12 Advanced Self-Care Tips You Haven’t Considered

September 10, 2018

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As freelancers and entrepreneurs, we’ve all heard the standard self-care tips of taking a break, eating well, exercising yadda yadda. But there are a lot of things that many people don’t talk much about that you can do in your personal life as well as your business to help prioritize your health and well-being. I’d like to run you through a few little-known self-care tips that you might not have considered thus far to help keep you focused on what’s really important in your business. You.

Free Self-Care Assessment Worksheet

Not sure how your self-care is coming along. I’ve adapted a Self-care assessment specifically for freelancers and you can download it for free by clicking the button below! The self-care assessment worksheet comes in PDF form so you can download, fill it out and have a good overview to exactly how your self-care stands up.

It consists of 5 different categories:

Physical
Psychological
Emotional
Spiritual
Professional

Each section has questions asking you to rate how you feel right now about each of the topics discussed. Get your FREE assessment today!

Now, onto the self-care tips you came here to see!

Want a quick self-care tip overview? Check out my Self-care infographic

#1: Know how you spend your time

Do you know how you spend your time? Where do you use your energy throughout the day? To start, do you know how many hours are in a week without Googling it?

FYI, there are 168 hours in a week

So, let’s break it down, how do you spend a normal week?

8 hours sleeping/day (56/week)
8 hours working/day (40/week)
6 hours cooking/week
11 hours eating/week
Everything else

All together that’s 113 hours of things you basically “must” do like work and surviving. What’re you doing with the other 55 hours outside of the norm? TV, Netflix, Social Media? If you don’t really know, then it’s time to find out.

If you go to a nutritionist what’s the first thing they’ll tell you? Keep a food log. If you go to a personal trainer what will they pull out? A workout log. Financial planner? A payment log. For these people to do their jobs, they have to know where you are right now to identify the areas of improvement.

If you’ve never done a time log then I highly, highly recommend it. I’ve created a week-long time log that you can download for free by clicking below.

#2: Turn off non-essential notifications

Notifications were invented for one thing and one thing only, to distract you. I know it feels great that someone commented on your LinkedIn post or shared your newest Pinterest recipe. But, do you really have to know the second it happens? Waiting a few hours until you take a break or a little time to yourself will not change the fact that someone has interacted with your post.

Now, I understand that for social marketing the faster you respond to comments the better the algorithm places your post, so using them for your business in that way is understandable. For your personal accounts though, no way!

Do you need notifications that your Aunt Jannete has sent you an email on Gmail? Probably not. If you have a professional email for clients, then you can set up notifications for time-sensitive emails only if you must, but everything else is just a distraction.

Personally, when I used to get notifications, I would look at every single one, no matter what I was doing. It breaks your rhythm, concentration and it’s been shown to lower productivity and effectiveness. Not being productive and looming deadlines are a huge stress factor in most freelancer’s lives. Just try to avoid as many distractions as you can.

According to a study by Deloitte if you’re like most people you’re checking your phone on average, 47 times per day. But let’s be honest, we freelancers like our technology more than that!

Now, obviously, the numbers are different for different generations but even you’re reaching half those numbers, that’s still 15 hours of social media a week. How can you have any focused work time if you check your phone, on average, about 10 times an hour?

#3: Vision/mission statement

Do you know why people are indecisive, make poor decisions, and waste time? It’s because they lack a vision or a goal. If you don’t know where you’re headed, then every small decision has to be weighed and considered. That takes a lot of willpower and concentration that most freelancers can’t afford to part from.

Creating a mission/vision statement for your company puts up filters that easily allows you to decide if something will help you fulfil those statements or not. If it will help you and you can fit it into your schedule, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t. Easy as that.

You need to have a direction and an endgame, or you’ll end up saying yes to every little project, poor paying offers and nightmare clients out there. Set your boundaries and stick to them.

#4: Pay yourself first

This is a very common statement with creating a financial plan because if you don’t automatically transfer money out of your account right after getting paid it’s very unlikely that there won’t be any left at the end of the month. When you pay yourself first, it doesn’t “hurt” as much, and you’re setting yourself up for future success.

self-care strategies stretching — Give yourself 1 hour of self-care in the morning

Now as a self-care tips go, it’s fairly similar but paying yourself first in this regard means doing non-urgent priorities before you do anything else. What are non-urgent priorities?

Those would be things like exercising, preparing a weekly food menu, meditating, journaling and doing the things that make you happy before you do the time-sensitive things. (hint: you may have to overhaul your mornings, but most freelancers don’t have a specific time they need to be at the office, so it’s not that important).

If you plan self-care first thing in the morning, you’re much more likely to follow through. Waiting until 6 pm when you get home from work, that glass of wine and the couch will beat out any health goals you had established. Pay yourself first, and you won’t have to worry about saving extra energy at the end of the day or money in your bank account. Both are good tips.

