Ask HN: How do you mitigate stress as a single-person business?

3 points by akulbe 9y ago ↗ HN

I went to the hospital with chest pain on Monday night. ECG and blood work checked out fine. BP was sky high, and still is higher than normal.

The doctor asked me about acid reflux, sleep deprivation, anxiety/stress.

My answers were: no, tons in the last couple weeks, no more than the next guy(?).

Was talking to a CPA friend the following day, and relaying the conversation with the doctor to my friend.

He said that he deals with a lot of self-employed folks, and he thinks we're more stressed in general. We're making all the decisions, where an employee has very few, if any, decisions to make.

It got me to thinking... okay, maybe there's a LOT more to this than I think. I don't want to go back to working for someone else, if I can help it. I'd like to grow my business, and take on contractors and/or employees, and get to a point where I can delegate.

How can I mitigate the stress? (which at this point, doesn't seem like much, but it obviously is)

How do you mitigate it?

Thanks.

1 comment

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biggodoggo 9y ago ↗

In my experience it's not the amount of decisions as much as amount of work, I've mitigated that by automating as much of my business as possible from invoicing to funneling customer communication from email and phone calls to slack. try and identify what parts of your business you are spending the most time on and figure out if there's a better way