Based on your answers, it looks like you are at serious risk of developing startup burnout.
Startup Burnout Stage 3
Startup Burnout doesn’t start with exhaustion. It starts with stress and that is exaclty what you are encountering in stage 3: ‘Chronic Stress’.
To be honest, most startup founders probably spend a lot of time in this stage. After all, startup life is stressful.
Even though you are not suffering from pure exhaustion yet (as you would in stages 4 and 5), this phase is already damaging your mental health and your productivity!
What to do to prevent completely burning out?
First of all, become aware of the danger and realize that not taking care of yourself is seriously slowing down your startup journey. The best way to speed up your game is make sure you are fit and focused. In other words: invest time in sleep, working out, relaxation, and connecting to other people.
You are probably procrastinating and feeling guilty about it, too. So, allocating time to rest will feel counterintuitive. But it’s the best thing you can do. Investing in your health means diminishing procrastination. Working long hours and sacrificing your free time means experiencing more brain fog (and slows you down even more).
If you want to learn more about this, download the ebook ‘Escaping Founder Burnout’. There is a discount code in your inbox!
Secondly, work on curbing your stress. Learn to deal with the uncertainties that come with building a startup, schedule your time well, and organize your work. In this stage of startup burnout it would be a good idea to limit your work hours and maybe adopt a fixed schedule to protect yourself. But for some, flexibility is more useful.
Regain your Focus with Curbn
In the following months, I will be developing a new product ‘50 x Smarter’, that will teach startup founders and entrepreneurs how to work smarter instead of harder using their own tools.
The key objective of ‘50 x Smarter‘ is to reduce the stress your heavy workload causes you. It would not be realistic to say ‘reduce the workload’, but learning a smarter way to prioritize and deal with the endless e-mails and tasks on your to-do list will help you to get back on top.
I hope to publish the first part in January 25, so bear with me. If you want to pre-order, you can find ‘50 x Smarter‘ on Gumroad. In the meantime, here’s already some advice:
Clear up the loose ends in your head.
Write them down and free up space in your mind.
With ‘50 x Smarter‘, I hope to teach you exactly how to do this with simple hacks in the tools you already use. Sometimes it’ll be about a feature you didn’t know yet, other times it’s about using something in a different way or picking up on a new habit.
But we’re not there yet. So, for the time being, I’ll just share some of that knowledge in my newsletter. So keep an eye on your mailbox and dig out the trash can (Spam) if you want to stay in the loop.