Five Non Negotiables That Make Working on Your Own Terms Possible
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
In the last post I shared what moving my working day to ten to four taught me and why the quality of hours will always beat the quantity of depleted ones. Today I want to get into what that actually requires, because wanting to work differently is one thing but doing it requires specific decisions. Decisions you make in advance so that you are not remaking them every single time something comes along and asks you to move. That is what a non negotiable is. It is the answer to a question you have already decided. I am going to share my five, not because yours should look the same, but because sometimes hearing someone name theirs specifically is what helps you start naming your own.
1) Movement Before the Laptop Opens
Every single day before I go anywhere near my desk, I move. When I was stuck in a business I loathed I did not move at all. I was at my desk from early morning until late at night and my body paid the price for it, not dramatically at first but gradually. The stiffness, the heaviness, that low level hum of burnout and exhaustion around the edges that was not occasional but constant. Moving every morning before ten has become preventative and meditative. It changes the quality of everything when I get to the desk. My thinking is clearer, my decisions are better, my energy is different. And it signals something I need reminding of more than I care to admit, which is that I am a person first and a founder second.
2) A Transition Ritual That Signals the Working Day Is Done
My second non negotiable surprises people. It is cooking. Proper cooking, from scratch, at the end of the working day. For me it acts as a transition, the thing that moves me from founder mode to person mode. It works because it is creative, it is tactile and it is completely removed from a screen, which means it signals to my brain that the working day is done. The laptop closes, the music goes on, the rummage in the fridge starts and the day shifts. When you peel back the layers, the non negotiable here is not cooking specifically but having something that makes the transition from work to not work real, rather than closing the laptop and sitting on the sofa still half thinking about that email you were just writing.
Yours could look completely different. Walking around the block without a phone for ten minutes. Stopping notifications after a certain hour. Eating dinner completely device free. Having an entire day a week with no client contact. Whatever it is, it needs to be specific and it needs to be held.
3) Holding the Hours, Even When It Is Tempting Not To
My working hours are ten to four. The non negotiable is not the hours themselves but holding them, which sounds simple but is actually quite tricky when a big project lands or a deadline looms or something exciting appears. Every now and then staying late on something important is fine. I am not rigid about that. But when it starts happening regularly, when one late evening becomes two, I know I have gone too far, because what happens is that the bookends I talked about in the last post, the morning and the evening, start to disappear. And when those disappear the quality of the middle disappears with them. Holding the hours protects the time on either side and everything that time gives me.
4) Saying No to Things That Do Not Serve the Destination
This one is about protecting the working day itself. Every yes that does not serve where you are going is a no to something that does. And that sounds straightforward until you are in it, because it is very easy to say yes to things out of politeness or habit or the fear that saying no will close a door. But a working day that is only six hours long cannot absorb every request, every meeting, every coffee chat without something important being pushed out. Saying no is how the six hour day stays a six hour day rather than stretching back into the eight or ten or twelve hour version I used to live in.
5) Holding the Price, Even When Every Instinct Says Fix It
This is the hardest one and the most important. When a founder tells me they want to do the work but cannot quite afford it, every instinct I have wants to jump in and solve it. Discount it, do a chunk for free, bend the offer until it fits. I am a fixer by nature. I see someone who needs help and something in me wants to help. But I have learned the hard way what that instinct costs, because I have discounted before, I have overdelivered, I have bent the offer to fit someone’s budget rather than the other way around, and what happened was not what I hoped. I burned myself trying to make the lower price feel justified, and more often than not the person disappeared and found someone cheaper still.
So I hold my price. Not because the instinct has gone away but because I have learned to catch it. I know what I am worth and I know what the work is worth. The price reflects how committed I am to bringing someone’s dream to life alongside them, properly, fully, without burning out halfway through trying to prove I was worth the discount I should never have offered.
How to Find Your Own Non Negotiables
Start by noticing where the resentment is, because resentment is usually the first sign that something has been crossed more times than it should have been. The meeting you keep agreeing to but dread. The hour you keep handing over that you wish you had kept for yourself. The discount you keep giving that leaves you feeling smaller. Notice the gap between what you intend to do and what you actually protect. You plan a walk and skip it. You promise yourself an evening off and work anyway. That gap is where your non negotiables need to live.
Whatever they are, write them down, make the decision once and then hold it. And then watch what happens. Because when the decision is already made, you do not have to remake it every time something asks you to move, and that is a relief that changes everything.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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