5 Things Every Founder Should Do at Christmas

When you’re working on a startup idea, it's so easy to pour too much of yourself into the businesses and neglect looking after your own well being. Here are 5 things I’m going to be doing over the Christmas period to stand me in good stead going into the new year.

1. Spend time with Friends and Family

Switch off. A break from the grind is good for you. No doubt you’ve been busting a gut the whole year, use the Christmas period to spend quality time with friends, family and with the important relationships you’ve been neglecting this year.

I find friends and family are the people who help me most throughout the year and are the ones I neglect most easily. Friends and family are important to my mental and physical well being and are going to be needed throughout the new year so I’m going to be spending quality time with them.

2. Over Indulge

Spending time with friends and family its inevitable that I’m going to overindulge. And? So what, go for it. I’m not advocating anything that will have a long-term negative impact on my health but I’m going to use this time of the year to enjoy time with friends and family and that will invariably involve drink, food and more drink.

3.  Read

I always find reading is something I put off. I’ve got a stack of books I want to attack over the Christmas period. Some are business books, some are just a good bit of fiction. It helps destress, it improves my knowledge and its a great way to entertain myself away from a screen.

Top of my list is How to Build a Car, the autobiography of Adrian Newey, the designer of multiple world championship-winning Formula One cars. You can check out the RookieOven Reading List for some more inspiration. What books would you recommend?

4. Alone time and reflection

I’m also going to be using the Christmas period to spend some time alone and reflect on the year gone by. For me, its been a pretty busy 2018, from getting married, launching some side projects at Add Jam, working on automating my house, landscaping my garden (my summer project) and taking hard decisions such as stopping the development of Pocket Leap as a product.

I’m going to use Christmas as a chance to reflect on it all. It’s by looking back and learning that we get better.

5. Plan

What am I going to do next year? At the start of every year, Chris and I get together and share our reflections on the year prior as well as our aspirations for the new year. We speak frankly with each other about what we’ve achieved, or failed to achieve in the previous year and set goals both personally and as a team for the year ahead.

For Add Jam, 2018 was a year of significant personal landmarks, with me getting married and Chris engaged, but we also achieved a lot of our goals for 2018 as a team. That’s putting us in good standing moving into a new year where I’m already planning and setting goals - more on that soon.