3 Things to Help You Create Work-Life Balance as an Entrepreneur
Creating a work-life balance as entrepreneur is hard. Creating that balance when you work from home is even harder. But it IS possible. It takes a few strategies and some determination to get you there. Let's get started!
(I've got a long video at the bottom if you'd rather just watch the whole thing.)
1. Set a Schedule and Know Your Schedule (and vice versa)
Our lives and businesses have so many moving parts, throw in a spouse and kids, and you can at least triple your responsibilities. As a single gal, I have a little bit more flexibility, but I still keep a full schedule.
I like to prioritize my life first.
Because I want to focus more on the "life" side of things, I know that there are many events and commitments outside of my work that I need to give priority too. One is my other part-time job, so as soon as I get that schedule, I block off those hours/days. The next is church events - I serve every other Sunday and then we have a few community nights throughout the month (here in Atlanta, we have to also factor in driving time!!) The final thing is anything personal - travel, birthdays, girls' nights, workouts, etc.
Then I set my business hours.
After I get everything on the life side as nailed down as possible, I look at what hours I have that week for my business. I set my business hours based on my life schedule because that's where I want to focus my time. If I have a full work from home day, then I like to shut down business when my roommates get home. But there are definitely days when I get off my part-time job at 4p and so then I may work from 5-8p in/on the business.
Now that we've got our scheduled business hours, lets talk about how to use those hours.
2. Know what tasks you do on a weekly/daily/monthly basis.
If you don't know what needs to get done, you'll waste those precious business hours. Grab a piece of paper and answer these questions -
- Do you blog daily/weekly/monthly?
- What does blogging entail for you (graphics, social media scheduling, videos)?
- How many emails do you send each month (and when)?
- Do you have clients?
- What type of work do you do for them?
- What deadlines do you have this week/month?
There are tons of other questions you can ask yourself, but these are a great starting point to get your laundry list going (or grab yours here)
3. Have a place to track it all.
Now that you've answered all these questions and determined your schedule priorities you need to have a place to track them. Up above I showed you my Emily Ley Simplified Planner (the weekly one). But I also use Trello (you can get some great tips from trelloforbusiness.com (not an affiliate link), which is a free software that syncs between my computer, laptop, iPad, and iPhone! I spent a lot of time the other day setting up my schedule in Trello, it took some time but I love it! Here are some screenshots of what that looks like.
It takes a little bit of work to set up recurring checklists (and you can use Butler for Trello too!), but y'all, I know this is going to be huge for me in these next few months!
I know what needs to get done each day for my business and then what needs to be done for clients each day. And since I love checklists, I can tick off those little blocks all day long!
How do you create work-life balance that truly brings joy to your life? I'd love more tips from you!