READY Work Life Balance in SEO
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone, it's Olga Zarr from SU SLY. Long time no see, so today I have a topic which is very dear to my heart, I can say, especially recently, and this is the topic of work life Balance in SEO and SEO. Generally, how to achieve work life balance being an SEO. So, a little bit about the background and what led me into this topic.
[00:00:33] So, I've been working very hard, hard, almost, I would say obsessively on SEO for the past, I would say, four years or so. So in 2020, this was my pandemic project. I started SEO Sly, my blog. I started, uh, I started creating a lot of tutorials, guides, articles, then videos, podcasts, and so on and so on. I was able to build my authority, branding, build a following, and I started to become more visible.
[00:01:12] I got invited to conferences, podcasts, and so on, the snowball, I would say, I can say started to roll. in the very positive direction, because it allowed me to finally become an independent SEO consultant and gave up any SEO jobs I had. And here's the thing, last year and I think the the year before that, so 2021, 2022, 2023, especially 2022 and 2023, were very, um, hardworking for me because SEO is my passion and SEO is a specific type of industry because it is ever changing, everything is changing, you have to adapt, you have to stay up to date, you have to watch SEO news, you have to check what's going on, you have to read what other SEOs have to say, you have to experiment, you have to like there is a ton of keeping up to date going on that is required from you as an SEO.
[00:02:23] In other professions, not all of them, but in many professions that the rate of change is not that fast. And, you can have a set of work processes, your methods that work for a very extended period of time. Of course, change is needed everywhere because change equals progress, but In many professions, the change is not that fast, and you can sleep, I would say, more peacefully, and you can just focus on your work, doing it from this to that, and knowing that the next day probably not a lot will change, and most of the things are up to you, depending your attitudes.
[00:03:13] your engagement, your motivation, and stuff like that. In SEO, I think it is quite different. As I said, it requires a tone of keeping up. And if you are an ambitious SEO, and most of you are, just like me, you want to keep up with everything. And you want to make sure that all of those things that are working now, that, that have been working, that are worth checking, that all of those things are reflected in your methods, and that you do it perfectly for your own websites, for your clients websites.
[00:03:56] and so on and so on. And in my case, this led to, and in addition to all of that, I am a perfectionist. I have those perfectionist tendencies. And if I am really into something, if something is my passion, like SEO is, then I tend to obsess about it. And like, basically the entire world starts to revolve around SEO.
[00:04:20] So my, approach was Let's introduce SEO to every area of my life. So, I was listening to SEO podcast while I was working, working out, while I was on a bike, running, walking. Of course, as much as I could, I was reading all the SEO news and creating SEO newsletter. Of course, uh, I was attending SU courses, one of the best SU courses.
[00:04:48] Maybe this is not a course, it's training. I attended, I think in my entire SEO career was tested SEO training by Lee Weicher. Um, I will link, uh, somewhere below or here. I'm not sure where, uh, the link to the interview where I talk with Lee. And he talks more about his approach to SEO. So I was learning SEO, trying to do my own SEO tests.
[00:05:14] Of course, in addition to that, I had clients, I have clients, so I want to kind of transform all of that knowledge, new, old experience, everything I have to clients in the best way possible. Of course, with clients, there are often time constraints, uh, and I, and I always like to do more, and very often I ended up doing way more, working longer.
[00:05:42] because I just wanted this to be done in a perfect way. And of course, in addition to that, there was, there is this, my biggest project, SEO Sly, which is about sharing my findings in the form of articles, videos like this one, and in the future, uh, in the near future, doing it in the form of a course, uh, SEO community, but stay tuned for that.
[00:06:06] So a ton of things. And my entire, entire world, including sports, uh, became about SEO. So, as I said, I was working out and listening to SEO podcasts or thinking about new ways of doing SEO. And, um, end of 2023 and I really started to feel like my energy level, levels are not necessarily where they should be or where they used to be like two years ago or something like that.
[00:06:42] So I definitely started to think about ways to, to get back to where I was, uh, where, when I was at my peak so to cut the story short, so my resolution for 2024, as you can guess, probably by now, is to introduce more work life balance. And I want to make sure that the life part is not only about SEO, because with, with, with my kind of approach, with my kind of personality, perfectionism, this is something that, that has to change and, uh, I'm sharing this with you to kind of warn you that even if SEO is your biggest passion and you think you can do it all day and night, you will be able to do it for some time and then at some point your system will say stop it, something is not right.
[00:07:42] So some of the things I am now introducing, which you can potentially also think about introducing, if you are also feeling a little bit on, on the edge of being Maybe overworked are I'm giving myself, um, more strict, hours regarding, work. So I used to work like I woke up, I was working, I.
[00:08:12] did a workout, then I was working until I fell apart, basically. Now, my goal is to give it a little bit more structure. So, I wake up, work, then I take a break for a workout, stretching, maybe something else, gym. it does not have to be like super long running workout. And then I work for a couple of more hours, but I make sure that in total I don't spend more than eight hours a day in front of the computer, and there is like a strict hour where I stop working.
