For years, I bought into the business hustle. Early mornings, late nights and a relentless drive to achieve success, fuelled by countless books, YouTube videos and entrepreneurs spelting their motivational mantras.
Business rolls in seasons – growth seasons and quiet seasons. I felt like I’d been stuck in growth season though this entire time and it was starting to show.
I would tell myself, Just one more year like this and I’ll finally have freedom. But the truth? That freedom never arrived. Instead, I found myself on a treadmill of exhaustion, where rest felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t just stop and press pause from this business – I didn’t have time to stop.
The hardest truth? I was doing this to myself and their were some painfully obvious problems once I stopped to think about it.
- I built this business to do something different and to try something new from a standard 9-5. It felt like a hilarious ironic when I forgot I was the one steering the ship.
- I never defined what ‘freedom’ was to me. I just had an ambiguous idea in mind that that was something I was meant to pursue but didn’t define it in a SMART or concrete way so surprise surprise the goal I never defined never came to fruition.
One day, the question hit me: What’s the point of building a business if it leaves you drained and craving an escape?
This question was my turning point.
No one goes out there to build a business that feels like a weight on their shoulders. I reconsidered the traditional metrics of success and reconsidered how to design a business that would support my life, not consume it—one I don’t need a holiday from.
Why this approach matters
Building a business you don’t need a holiday from isn’t just a nice idea—it’s a revolutionary way of working. When your business is built on systems, flexibility, and focus, something incredible happens:
- Work stops feeling like a chore and becomes an integral part of your life’s purpose.
- Burnout fades, replaced by sustainable energy and creativity.
- You experience the freedom you dreamed of—not in some distant future, but now.
This approach isn’t about avoiding hard work. It’s about designing a business that aligns with your values and supports the life you want to live. When your work energises you, it’s no longer something to escape from; it becomes a source of fulfilment.
What you can do to achieve this:
1. Delete more than you keep
Too much of anything is not healthy. Combing through your entire business and deleting anything remotely superfluous to your businesses primary goal/purpose gives you less to consider, less decisions required to be made and more mental bandwidth to focus on the more important things.
2. Build systems
The hustle culture glorifies busyness, but busyness doesn’t equal productivity. Systems do.
By creating systems, you shift your energy from the grind to strategic growth. Systems aren’t just about efficiency—they’re about reclaiming your time and mental bandwidth.
Not sure where to start?
Think about the repetitive tasks that consume your day: answering the same emails, updating spreadsheets, or following up with clients. These are essential but time-consuming activities that don’t necessarily require your direct input. Enter automation and delegation.
- Automation: Tools like Zapier, Asana or automated email sequences can handle repetitive tasks seamlessly. For instance, I use scheduling software to manage the booking of client calls, saving hours of back-and-forth emails with a single URL link.
- Delegation: Building a team doesn’t mean you need an army of employees. Start with a virtual assistant, freelancer or even AI who can take non-core tasks off your plate.
2. Design for flexibility
Flexibility isn’t just a luxury; it’s a necessity for long-term sustainability. A sustainable business adapts to your life, not the other way around.
When I started my web studio, I followed the industry norms which felt like strict hours, client meetings at inconvenient times and zero boundaries. Burnout was inevitable. Eventually, I reimagined how I worked.
- Remote work: Embracing a mobile lifestyle was a game-changer to creating a change of scenery and boost of energy to the monotony of a regular work day. Whether I’m working from home or a café halfway across the world, my business flows seamlessly.
- Minimalist strategies: Instead of offering 15 services, I honed in on my core expertise. Fewer services meant fewer distractions and a higher quality of work.
- Boundaries: I only take client calls on specific days and start my workday at 10 a.m., ensuring mornings are for personal time or focused creative work.
3. Focus on high-value activities
Not all tasks are created equal. To build a business that thrives without overextending yourself, you must identify and prioritise on doing what truly matters for you to being doing and for everything else to get done without your input.
This involves leveraging either or a combination of people, tools, resources or systems for the other stuff to get done.
4. A rolling stone gathers moss
Controlling your inputs greatly affects your outputs. Little distractions snowball into much bigger negative things affects due to the compounding effect at play.
Whilst good habits are important to instil into your daily activities, its also important to review the presence of negative habits and how they also affect your life and output.
For me, this meant:
- Eliminating distractions: Scrolling social media might feel productive (especially when it’s business-related), but often, it’s not. Setting boundaries on non-essential activities gave me back hours every week.
- Saying no more: Early in my career, I said yes to every opportunity fearing I’d miss out. Now, I understand that saying no to low-value work is saying yes to space for more growth, creativity and energy. Also goes for your personal life and the events, people and activities you choose to say yes to.
- Leveraging my zone of genius: Instead of being a jack-of-all-trades, I am realigning my focus on what I do best and working at becoming a master at my craft. Being a generalist is a skill in its own regard but being a specialist still has its place in industry.
When you spend your time on high-value activities, you not only move the needle in your business but also reclaim the energy lost to unnecessary tasks.
Success doesn’t have to mean endless hustle or chasing arbitrary goals. Ask yourself daily whether what you are doing is helping you move toward:
- Building a business that works for you, not against you.
- Creating space for rest, creativity, and personal growth.
- Aligning your work with your values and vision for life.
Ask yourself: What kind of business are you building? And what kind of life are you creating? Is it one that demands everything from you? Or one that supports everything you want to be?
The choice is yours. Choose wisely.
