Rebecca Bollwitt: Owner and editor-in-chief of Miss604.com, which has attracted nearly 34,000 Twitter followers
A year into full-time blogging and running a website development company, Rebecca Bollwitt – a.k.a. Vancouver blogger Miss 604 – was burned out. She was spending long days loading her site full of content. Nearly every night, she covered events around town. She hardly saw her husband.
"I felt I had to go at [blogging] with everything I had and spend every waking moment doing it," she remembered.
But as the lifestyle wore her down, Bollwitt realized she needed to set boundaries on her social media job.
"[I realized] 'I can peel it back a little; I can stop working at 5.'"
So Bollwitt created an end point to her days.
"When my husband gets home from work, I stop; I'll close my laptop and I'm done," she said.
"I'll check Twitter every now and then or I'll schedule some retweets or something like that. But otherwise, after 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., you'll rarely see me tweet or rarely see a blog post."
She added that, using analytics, she was able to ascertain that her readers don't spend much time on the blog on weekends – a detail that has allowed her to take weekends off, mostly.
"You'll rarely see a post on the weekend – maybe just a photo post on Sunday or something."
Bollwitt added that, to this day, she has checks in place to ensure she doesn't work unrelentingly.
"My husband will send me messages on Skype and say, 'Go for lunch' or 'Go for a walk.'"
But she added that her efforts have been crucial to her success and stamina in her job.
"It's not that I don't dedicate pretty much everything that I do to my work and to my site," she said.
"But if you don't take that time to recoup and regenerate and spend time off the grid with family and whatnot, you're useless."