[00:08:48] So I'm now thinking about making it 5 p. m. or 4 p. m. Because if I don't have it, have this deadline, then, then I always end up working until seven, or something like that. And when I finish at seven, it is like, basically the day is over, all I can do is take a walk with my very, very old dog, uh, who doesn't really walk anymore, eat something, watch Netflix.
[00:09:21] and go to sleep, and there is no place for other fun activities. There is no place for reading books, which I love, or even reading SEO news, but that shouldn't, I guess I shouldn't be doing that in the evening. So this is, this is one of the things I'm changing. Another thing, I used to work in those types of marathons.
[00:09:48] I am a marathoner, so I love doing something for many days in a row. So it wasn't very uncommon for me, for example, to run 18 20 days in a row. In the past, like 2020, 2022, and 2021, I'm not running that much now anymore because, because I'm getting older and similar, similarly, my knees are telling me to stop.
[00:10:17] And I used to do, uh, at some points. I started to do the same thing with SEO. So I was doing SEO. I was working for a couple of weeks in a row without any, any, any stop, any free day. So this is the hardest thing for me to do because when there is a weekend client, there are no client calls, no one is sending me emails.
[00:10:42] It is very tempting to stay the entire weekend doing either client work or doing my own SEO work, uh, meaning SEO fly stuff. It is very tempting. I haven't been fully successful with that yet. But there is a lot of improvement, a lot of change, so starting this year, um, I took, uh, from the first, from the 30th of, uh, December, I took more than two, entirely three weeks, um, I planned on working, it was supposed to be a workation.
[00:11:20] But it turned out that, uh, the internet I had there was too poor and I wasn't really able to work. So I decided to take that opportunity, uh, to, to simply rest and reset. I read, a very nice book, uh, called Change to the Desk, which is basically about workaholism. And It offers a lot of remedies and tips on what you can do to stop and to introduce a more healthy kind of structure into your life, because you won't go far with overworking yourself.
[00:11:59] Some other things I'm also introducing is, for example, mindfulness, meditation. So I've been flirting with that for a couple of years, but I have never been very consistent. But this is also something I am now way more consistent with, and when I need these resets in the middle of the day or something, I meditate for a maximum of, I would say, 20 minutes.
[00:12:26] More is still too much for me, but I think it is getting me somewhere. And another aspect of this work life balance in SEO is the balance of the work I do for clients versus I do for my own projects, my own websites. Mostly this is about SEO slide, about sharing my tips, sharing my knowledge, videos, articles, all that stuff that I used to do a ton of, but at some point I had to stop, or I had to like cut it down very aggressively because I had so much client work.
[00:13:06] And of course, when, when I had a pressing thing with a client, I always choose the client instead of my own thing. And this is what I used to do for a long time. So there was always client work, client work. And in many, cases, there wasn't enough time for me to create anything, for my own projects.
[00:13:29] If you are a subscriber to my SEO newsletter, you probably noticed that the rate at which I was sending it last year wasn't that consistent. I used to send it every week and then I had to, and then I started sending it every two weeks. Then I had a month's break, but this is one of the things that's also changing.
[00:13:52] So I have, I have a bunch of clients still, of course, and these are like the my, my top favorite clients, the ones with whom I love working, which understand the value of SEO and so on and so on. And I'm not planning on, on growing the number of clients I have. So the client work is here. It's like 50, 50 percent now.
[00:14:17] I hope it will be 50, 60%. And the rest. is SEO Sly and doing those other SEO things just for myself and for you. So learning new things, and if I learn something new, something cool, I want to share it with you through newsletter, through YouTube, social media, and so on. So this is also the difference, I would say, dimension of this work life SEO balance I am now introducing.
[00:14:46] So what can you expect with that regard from me more newsletters and shorter ones, more videos, hopefully, more articles, hopefully as well. I'm getting back to writing to, for Search Engine Journal. And also, uh, I've been talking about the SEO course for almost two years now. I've been planning it, At some point in the past, I'm not sure some of you probably remember, I had the SEO Slide Pro section with extra videos and stuff like that all around SEO auditing, so this is also something that I am kind of Resuming so soon, there will be the SEO course, which will be, I will tell you more about it in, in just soon, and there will probably be an SEO community, similar to the one we had, but which will be on a different platform.
[00:15:49] more professional, easier to kind of navigate and all of that. So this is the portion I am the present, the gift I'm giving to myself to kind of help me with that work life balance and client SEO, my own SEO balance as well. So final tips for you, don't overwork yourself, working like insane hour, 70, 80 hours per week may Be necessary at some stages of your life if you are launching something, but make sure this is not like a rule and you work like that like every week, every month for a year because you will end up not wanting to work and you will Top stop loving SEO.
[00:16:41] So very very take it very seriously. There is also the concept of deep work I became interested in that a lot. I read a book about it, which is basically about Working in those deep work chunk chunks of work. They can be like 90 minutes 60 30 kind of a Pomodoro type of technique and making sure that while you are in this deep work mode, no one is disturbing you and you can really focus on this one specific task you are doing and you are doing it like with 100 percent capacity and focus, there are no distractions.
