Unearth PR at BrightonSEO
With 46% of people in the UK now reportedly having a “side hustle”, our Co-founder and Head of PR, Georgia Gadsby March, gave a talk on all things “burnout” when starting a business whilst working full time. This talk was held at the one and only BrightonSEO, the UK’s largest search marketing conference.
We know all too well how difficult it can be to balance work and life when you’re essentially working two full-time jobs - a situation many business owners face at the start of their entrepreneurial journey. So how can you survive this period of time without experiencing burnout? Georgia Gadsby March has all the tips to share in the presentation and transcript below…
How to Have A Successful Agency Career and Side Business Without Experiencing Burnout
I’m Georgia Gadsby March and I’m the Co-Founder of Unearth PR and a Digital PR Manager at Novos. Over the last several months, I’ve discovered some great ways to support in preventing burnout whilst having a successful agency career and side business.
Did you know that 46% of the UK population have a side hustle? Now, I’m hedging my bets that that’s a lot higher in the digital marketing community and owing to the cost of living.
I’m definitely a part of that 46%. I’m a serial entrepreneur - Unearth PR is my third business - and I’m also a Digital PR Manager at an e-commerce SEO agency. I’ve suffered from burnout numerous times in the past and over the past 6-12 months I’ve found some mindset shifts and techniques that really work for me, that I’m going to share, and I’ve broken these down into four steps - hopefully you’ll find them valuable.
Changing Your Mindset
The first step is to change your mindset around the time you have.
There’s a new trend on TikTok where Gen Z’s are saying that we need to “treat our life as our day job and our day job as our side hustle” and it’s a concept that I absolutely love! It’s so so easy to get bogged down by the idea that our day job is our entire life because, when you work a traditional 9-5 style job, we feel like we have to plan our lives around it as it sits in the centre of our day. We need to do is flip that mentality on its head.
If you work 40 hours per week, that’s only 23.8% of your week. In the grand scheme of things, that is a small percentage of time. But it’s also important to be realistic as you spend 7 hours a night sleeping too. If you add that time in, that’s roughly 53% of your week combined.
So on average, 47% of your week is made up of “free time”. That’s roughly 78 hours! You could probably accomplish a lot with your side business, social life, or fitness goals in that time. So the first step is to challenge and change that traditional mindset.
That being said, it’s also important to be mindful and recognise that we don’t all have the same life. You might be a parent having to do the school run, or you might be having to work a second job - this 78 hours of free time may be a different figure for you and is not going to work for everyone. If you know that you don’t have these 78 hours in your week, then I really encourage you to strip it right back to this basic concept of “treat our life as our day job and our day job as our side hustle” and try to bring this concept into your everyday life.
2. Make Your Working Hours Stay in Their Lane
The next step is making sure those 40 working hours stay in their lane.
When you enjoy your job, it can be really easy to slip into the habit of working just a little bit extra every day. An hour here, an hour there - it all adds up and it seeps into the time you could be spending with friends/family, working on your side business, and doing other things that you love. So here are some ways you can avoid that…
Set your working hours, lunch breaks, and focus times in your calendar. This way your colleagues can see when you’re unreachable and you don’t need to harbour guilt around not checking messages/emails and responding.
With focus times - it’s so easy to get distracted by messages and emails when there’s a task you really need to get done. By blocking this time out with no distractions to do those tasks you’re ensuring you’re getting everything done within the working day. Similarly, make your working times visible in your email signature and on any messaging systems you use like Slack. And set an out of office if you finish at unusual times.
These ones are super important if you work at a company with completely full ‘flexi time’ so you don’t hold that accountability outside of work time.
Also, never ever say, “I’ll be checking my emails periodically” when you have annual leave or time off. Your colleagues will take that to mean that you’re accessible and you’ll end up very upset with yourself.
Normalise saying “no” and reducing expectations: if you’re being given a task that you know can’t be completed within your working hours and there’s no way to delegate or reprioritise to fit it in - say so!
3. Optimise Your Time
The third step is to optimise your time.
