Many of us sought to become entrepreneurs because of the time and money freedom it provided. It was a sure-fire way for us to contribute to our families in a positive way, maintain our sense of self, and still have the flexibility to work around school and activity schedules for our kids. While working from home certainly comes with lots of benefits, it can also become harder to maintain a healthy work-life balance as an entrepreneur. Burnout is real, and while working from home, we need to be more mindful about our working routines and habits to avoid burnout. I’m sharing the top 5 tips to have a better work-life balance as an entrepreneur in this post. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, these tips and tricks will help you get your balance back on track.
Achieve a Healthy Work-Life Balance as an Entrepreneur
1) Set Your Boundaries
We’ve all heard of ‘boundaries,’ especially when it comes to things like relationships. It refers to that invisible line that you establish between you and another person that cannot be crossed. It’s how you expect to be treated by someone and refers to the behavior you accept from another person.
Boundaries are also important when you talk about a line between business and personal life. Does your boss call you after hours? Are you expected to work on reports or take your work home with you? When you work at a physical location away from home, the difference is a little more clear between what’s work and what’s not. However, it’s easy to not set or stick to your boundaries when you are building a business and love what you do.
It’s important to protect your energy and set some boundaries to have a much more productive, and pleasant, experience while working remotely.
Here are a few boundary ideas that might work for you:
- Have a set time that you stop working
- Create a morning routine that doesn’t involve checking your phone or email immediately
- When you are done working for the day, turn off ALL phone notifications
- Don’t say ‘yes’ to things right away; sometimes, you might need to consider something for a night before jumping in (and then regretting saying yes later)
2) Ask For Help
As a CEO and business owner, it’s important to know when to ask for help. We all need help sometimes and collaborating, or hiring is essential for business growth.
Many of us started out as solopreneurs in our business. It was easier maybe because we were learning and didn’t have the overhead to outsource different tasks. As our business grows and we become busier, it doesn’t make sense to continue to try to do all the things. Consider hiring a VA or an OBM to help alleviate some of what you are doing day to day or to help you manage larger projects so you can stay in your zone of genius. You can check out my best tips for hiring here.
Similarly, you can also ask for help at home. If your children are old enough they can pitch in with tasks at home like laundry, dinner, or simple cleaning. You may also consider hiring someone to help with deeper cleaning tasks or running errands. There are also many grocery stores that offer home delivery and subscription meal services.
3)Take Breaks
Sometimes we can get so involved in our work that we forget to take breaks. Make sure you are making yourself a priority and scheduling breaks throughout the day. If you tend to forget breaks, you might want to start setting alarms on your phone, so you intentionally take those breaks.
There are also apps you can install on your phone or desktop like the Pomodoro extension that will run for 20 or 25 minutes and then a five minute break. Use this time to stretch and walk around. It will help you avoid muscle fatigue or repetitive strain injuries.
Taking scheduled breaks and blocking your work into predetermined time frames with like tasks can be a game changer when it comes to productivity, avoiding burnout, and a healthy work-life balance. You’ll also know that focused time is well-spent on your work, so you won’t feel like you need to borrow from your personal time in order to complete your business tasks. You can read some other productivity tips here.
4) Map Out Your Week
At the start of the week, take a look at your projects, schedule, and tasks for the week. Then, you can start to move things around to try to batch as much as possible. You actually get more done this way. For example, if you have a lot of graphic design tasks throughout the week – move them all to the same day, unless something is time-sensitive.
I love to use ClickUp to schedule my week and keep my to-do list focused on business and client tasks. I can easily switch between views and see at a glance grid, list, kanban, or calendar views and know what’s coming up on different days. Of course, I’m careful not to conflict anything with my personal appointments or family activities.
5) Check-In With Yourself to Avoid Burnout
Make checking in with yourself a priority when striving to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Do a check-in at the end of the week to reflect on how your week went – were you overbooked? Did you try to take on too much? What can you do next week to avoid that?
It’s important to be honest with yourself when doing this self-reflection. Sure, we all want to grow our businesses and we all want to spend time with our families, but you can’t run yourself ragged doing so. You’ll only end up burnt-out and resentful if you continue to try to do everything yourself without rest or help.
If you’re feeling way too overwhelmed with the back-end of your business or your day-to-day business operations, I work with entrepreneurs like you to help you streamline, organize, and automate your business. You can schedule a complimentary consultation with me here to learn more.