[00:17:20] And very often with a few, with a few sessions like that, three sessions like that per day, four, you can achieve very often a weeks of work you would achieve if you were in this multitasking not fully focused mode when there are tons of notifications and other things disturbing you. So my hope is that with the introduction of this I can also reduce the time, the time I need to work spent on by the computer and increase my output.
[00:17:55] Because it, it doesn't matter that much, uh, what you do, uh, meaning if you are working in a deep work focused mode, or if you are just working and doing a ton of other things, notifications, you will probably be similarly tired after either. And if you can just, um, kind of compress the amount of time you need to achieve them the same or even more, I would definitely, um, recommend doing that.
[00:18:26] Um, the way I am tracking my time and my tasks now, uh, this also change has been changing. Many times so currently my setup is I have asana in asana. I have my own projects my clients And of course, I have all the tasks with deadlines and and and other things I want to Achieve and I also use hub stuff, but I just use it for myself.
[00:18:51] I hate this tool, and how it is used . I'm even thinking about creating a separate video about that, but that doesn't matter. I use Hubstaff for myself to kind of be able to tell how much time I spent by the computer working. And also when I leave the computer, Hubstaff will stop so I can precisely know how much time I spent in front of the computer.
[00:19:15] In addition to that, there is a tool called Let me check what, what's the name of the tool because I don't remember right now. I think it's called flow and flow allows me to blacklist certain. applications, certain websites, and it allows me to work in those longer chunks. So I, I turn on the flow for 90 minutes and during those 90 minutes, I just focus on, for example, writing newsletter, which is something I did this morning.
[00:19:48] And the flow won't let me open Messenger, Facebook, so other social media platforms that are not really helping me work. So. The combination of those two tools has been really, helpful, and I am playing with that now.
[00:20:06] So in addition to that, uh, there are other things that are responsible for how I feel during the day, how, how motivated I am, how fresh I am.
[00:20:18] And they are kind of obvious things, but things that definitely have to be taken care of. One is sleep. Uh, the other one is diet, drinking enough water and, and going outside, which is, I think, especially important for people who work from home. So, Regarding sleep, for example, for me, I can only do productive work when I get up very early.
[00:20:48] It has to be like 6 a. m. If I oversleep until eight, then I am sluggish the entire day and I work like, and I do 10 times less things than, than I could achieve if I woke up at five or six. So getting at this, getting up at this hour every day is very important to me. And of course, going to sleep at 10 at the latest to get at least those 8, 7, 8 hours of sleep.
[00:21:18] Diet, of course. So, this is kind of, kind of obvious. You have to give your, your system enough energy and high quality energy for it to work. So, I'm not a dietician, so I won't be giving any tips here, but taking care of the diet, eating good food, whole foods, and which are healthy, and so on.
[00:21:40] Drinking enough water. And the last one is going outside. So, I am a very introvert person. I am a homebody. I could just live in my house without leaving it. And even if I don't feel the need to go outside, if I spend a couple of days in a row in my, at my home, and I have a treadmill at my home, I have a stationary bike, so I can do all those sports activities.
[00:22:10] In, at my home, no problem with that, I don't have to go outside. So if I stay at home for that many days in a row, usually like something starts to happen, I am less motivated, more depressed, more angry, maybe angry is not the right word, but something is going on. And if I just go outside. for for an hour, two hours or half a day, or I take the entire day off and I go somewhere.
[00:22:38] Doesn't doesn't matter where, but the change of scenery is important. I feel totally different. And this is, this is like psychologically proven by studies. You, you, you need your brain needs. more different kind of impulses, different scenery, something new for it to thrive. It cannot be just staring at your screen all the time, flat screen with your, all your SEO things, even though you love them.
[00:23:06] So this is, this is, kind of something which I think is very important, especially if you work from home, if you work remotely. This content with the real world and with real people, if possible, as well. Okay, so this is it, I think, regarding work life balance. Probably over time I will have more insights, more ideas, because the topic is still very fresh and I am still kind of learning what I want to do and trying different systems out.
[00:23:37] And on top of that, Uh, the last thing I want to add, every day I create a small plan in the form of a note in the journal, what I want to achieve, how I want to feel. And, um, so that's when I sit at the desk, I know more or less what I want to achieve on that particular day. And if I know there is this timeframe that I can only work until that hour, then probably I will be more motivated to complete the work instead of getting distractions all over the place.
[00:24:11] Even if those distractions are good, for example, in the form of SEO articles, SEO news, even, even if all of those distractions are about SEO, they won't help you do the actual SEO work you have to do if you are very prone to them. So that's it. Tell me how work life balance looks for you, what's, how, how are you trying to, how are you balancing your life with SEO?
[00:24:39] And if you want any more tips, you have any questions regarding that, just let me know in the comments and I will answer them. Thanks and see you in the next video and don't forget to subscribe, give a like, thumbs up and, and stuff like that so that you can let the algorithm know that you like this content, and hopefully this content will show for more SEOs.
[00:25:02] So thanks and bye.