Really stop and think about when it is that you’re the most motivated…and when it is that you’re open to distractions.
This is a method I’ve used for a little while which I actually discovered from a medical student who worked three jobs alongside her studies. She broke up her calendar into sections based on her motivation and distraction levels, so I applied this to my own day-to-day.
I’ve discovered that I have my highest energy and motivation and the lowest temptation in the mornings (between 7am and midday). This is when I can write 60 words a minute, complete task after task, and send email after email. This is the time to do the tasks I don’t enjoy so much, such as spreadsheets, or anything to do with numbers, because of that lack of temptation and distraction. I’ll spend 7am - 9am on Unearth PR and then a regular 9am - 12pm at my day job.
Then, the middle of the day (around midday to 6pm) is reserved for the fun stuff because my motivation is slipping and I’m experiencing temptation to lean into distractions, so I’ve got to do tasks that keeps me motivated. I’m a massive people person and I love chatting, so I’ll schedule in team 1:1s or anything that requires collaboration, creativity, or marketing of the business. Those are my afternoon tasks.
And then anything after 6pm I’m in low motivation and high temptation mode - so I’m having to really push to keep going at this point. This is when I’m doing the really low effort work - copy checking, making a to-do list for the next day, making a quick TikTok, whatever.
So, in a nutshell, you need to schedule in your tasks based around your motivation and distraction levels to get the most out of your day.
But again, when you’re a business owner, you sometimes have to work when you don’t want to work. It can be really overwhelming to keep going and that’s when you can start to feel on the edge of burnout.
What I’ve put into place is something around the Zeigarnik effect. Zeigarnik was a Lithuanian psychologist who coined the term and said “our brains will stay occupied with a task until it’s accomplished.” So if you think you’ve left some work behind at your day job, it still sits there and takes up mental capacity and space in your brain. This is what causes us to often have the feeling of being weighed down by our tasks and our responsibilities.
And she said, one of the best ways to release that feeling is to write it down. When you finish your day job, write every task that’s on your mind and close that notebook. Do the same with your side business, then you can leave it at the office and go and spend time with your family or do hobbies you enjoy without the weight.
72% of entrepreneurs suffer from mental health issues and 30% have diagnosed depression - according to a study released in 2021. If you don’t look after yourself, it can get much more serious than burnout, so it’s incredibly important that you think about healthy ways to cope and keep the balance like these.
4. Prioritise Your Personal and Social Time
The fourth and final step is to prioritise your personal & social time.
But how do you do that when you’re so busy all the time? It is tough, but there are a few things you can do…
The first being, stop striving for work/life balance. When you have a day job and run a side business it can create so much added pressure to attempt to achieve this when in actuality, it’s really unattainable. Start thinking about this concept of ‘work/life synergy’ instead. This is when your work and personal life compliment each other, rather than striking an unachievable 50/50 balance.
Now - a controversial one - if you’re on industry Twitter, you are still working! No matter how much you love PR and SEO, spending an hour scrolling through threads on a Saturday morning, that’s probably not the healthiest of work/life boundaries.
Schedule in time to spend with friends and family and ensure this is absolutely non-negotiable. For example, my wife and I block out every Wednesday evening from 5pm to spend time together. We also don’t work on the weekends before 11am so this time off becomes our alternative weekend.
As entrepreneurs, we don’t get weekends in a traditional sense so you need to create your own to allow you to have that time for yourself. Whether it’s no-work Wednesdays or deciding not to work on Sundays or Friday nights - whatever works for you, create your own weekend and stick to it.
And lastly, outsource the tasks that take up the most time or the tasks you dread working on. Realistically, no amount of additional income is worth your sanity, so if you’re working every spare minute of every day because there’s so much on, you need support and help with that workload.
Recap
To recap, the four steps to having a successful agency role and side business without burning out are…
Changing your mindset
Not letting your day job go over its allotted hours
Optimising your time
And prioritising your personal and social life.
I hope you’ve all been able to take something valuable away from this. Thank you so much for listening or reading and please feel free to share your thoughts with me on Twitter!