I've never found running businesses alone particularly stressful. Normal employment was worse to me.
Everything that can be automated is automated: backups, database cleanup, lifecycle e-mails, dunning for clients with past-due bills, accounting, bill payment, etc.
I do all my "checking on" things in the morning (e-mails/tickets, tweaking ad campaigns, server status and checking for security updates, etc). Afterwards, I put a few hours into something on my TODO lists which I manage in Trello; some days I choose to work on a new feature, sometimes on bugs, sometimes on new marketing or seeking out new partnerships, sometimes I just pick a side project to work on. Whatever gets done gets done, and some days it gets done in the afternoon and some days at night.
I don't keep a schedule. I don't stress about how much progress was or wasn't made on a daily basis. There's no boss making me stress over things, and I've always managed to move forward anyway without any external motivation. I only look back on it over the span of months; "that was a productive summer".
Financial security helps a lot I suppose. I use the profit from one project to bootstrap the next. The only time I haven't had enough in savings to pay at least 6 months of expenses was the very beginning -- when I was 18 with $0 and started college on federal loans. I didn't need loans for very long, as I started my first businesses back then (ad sales and a subscription web stats service). I plan on new ventures being profitable from the first customer as much as possible.
Everything that can be automated is automated: backups, database cleanup, lifecycle e-mails, dunning for clients with past-due bills, accounting, bill payment, etc.
I do all my "checking on" things in the morning (e-mails/tickets, tweaking ad campaigns, server status and checking for security updates, etc). Afterwards, I put a few hours into something on my TODO lists which I manage in Trello; some days I choose to work on a new feature, sometimes on bugs, sometimes on new marketing or seeking out new partnerships, sometimes I just pick a side project to work on. Whatever gets done gets done, and some days it gets done in the afternoon and some days at night.
I don't keep a schedule. I don't stress about how much progress was or wasn't made on a daily basis. There's no boss making me stress over things, and I've always managed to move forward anyway without any external motivation. I only look back on it over the span of months; "that was a productive summer".
Financial security helps a lot I suppose. I use the profit from one project to bootstrap the next. The only time I haven't had enough in savings to pay at least 6 months of expenses was the very beginning -- when I was 18 with $0 and started college on federal loans. I didn't need loans for very long, as I started my first businesses back then (ad sales and a subscription web stats service). I plan on new ventures being profitable from the first customer as much as possible.