For a few self-care tips to help you destress, check out my article 10 Ways to Manage Stress levels

#5: Play a game you can win

When it comes to to-do lists, many freelancers and entrepreneurs are playing a game they can’t win. Our lists have 150 items that seem to just get longer throughout the day. We go to bed defeated because we think “we didn’t do much” and wake up overwhelmed because “we have so much to do”. There isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done on that list. So how do we make this freelance game winnable? Change it.

I’ve borrowed a few self-care tips from Michael Hyatt, but I must say, his Big 3 has actually changed my life. In essence, the Big 3 are the three tasks that you need to get done today to make your day a success.

It answers the question “What are the 3 most important tasks that will most help me reach my goals today?” Everyone can do three things today. The rest of the to-do list is just bonus points. If you need help with goal writing head to my article: Step #1 to Leading a Healthy Freelance Life

I like this strategy for many different reasons but unlike a few of the common self-care tips of “make a to-do-list” and “write things down”, the Big 3 prioritizes exactly what will help you the most today. This builds on the idea that “success is a series of small wins” and it’s oh, so true!

I was reading the other day that someone was planning on making a course and didn’t know when she’d find the time to do it. Some brilliant LinkedIn user commented,

“30 minutes for 30 days and you’ll have it done.”

I thought that was brilliant! 30 minutes for 30 days is 15 hours of extremely focused work. That’s more than enough to finish a course with 4 or 5 modules. 1 small win for 30 straight days and you can create a product or course that could change your life forever.

Deciding the 3 most important tasks that you need to do that day not only gives you clarity and direction in what you need to accomplish, it also sets the tone for your day. If you know by 6 am that you need to write a blog post, your mind will automatically switch into writing mode. Somedays for me are translation days, so I prepare myself by getting into that mindset. It makes your day much more manageable, and it gives you a light at the end of the tunnel which will increase motivation, focus and decrease distractions.

#6: Set time blocks

If you’ve been freelancing for a while you probably have a normal daily routine already, and that’s one of the best self-care tips you can do, but you may not have let everyone else in your life know. Setting boundaries on your time is one of the most effective things you can do as someone who works from home. Say for example you work from 10AM-12PM on your biggest task of the day. Phone off, door closed, social media blocked (check out the anti-social app) and get to work.

Can you imagine how much you could get done with zero distractions? You need to be very firm with these time blocks. Although you’re working from home, you’re still at work. No being bothered by the kids, your spouse, the dog, the mailman, nothing. 98% of things can wait an hour or two without the world catching on fire.

Block out your timeslots and make sure everyone in your life knows that during those times you can’t be contacted (besides emergencies of course).

#7: Make your bed

I can hear you now, “really? A list of self-care tips with making my bed? Great advice buddy…” Now just give me a second. There are certain habits out there like exercising, daily goal setting, family dinners, keeping a food log, and yes, making your bed, which have been linked to improvements in completely unrelated areas. It follows the idea that “success begets success” and there’s hard data to prove it.

One Psychology Today articles states, “Bed makers are also more likely to like their jobs, own a home, exercise regularly, and feel well rested.” This is the idea that every time you make your bed you’re training your willpower and each day, it gets a little stronger and a little stronger. After this routine becomes a habit, you no longer need any willpower. One small win like making your bed every morning makes going to the gym, waking up without hitting the snooze button, eating better, and being more productive not seem so hard.

#8: Unsubscribe from everything that isn’t helpful

Let me tell you a little story, I’ve been living in Spain for almost 6 years now, and as of about a year ago, I was subscribed to over 20 newsletters from US-based retailers that I hadn’t used or read in over 5 years. I got daily emails from Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon.com and a lot more. Every day I would go into my email, and I would have to delete them manually. Every. Single. Day.

Why was I doing that to myself? Laziness probably. It may not seem like much to delete a few emails each day, but there’s a theory called Decision Fatigue. It’s based on the idea that the more decisions you make throughout the day, the more difficult each decision becomes and so you start making worse choices as the day goes on.

So now back to my long list of subscriptions. I was wasting my precious decision-making muscle on whether I should read or delete emails from things I hadn’t used in over 5 years. That’s insane.

So head into your Gmail and unsubscribe from every newsletter that is not helping you achieve your goals or improving your life (except mine of course :-D)

#9: Change bad habits

Habits are strange creatures, and they’re so ingrained in who we are that we don’t even know we’re doing them. They’re made up of three things. I let this graphic from the book, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg explain it.

As you can see, there are 4 main parts. The first is the cue. The cue can be anything from a time of day, location, feeling, other people and really almost anything. Then you have your routine, which is the habit itself like the snooze button, social media, a glass of wine, etc. Lastly the reward. There needs to be a craving for that reward as well when you experience the cue.

Cue, craving, routine, reward. That’s it.

