to produce a lot. The thing is, having 7 day weeks isn’t the solution.
I’ve been a freelancer for more than 10 years, and I have published my own stuff for even longer than that. At times I’ve made good money, at other times I’ve been stretching my funds thin. It’s a rough business, we all know that.
However, I’ve never ever had the brains to take a day, or even a few days, off. Not even when I made truckloads (I wish), it was as if I was motivated to make more, to push myself even further. Weekends didn’t exist, and I had at least two all-nighters each month. Sleep is for the weak.
That all changed when I ended up in the hospital, over-worked with a heart condition, just over 20 years old.
I have not been the fastest learner when it comes to these things, but one thing is for sure: I understand the value of taking a day off. For me, it is both a health issue and a productivity issue. Feeling tired all the time, wrestling with motivation, is a good way to produce poor content in longer time than usual. That’s what you’ll get if you work all the time, I can tell you that.
The next step is health issues. There has been a lot of coverage on that fairly recently, and I think it is a good thing that it is being said that sitting around writing blog posts all day is a bad thing for your health. It is, you need to get out more, you need to move, you need to take breathers, and you need a day off every now and then.
It is hard to build something new, to be paid by the post, to be a freelancer. However, you’d be surprised how much easier, and how much more fun, it’ll be if you take some time off every now and then. It’ll make you a better writer, designer, or whatever’s your poison. And in the long run, that will make you more money.
I have taken my advice to heart. I don’t work weekends, and I try to take a day off every now and then, to spend it with family and/or friends. In my profession it is hard to take several weeks off, going abroad on vacation, so I’ll have to settle with an occasional day off. If I can do it, so can you.