Work-life balance has traditionally been one of the most challenging issues for students and small business owners alike. Whether it’s the long hours of work, the constant need for marketing, or the demands of networking, work can easily cut into an entrepreneur’s personal life. Conversely, family concerns, such as time spent with a spouse or children or vacations, can just as easily be consumed by work.
The same can be said for college studies, as long couples at university and then doing endless amounts of homework can drive students into a corner and they won’t notice how their younger years have passed at all as they study.
A good balance can help you keep your sanity when faced with the stresses of running a small business or going to college, so it’s important to prioritize this issue. Don’t be self-destructive and free up your time to study – all you have to do is say: ” write my research paper” and the essay writing specials will do their best.
In fact, studies show that work-life balance is a major factor in career success for men and women. Unfortunately, another survey showed that one-third of all workers believe that maintaining a work-life balance is more difficult now than ever.
This begs the question: how can you maintain a work-life balance in your small business?
You can’t work so hard that you burn out and have no time for friends and family, but you understandably want and need to strive for success in your small business.
This article reveals the intricacies of finding that precarious balance in your daily life. Go from understanding what work-life balance is to put it into practice with these faithful work-life balance tips.
First, let’s define and define what we mean by striving for work-life balance.
What is work-life balance?
We’ve all heard the term “work-life balance.” It has become a cliché for some. That doesn’t diminish its importance.
It’s the ideal goal for anyone starting and running a business: to have enough time at work to be successful in your industry, but also to have enough time to be with friends and family and pursue relaxing hobbies.
Wikipedia: “Work-life balance is a concept that involves the proper prioritization between ‘work’ (career and ambition) and ‘lifestyle’ (health, pleasure, relaxation, family, and spiritual development/meditation).”
Given this definition, we must determine what constitutes an “optimal” work-life balance.
Is it an accurate 50/50 balance between career and lifestyle? Is it so that you don’t feel stressed running your small business? So you can go on vacation whenever you want?
To some extent, this balance is deeply personal and individual to each entrepreneur and freelancer, but there are some basic principles we should be comfortable with.
For example, a good balance means:
- Don’t work so hard that you hate your career.
- Take care of your health and well-being.
- Create enough time for activities you really enjoy.
- Spend enough time with the people who are important to you.
- Achieve what you want to achieve in your business without overdoing it.
- With these examples in mind, let’s look at ways to improve your work-life balance.
5 Ways to Achieve Work-Life Balance
Here are some helpful work-life balance tips to help you achieve more balance. They work well if you practice them daily and take a long-term view.
Set boundaries correctly.
Setting boundaries means that you have limits to your work. On certain days, you simply won’t do any work because you set it aside specifically for personal interests. Setting boundaries is an attractive concept, but for many small business owners who are “married” to their work, it’s easier said than done.
With that in mind, here are some practical tips on how to set boundaries to separate work from personal time:
- Don’t do any work-related business after a certain time.
- Don’t take any work-related messages or messages on your smartphone (since your smartphone will always be with you).
- Take formal “breaks” during the day to have time to decompress and recharge during the workday.
- Use the entire weekend for personal activities, whether it’s spending time with family, meditating, or a favorite hobby.
The principle is that while you certainly enjoy being an entrepreneur and getting bigger and bigger in your industry, you consider the fact that you cannot pursue this ambitious goal without stopping, where boundaries must enter the picture to open up space for a healthy balance. Otherwise, you risk burnout.
For more information on how to successfully draw a separation between work and personal life, see our two guides on setting boundaries and getting the mental gap right:
Become Super Productive
Productivity is always on the minds of small business owners and entrepreneurs who realize that it gives them the ability to accomplish more in less time.
Being productive is the key to a balanced work-life balance, as being more involved in your work means you’ll have more free time, but many people don’t understand the basics of productivity to make them work for themselves.
Because productivity can be such an open concept, it’s helpful for us here to break it down into easily digestible components that you can build into your own productivity system. To improve productivity both at work and at home, think of productivity as the following:
Organization. When you’re well-organized, you don’t have to spend time searching for what you need to succeed in running your small business. I not only have the ability to quickly find physical items such as your tablet or checkbook but also to effectively sort through mental items such as ideas and tasks that you need to accomplish both at work and in your personal life.
Divide into themes – When you divide your days, weeks, and months into themes, you automatically take thinking about what to do during a given time period out of the equation as work. This gives you extra time because you can get right down to the tasks you need to accomplish in your business. For example, Monday might be a self-publishing day, Tuesday might be a networking day, Wednesday might be a client project day, etc.
Time Management – Knowing how to effectively manage your time and plan your workday and personal time accordingly will give you plenty of breathing room. It helps to block off parts of your day for only certain tasks, so you know exactly what you need to do at any given time without wasting time thinking about it.