I’m sure some of you have a few bad habits that you’d like to change so here’s how it’s done.

Taking a look at that photo by Duhigg you can see that the cue, craving and reward all stay the same. What you need to change consciously is the routine. In this example, the cue is getting home at 6:30, the routine is having a glass of wine, and the reward is relaxing. You’ll need to find a routine that gives you a similar reward.

This habit change goes from having a glass of wine to chatting with your partner. Both, hopefully, should allow you to relax (the reward). Over time you’ll start to identify getting home at 6:30 with having a nice chat with your partner instead of opening a bottle of chardonnay. Voila!

#10: Delegate/Automate

As freelancers there’s a lot of pressure to ‘do it all’, but that doesn’t need to be the case. You may have heard of getting yourself a virtual assistant, and I highly recommend it, but that’s not really what #10 is about.

I know for some this may not be possible, but if you can afford it, I would 100% recommend getting someone to clean your house. Let me explain.

self-care delegate — Does this look fun?

I’ve had that feeling that since I’m “at home anyways” I should do the dishes, walk the dog, buy the groceries, cook, clean and really everything that involves housework. I don’t know about you, but I hate housework!

For me, if there’s anything that is the opposite of these self-care tips, it’s housework. I don’t want to spend 3 hours of my precious weekend cleaning the house. That’s not restful and it actually just stresses me out. The $100 or so every two weeks is something I haven’t thought twice about, and I’ll never regret it. Delegate as much as you can to others, so you have the time to focus on what’s important.

I want my weekends to be with friends and loved ones, not elbow deep in the toilet.

If you’re worried about the cash think about it like this:

What do you make per hour?
How much does a cleaning service cost?
How much time can you save?

For me, the answer was crystal clear.

Another great automation tool I just found was MeetEdgar. You create social media posts once and MeetEdgar will constantly send them out. For those of us who aren’t very into social media and posting every day, this could be a lifesaver! I’ve just recently signed up and my website traffic has doubled!

Check it out and get $10 off your first month! ed.gr/om3n4

#11 Quit Multitasking

Multitasking is “merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time”, as Steve Uzzel says in his book, The ONE Thing. It has been shown by Basex, an information-tech research firm, found that interruptions consume an average of 2.1 hours per day or 28% of the workday.

self-care strategies eating at desk — That means no eating at your desk!

The numbers are probably a bit different than for freelancers but maybe not that different if you think about it. Office workers have to deal with their bosses, co-workers, emails, phone calls and everything else that comes with working a 9-5. As freelancers though, we have to deal with a lot more distractions that they haven’t thought of.

At home, you have your couch 50 feet away, Netflix is just a few clicks away, your kitchen on the other side of the wall, the dog needs to go out, maybe I should fold some laundry, I haven’t dusted for a while, how about I just take out the garbage, and on and on and on. If we don’t firmly separate our personal and professional life, they start to blend together, and multitasking becomes a part of our reality.

(I’m ashamed to say that I have a load of laundry in the washing machine right now. Hey, I never said I was perfect, but I’m working on it)

#12 Prepare Weekly Food Menus

A lot of these self-care tips involve planning, and this one is no different. Setting goals allows you to prioritize decisions. Paying yourself first is planning morning around different self-care tips. Setting aside 10 minutes every Sunday night to plan out your weekly meals will not only save you from reaching for the snack draw but also the decision fatigue when you get to the store.

self-care strategies healthy meal — Meals like this don’t happen last minute (usually)

Tell me this, have you ever gotten to the store around 6 pm and you weren’t sure what you were going to get when you went? What’d you end up buying? I’m sure it wasn’t fish and vegetables.

If you have or want a calendar, I’d highly recommend the Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt, then write down your meals, and you won’t have to make any last minute, and most likely, poor decisions in grocery stores.

Little-Known Self-Care tips

As I mentioned, almost 3,000 words ago, we’ve all heard the standard self-care tips of taking a break, exercising, eat well, drink water. Don’t get me wrong though! These are incredibly important self-care tips, but I believe these don’t happen overnight, and they need to be planned.

I tried to get to the root of self-care by going to the planning phase before you can start to exercise, or take a break. As freelancers, and freelancers who prioritize our health, planning and preparing your time is a must. The first time I did self-care tips #1, a time log I was more than a little embarrassed by how much time I wasted. I actually felt bad, like I was being lazy although I was making more than enough to live a comfortable life.

If you’d like to do your own time log, click the button below to grab your free weekly time-log sheet. It comes in a .doc file so print it out, put it on your desk and fill in the slots. Only when you know your starting point can you begin to implement self-care tips to improve it.

Lastly, if you’re still not sure of your current self-care situation then the only way to find out is by filling out a self-care assessment worksheet. Get your free assessment sent to your inbox by clicking the button below!

Have you considered any of these self-care tips before? Which ones have you tried?