How I kept myself in maintenance mode

I’m coming to the end of my six-week slow down. It wasn’t a six-week vacation (I wish!); it was an intentional, lighter version of business. And I took it for two main reasons. 

The first is personal.
I am not very good at pacing myself. When I’m in something, I’m in it. It’s how I have burnt out from multiple jobs, and it’s why sometimes I get to mid-December or mid-May and just want to crawl under a table and sleep for a week.

I want to be able to continue to do this work that I love. So I’ve begrudgingly learned that if I don’t build in periods where I allow myself to ease off, I’ll burn out of this work too. 

The second is strategic.
The people I work with are not on Linkedin in mid-July scrolling for a business strategist. They are spending time with their family or pets, traveling, reading, enjoying the outdoors, and thinking long-term. Going full throttle on content and outreach when your audience is mentally elsewhere is wasted energy. So I don’t do it.

I decided to keep myself in maintenance mode. 

My goals for this ligther time period were:

• Keep my algorithm active. LinkedIn is my primary networking, experimentation and lead generation platform. I didn't want the algorithm to forget about me. 

• Keep some consistency to my emails. I don’t want to completely disappear from people’s inboxes. While it's slower, it can also be when people read reflection pieces. 

• Be available for my clients, and fully offline on actual vacation. 

• Have my own time to read, think and reflect.

Here is how I did it: 

• Reused my top content on LinkedIn. Using AuthoredUp, I looked at which of my LinkedIn posts had performed best over the past year. I lightly updated them, and then scheduled. I also maintained my Instagram using lightly tweaked versions of the same content.
  
  Reusing content makes me cringe a bit. I had to remind myself that many people didn’t see the content the first time around. If they did, they probably don't remember it the way I do. If it was good content then, it’s worth resharing. 

• I converted my best Tuesday emails into newsletter posts. This was both helpful to give me focus for those Thursday newsletter posts, but also went into part of a longer term strategy. Sometimes I send a Tuesday email that I thought was really good, or I get good feedback on, and am sad that it will likely get lost in people’s emails. 
  
  My thursday newsletter posts (like this one) live on my website, as a blog. Not only does this mean I can send them to people that I think might be interested down the line, but it also means that they get picked up by search (SEO and AEO) and found by people who aren’t on my mailing list. It’s a win-win. 

• I scheduled everything. It took some focused time, but I scheduled all my posts and emails. This meant I could just do it before I went away and stop thinking about it. 

• I plan for this in revenue and cash flow projections. I know that my revenue will be low in July and August. When I do my financials, I factor that in.  

Doing all this meant that when I worked remotely from my parent's place in Italy for a few weeks, I could do my client and thinking work, but also go to the beach in the morning and evening. And, when I was on actual vacation in the US, I could go completely offline with the peace of mind that not everything would come to a dead halt. 

Building a sustainable, purposeful business isn’t about maintaining the same intensity all year. It's about knowing when to push and when to ease off, and making sure those lighter periods are planned rather than forced on you by exhaustion.