Delegating
You can’t do everything, even if you often feel like it’s your only option. Delegating is a great way to reduce the number of tasks on your slate while moving all those projects forward.
Delegating is not only important for entrepreneurs, but also for students because you don’t always have the time to deal with the huge number of tasks that you have in college. To simplify your life – find the best research paper writing service, here you can get the best writing help and you can get the highest grade for it.
If you have a small number of employees hired, be clear about what their job expectations are and how you want to meet them. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, there are tactics to automate your tasks so you don’t have to do everything yourself.
First, it will always hurt a little when you train your employees how to do certain tasks to free you up for more important responsibilities in your business or free time at home. In the long run, this front-line work will pay huge dividends.
For example, when you hire a new employee, he or she doesn’t know how to use your ordering system. It will take some time to teach them how to understand the area, and that likely means you will have to do more work at first until they reach maximum speed. This may mean longer work for you and even some lag in key training projects for your new employee.
However, once your employee has mastered the skills, they no longer need your guidance; they now take over the job, freeing you up for personal time with friends and family.
The power is in the ability to delegate.
And if you’re documenting training materials needed for new hires or important tasks, that also takes time, but then you can pass those instructions on to future employees. They can study them and refer to them so they know how to perform the duties of their role without needing your direct guidance, which will save you training time and allow you to grow faster.
Learn to prioritize.
Being able to honestly and intelligently determine which tasks require your immediate attention (needs) and which require only wants (wants) will allow you to do the most important tasks so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. This strategy isn’t just an ingenious way to get the most important things done, it will also help you determine what’s really important and what’s not.
When you can prioritise in this way, you’ll be better able to decide what can be put off until later or put off altogether so that you have more time left for your personal life.
The trick to prioritising is that it also requires extra time and advanced work, but you’ll be glad you invested in it when you get the benefit of more time for what you want to do later. As you prioritise, ask yourself whether the task you are doing is really extremely important (read: it can’t wait, or bad consequences will happen) or just important, which means you can put it off because you still have some leeway.
The more you get into the habit of evaluating your tasks this way and being intellectually honest with yourself, the faster you will come to have a choice about what to do because all the obligatory measures have already been taken. And when you have more choice, you are more in control than ever, and you can decide whether you want to use the extra room to maneuver for self-improvement or to spend time with friends and family.
Minimize distractions as much as possible
During your workday, anything that doesn’t contribute to the effectiveness of your tasks is a distraction. If it prevents you from doing your job properly, it’s a distraction.
The dilemma is that there are more distractions than ever before in our digital world. Here are some of the worst distractions you probably already face:
- Text messages.
- Emails
- Social media
- Smartphone alerts
- Phone calls.
Yes, the above can be relevant to your workday from time to time if it is specifically related to your work. For example, if you’re going to be behind on a delivery deadline for a client project, you’ll definitely need to email your client to let them know ahead of time. As for social media, if you’re using it to promote your business and you’re only using it for marketing during the workday, that’s also justified.
I’m talking about the problems of using the above, such as texting friends or family while working, constantly checking emails while working, using social media to kill time at work, not turning off smartphone notifications, and unnecessary calls during the workday.
Reduce distractions:
- Check your phone only during breaks or at lunchtime.
- Commit to checking email only once or twice during the workday.
- Strictly use social media for work-related purposes, such as increasing popularity on Facebook.
Finding work-life balance
The biggest diligence is that you need to really make that balance work for you. That’s why it’s so important to make final decisions, such as: setting boundaries or not answering them, or dealing with any work-related issues at certain times each day or on certain days (like weekends).
When you set these rules for your approach to things and stick to them, then you can achieve a healthy balance between your business and personal life. Not only will you be more successful, but you’ll take care of yourself and spend time with friends and family.
Find that elusive work-life balance with help:
- Understanding that work-life balance is better.
- Establishing boundaries between your work and personal life.
- Becoming more productive and adjusting systems.
- Handing over busy jobs to those you use.
- Prioritizing tasks and focusing.
- Reducing distractions.
Keep in mind, it can take quite a bit of experimentation to try different methods until you arrive at your own productivity system that works for you and your business. Stick with it until your breakthrough.
Conclusion
Our lives are full of different stages and each of us is at different stages, but the most time-consuming stages of life like going to university or college or work, even more of our time can be taken up by launching our personal business.
All of these things are undoubtedly important to us as individuals
It is undoubtedly important for all of us to learn new things and improve our knowledge and skills. But we should not forget about our health, both physical and psychological. Rest is one of the key things that help us stay healthy, as well as our personal life and communication with family and friends.
