When Taking Breaks Unexpectedly Is a Good Thing

If you regularly follow my blog, you probably noticed my absence in July. It wasn’t something I planned. What I planned was more content than ever before. 

What ended up happening was I wrote several more chapters in my novel, finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, worked on the last major push for a client, and I slept. A lot.

Dropping off the radar suddenly is one of the cardinal sins in the online world for business. If you’re a freelancer to boot, it can mean the difference between eating well and surviving on one meal a day. Worse still, it can mess with your routine big time and make getting back into the swing of daily posting much more difficult. 

As with most things in life, however, such advice requires a balanced approach. 

Fatigue is unforgiving. 

When your body says STOP, you don’t always get to have a choice except to struggle through as best you can and cut out anything that your survival does not depend on. Sometimes, all it takes is putting one thing in your life on hold for a little while for everything else to come to a screeching halt. 

This is exactly what happened to me. I put a pause on anything and everything to do with my volunteer endeavors. I’d been pulling back in this area since January, but in July I brought it to an abrupt stop. Ongoing drama, general fatigue, and a leadership change at the organization in question reached a fever pitch, and I felt it was in my best interests to just walk away for a little while. 

The result was that the tension I’d been holding in was all released at one time and fatigue set in. So, I had to drop more just to give myself a chance to recover. 

More and more people I know, and I have a tiny circle of people, are struggling with fatigue. For some, ongoing health issues from 2020 onward took up so much time and energy, they’re on the brink of burnout. For others, the lingering dis-ease from both the illness itself and the treatment is still an issue. 

Others, like myself, not only had to deal with the societal effects of 2020-2021, but had several major life events happen within a brief space of time in additional to the health struggles. Still others are adjusting to the new slowing economy and trying to make life and their business work. 

Bottom line is that you can try to head off fatigue all you want, but life is still life and you don’t always get to choose your course of action. Sometimes, life is just a lot of dealing with things as they come and hoping for the best, plans and goals notwithstanding. 

Niche tyranny is more rampant than we acknowledge. 

The other cardinal rule of having an online presence is “picking a niche” or an “aesthetic.” Ok, that’s a wonderful tool to have, but have we perhaps considered that doing so is tyrannical? 

Imagine confining yourself and your life to one color, one “look,” or one arbitrary aspect of yourself. Now imagine making that your entire identity. You may laugh, but that is exactly what’s happening. And the world has narrowed to the size of a prison cell. 

Want to switch subjects? Start another channel, another website, or another business. The compartmentalization is good for algorithms, but it’s bad for human beings because we’re less likely to discover how our various skills, talents, and knowledge bases intersect. 

What ends up happening is that you end up having to double or triple your efforts to meet the algorithms’ requirements. Hence, the aforementioned fatigue setting in. 

Polymaths or “renaissance” people are not served well in today’s world. We’ve bought into the promise of “branding” a little too much and unless you are in a niche, then you have less chance of success than you would be otherwise.

What does this have to do with taking an unexpected break? Well, even prisoners are allowed daily exercise. So, why shouldn’t we be allowed to take a break from our boxes? 

Sometimes you have to take off your entrepreneurial hat, or the persona you put on for your marketing efforts. Hence why I spent a lot of time reading Brandon Sanderson in July. Sanderson is not in my “niche”–not yet, at least. He’s an exceptional fantasist and I love the detail and complexity in The Way of Kings. But a “classic”? No, not yet. 

That being said, he’s a good example of a modern writer who embodies many of the themes and qualities you look for in a “classic.” Much like Stephen King’s Carrie. 

Letting go in one area helps you thrive in another. 

Writing posts for the blog is both a joy and a drag. I genuinely enjoy posting and creating ideas for new articles. It engages parts of my mind that I rarely get to use. 

But it also takes up a lot of writing time that I could put to use elsewhere. The shorter-form nature of a blog, for instance, isn’t always conducive to writing a novel. Fortunately for me, I had two things happen in July: I had a major section of work due for a client and I took a break from the blog. 

Not only did I get the writing for done for my client, I re-wrote nearly every single chapter of my novel and made some solid decisions about what I’d already written. It was better than I remembered, but it needed to be rearranged. Then, several other sub-plots suggested themselves as well as a new story arc. There’s still a LOT of work to do. But, for the first time in months, I feel motivated enough to actually do the work. 

Why? Well, part of the reason for that is the work I’m doing for one of my clients is technical writing. Specifically, I was helping write manuals for several programs this organization runs. The work involves a lot of piecing information together and making sure the flow is understandable. 

Writing a manual and writing a novel are very similar. You are telling a story still, but in a manual, the main character is the person reading the manual–not the character you create. So, your character has to be informed and have everything explained to them before they can actually go on their adventure and make what you’re writing the manual about work in the real world. 

My novel had been at a stand-still for a while. The plot wasn’t working out the way I’d planned. I wasn’t happy with the pacing, and I just didn’t have any motivation to really fix anything or even attempt to fix anything. 

Laying aside the blog and social media writing helped jump-start the inspiration again. And I’m much further along now than I have been since I began. 

Is the break worth the risks? 

That is an answer only you can decide for your business and your own health and well-being. Some people can work 15-hour days months on end and be fine. Not everyone can. Or should. 

If your business is farther along and you’re pulling in significant revenue, then a break may not be ideal right now, but you may find another way of lighting the load, like hiring a Virtual Assistant to take some of the smaller tasks off your plate. Or several, depending on how much you have on your plate.

I’m at a pointnow, where my audience is small enough to where it won’t make that big of a difference either way. And since one of my long-term goals is to become a published novelist, whether or not it’s a bestseller, then yes, the break was worth the risk. I think a month’s worth of blog content was a pretty fair exchange.