One of my Facebook friends posted today: “Totally. Burned. Out. In desperate need of a day off, but then the work won’t get done. Ugh.”

He’s an attorney and works for a firm. I assume he is salaried. I assume he cannot give the work to someone else to do. He has to do it because the work is assigned to him or nobody else is capable of doing it.

Either way, he’s stuck. That’s the way it is with most jobs.

But most self-employed people say the same thing. They either don’t have any employees or partners to whom they can give the work or nobody else is capable of doing it.

Either way, they’re stuck, too.

The employee understands the trade off. They exchange their time for dollars and don’t have to deal with the administrative and marketing demands of being self-employed. They give up some of their freedom in exchange for “security” (or so they think; there are no secure jobs). The self-employed person values freedom above all and is willing to take on the additional responsibilities and longer hours, in order to “be their own boss.”

For most of my career, I have been self-employed. I worked for my father for a year out of law school and I didn’t like it. I wanted to “do my own thing” (that’s how we described it in the ’70’s). I was willing to take on the additional responsibilities and long hours and give up the “security” of a job to get it.

But only to a point.

After a few years, I got Totally. Burned. Out. I wanted to take time off, but the work wouldn’t get done. I was stuck, and that’s when I made a decision to change what I was doing.

I realized that “if the work won’t get done unless I do it,” I didn’t own a business (practice), it owned me. I worked hard but if freedom was my goal, and it was, and I couldn’t take a day off when I wanted to, or six months when I wanted to, I might as well get a job.

I decided that I would hire more people and delegate to them as much of the work as possible. I supervised them and did the legal work that nobody else could do. I soon found out that there wasn’t much legal work that nobody else could do and while that may not have been good for my ego, it was very good for my well-being and my bank account. It meant I could concentrate on marketing and building the practice, and that’s what I did.

And then, I was able to take lots of time off because I owned a business (practice) and it no longer owned me.

If you are self-employed and “the work won’t get done unless you do it,” you should consider making similar changes. Hire more people, outsource, associate with other attorneys. Do what you have to do to lesson the need for you to do the work.

Not only will you avoid burn out and increase your income, you will have more time to post on Facebook.

Your time is precious. Learn how to leverage it to earn more and work less in The Attorney Marketing Formula.