adminCongratulations for starting your journey as an entrepreneur!
When you’re just starting off running your own work-from-home business, work can easily take precedence over everything else. After all, this is the newest addition to your family and you are bound to spend more time on it than anything else.
There are many entrepreneurs who want to know how to get a better work life balance. Well, for starters, maintaining a steady work life balance helps you work more efficiently and ensures you get time off to relax and de-stress…and this is important for your general well-being. Today, we are going to share a few tips on how to strike the right balance and make sure you don’t burn out too quickly and too easily.
Take Time Off …and Stay Off
When you are off work, be totally off work – this is the best starting point for how to get a better work life balance. Don’t check your email, not even a glance. Turn off all notifications, that’s right, all of them. Try to not even think about your job, difficult though it may be.
Everything related to your business should be done only during designated “work” time. If you think of something you need to do, put it on your to-do list for the next day. This is the first and most important step for creating the desired work-life balance. It takes a lot of discipline, but allow yourself this simple pleasure and guaranteed, you will be more productive when you get back to your tasks.
Make a Schedule (Even Though You Don’t Need To)
The third pointer for how to get a better work life balance is scheduling. One of the great things about running your own business is that you don’t need to stick to the 9-5 schedule anymore. With no-one peering over your shoulders to ensure that you will meet the deadline, it’s easy to settle into a haphazard routine of completing tasks. In order to maintain an orderly way of tackling the things-to-do list in your business, it can be helpful to create a work schedule. The purpose of this is to encourage you to clarify the division between work and non-work time.
You can also create a ritual for starting and stopping work to make the transition. Set a schedule that works for your business and your life. Your schedule has to be realistic and achievable for the day. If you know that you need to help your children with homework when they return from school, by all means, schedule this in a time slot so that you can account for your time. To increase your success rate, make sure your schedule is flexible enough to accommodate any unforeseen circumstances, yet work oriented enough to inspire you to do your tasks without slacking.
Prioritize Tasks
Prioritising your scheduled tasks plays a major role in securing major breakthroughs in our quest on how to get a better work life balance. One of the main reasons work often spills over into leisure time is that we don’t prioritise effectively and tasks take longer than expected.
When you’re on business time, create a priority list to ensure you get the most important things done well ahead of quitting time. The old adage ‘eat that frog’ comes to mind at this point because this will help you get the biggest and maybe less enjoyable but important task done and dusted.
Learn Time Management Techniques
With only a certain amount of time to spend on your business each day, you have to make the best use of this time. If we were able to, we would negotiate for more hours in a day. Will this address our issue of how to get a better work life balance though? Probably not because it all boils down to how you manage the time you have efficiently and productively.
It’s beneficial to learn some basic time management techniques. For example, decide how long each task should take. This keeps you from spinning wheels and wasting your precious working time. Also look out for ways to delegate, automate, and trim tasks that aren’t totally necessary. A great tip I can offer is, if there is a shortcut…take it, as long as it doesn’t compromise the quality of your business output.
Are there family members or friends who are more proficient at doing certain tasks? If so, to save on time, give them those tasks to do – they might do it in a shorter time and you can use the rest of the time to attack other important activities which your business needs you to do.
Work Efficiently
In addition to time management, think of some ways you can improve your efficiency to get more done during your work day. Try your best to cut out distractions. Set breaks throughout the day to refresh yourself, stretch, make a hot or cold drink and maintain concentration – but put a time limit on them. If there’s something you need to do that’s not related to your business, schedule a time to do it as a break or after work is done.
Let your family know you are unreachable during your work hours (except for emergencies) and stick to your set times. I hope we are getting closer to answering the question of how to get a better work life balance when running a home business.
Learn How to Cope with Stress
The last point to be mentioned when we want to know how to get a better work life balance is the issue of stress. Although we start with the end goal in mind, we can’t take away the stress involved in the day to day running of a business. It is therefore of paramount importance to learn some methods to help you cope with stress when you experience it. Please note that the methods will vary depending on an individual.
You can use little breaks throughout the day or as a way to transition from working to non-working time. Easy ideas include short walks, simple exercises you can do at your desk, or basic meditation techniques. If it helps also, you can have soothing, soft music playing in the background while you work.
There is no perfect work-life balance. It’s something you have to keep working on as you grow your business. It can also change depending on the stage your business is in, but you will get better at it over time. Once you know how to get a better work life balance, it will benefit both your business and your personal life.
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