A Monthly Five-Minute Check on How You're Looking After Yourself in Long Working Weeks
Most of the systems in a small trade firm are about the work: quoting, scheduling, chasing invoices. The person running it rarely gets a line in the diary. Yet when the week runs long, the whole business depends on you staying fit enough to keep turning up.
This is a five-minute monthly check you can slot in next to the VAT reminder, the van service and the insurance renewal. It doesn't need an app or a spreadsheet. A notebook page will do.
When to do it
Pick a fixed point in your monthly admin and attach the check to it. End-of-month invoicing, a payroll run or a stock count all work. The point is that it happens without you having to remember it, and that it sits with the other jobs that keep the firm running.
Set a five-minute timer. When it goes, stop and move on.
Question one: sleep
Look back over the last few weeks and ask yourself a plain question: have I had a sensible stopping point in the evening?
A fixed time to stop looking at your phone does more for the next day than any gadget. If quotes and customer messages are still getting answered at all hours, that's the thing to fix. Write down a cut-off time, and next month check whether you kept to it.
Question two: food
Ask what you actually ate on the busiest days. A proper lunch packed the night before beats whatever the nearest petrol station has left at two o'clock.
If the answer is "whatever I could grab", the fix is small and practical. Choose one evening a week to pack lunches for the days ahead, or put it on the same list as loading the van.
Question three: recovery
Check whether you've had a clear half day off each week. Treat rest like a job. Put it in the diary and defend it the way you would defend a customer booking.
Then check the daily basics. Five minutes of stretching your back, shoulders and knees when you get in is dull, and it works better done daily than done occasionally. If it has slipped, say so in your notes and restart it this week.
Question four: extras
Some tradespeople add a supplement to their routine, and the monthly check is a sensible moment to look at what you're taking and why. Food comes first. A supplement is an extra, never a fix.
If you buy one, read exactly what the maker says is in it. The guidance in looking after yourself on long working weeks gives Cherrily's Montmorency tart cherry extract capsules as an example of a clear listing: sugar-free, a 10:1 concentrate, taken as one capsule a day. That is the level of detail to expect from any product.
If you take medication or have a health condition, ask a pharmacist or your GP before starting anything new.
Choose one habit, then close the page
The risk with any review is that it turns into a long list of resolutions. Don't let it. Choose one habit for the coming month: the evening cut-off, the packed lunch or the protected half day. Write it at the top of the page.
Next month, check whether it stuck. If it did, add the next one. If it didn't, ask what got in the way, such as a late job, a customer who messages at night or a diary with no gaps, and adjust the system rather than blaming yourself.
A simple template
Copy this onto one page and reuse it each month:
- Evening cut-off kept? Yes / mostly / no
- Proper lunches on busy days? Yes / mostly / no
- Half day off each week? Yes / mostly / no
- Daily stretch? Yes / mostly / no
- Anything extra I'm taking, and do I know what's in it?
- One habit for next month:
Keep the pages in the same folder as your other monthly records. After a few months you'll see patterns, such as which weeks squeeze you hardest and which habits drop first. That's useful information when you're deciding whether to take on another job, hire help or say no to a long week.
Five minutes a month won't fix a stretched workload on its own. But it keeps the one person the firm can't replace on the list of things you check.