Cut your hours tomorrow, and your business doesn't get lighter. It gets exactly as dependent on you as it was on Monday, just for fewer hours a week.
That's the thing nobody says about the standard advice.
Work less.
Set better boundaries.
Finally take the holiday you've been threatening to take for three years.
All of it treats you as the problem to be managed, when the business is what's actually built to need you this much. Rest doesn't touch that. You just come back to the same load, briefly recovered.
We're not telling you to work less. We're also not telling you to work more. We're telling you it should be your choice, not the business's default setting.
Maybe that means a four-day week, and it actually holds because the business doesn't fall over on the fifth day.
Maybe it means finally starting the project you've had sitting in a drawer for two years, because for once there's room for it.
Both are the same outcome from where we sit: a business that runs on what you've built into it, not on how many hours you happen to be in the room.
Get that right, and the hours become a choice again.
There's a real cost to not having that choice.
Steve's writing about it properly on Friday.
He calls it the owner's tax.