This year, I am encouraging everyone to focus on their personal well-being as they build their social ventures. Not only does SoJo want to inspire and empower its community to take their ideas for social good into action, we want you to know that it also possible to keep your sanity in the process.
There is no doubt that the past year was great for SoJo. When reflecting however, it is clear that I worked myself on overdrive at an unsustainable pace, which came at the expense of my health and overall well-being. I set my personal new year's resolution to achieve success with SoJo without driving myself into the ground. In parallel to delivering on all of SoJo's goals this year, I look forward to focusing on other areas of my life which are equally important: time with friends and family, cooking, and overall personal well-being.
Some strategies for achieving success without working around the clock:
Work smarter, not harder: There will never be enough hours in a day. It is therefore important to set reasonable working hours, have the discipline to abide by those parameters. I am hopeful that simple time management tricks such as checking my email fewer times in the day, not scheduling meetings in my most productive working hours of the day, and taking regular breaks will help me to achieve more in less amount of time.
Let go of perfectionism: Chasing perfection in one task comes at the expense of starting a new task. We learned with releasing a less-than-perfect public beta that embracing imperfection is good. I will continue to embrace imperfection.
Set more realistic timelines: Last year I found myself underestimating the time required to complete a task and as a result over-committed myself, forcing me to spend longer hours working. I will therefore make an effort to be more generous with the time allocated to projects and leave more buffer-space to keep my sanity intact.
Be more organized: Working at the last-minute to deadlines forces the body to work on overdrive and much harder than it otherwise would. I hope to plan more and avoid last-minute crunches