Weekend Musings – It’s All About Balance

Balance

Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to my weekend musings. We’ve had a great weekend but I can honestly say I’m looking forward to Monday as we have an incredibly exciting week ahead at Fashion Metric. As I’ve mentioned before our core focus now is on interviewing and hiring new team members and working with some of our first clients to use the Virtual Tailor API which we release a couple of months ago.

While I’m used to working weekdays and weekends (i.e. I usually am just about always working) we have been learning how to get add a bit more balance into our lives. It’s not easy for me, and it has taken some getting used to but by having at least a day of downtime I am noticing a difference in the level of focus that I can give. Running a business (startup or not) is a marathon, not a sprint, so it is important to give your mind and body time to rest.

On that note I have also adjusted my sleep schedule. I used to a be a five hour of sleep buy, I swore by it. Now that we’re putting in 12+ hour days I’m finding that I need more sleep to be fully “on” for that amount of time. Lately I’ve been getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night and it also makes a difference.

For me 2015 is all about really pushing myself to my limits as we grow our team and our products. We have some great investors and mentors that have built, sold, and IPO’ed companies in the past and their advice has helped to lead me down this path to balance. I used to equate getting little sleep and working through the weekend to mean that I was producing the best results, I thought that was the only way. Now I’m learning that it’s all about balance, not about hours, but out quality and output.

I used to be the guy who bragged about working every waking minute, now I’m trying to be the guy who works incredibly hard, but also goes for a hike every other weeks, kayaks on Saturday morning, and even does yoga on Thursday evening. I’m still struggling to give myself the time, but I’m getting better every week. Weekends are great times to reflect, so it might not hurt to look at your own life and your schedule and understand if you have created enough balance to allow you to unlock your full potential.

Photo Credit: martin.davidsson via Compfight cc

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton