How to Maintain a Work-Life Balance for Small Business Owners

Did you become an entrepreneur so that you can get away from the nine to five grind but are getting crushed by the 40-60 hours you’ve ended up working in your small business?

We are here to help.

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by work. But with these tips, you can move your life-work balance into your favour…

1. Stop doing things you suck at

As a small business owner it can be easy to want to do EVERYTHING in your business.

And although initially you may need to due to a lack of initial cash flow, when you do have some money rolling in, it’s wise to delegate tasks you hate and aren’t good at to other people.

For instance, if you suck at accounting, hire a cloud accountant who can show you where you can save money on your taxes. Or if you suck at networking, hire a sales assistant who can attend networking events on your behalf.

Delegating tasks helps free up hours for you to spend on your personal life and can also improve the efficiency and profitability of your business.

Tip. Calculate how many hours you spent on tasks you aren’t good at for your business in the past month. Now calculate whether delegating this task would be cheaper for you considering the cost of your time per hour.

2. Be responsive not reactive

There are many things pulling for our attention at work, especially email, phone or social media alerts. However if you work more efficiently during set hours, you will have more time to free up for your personal life.

You can be more responsive to your work by practicing doing 50 minute set blocks of work with all notifications off, and check and respond to your notifications for 10 minutes after each 50 minute block is up.

We can generally concentrate for 50 minute blocks of time, so the 10 minute checking interval will allow you to have a break from the 50 minute task.

Tip. Download the app Rescue Time which shows you where you spend most of your time on your computer (eg. On news sites, Facebook, Twitter etc.). Once you know what your habits are, you can manage how much time you spend at work not working.

3. Only check email during set hours

It can be easy to take a peak at your work email during personal hours to check everything is going ok. However if you do this, you’ll find it’s hard to be fully present in your personal life if your mind is still in work mode.

An easy solution is to set a start and end time of your day, and put an out of office message on your email for emergencies out of these hours. This way if something goes wrong, there is a back up plan, and you can then enjoy your personal time with your friend, family or dog.

Tip. Switch off your email alerts at the set time you finish work everyday. If you are still tempted to check your email, use the app https://freedom.to/ that can block your internet for a set number of hours.

4. Book fun personal appointments every day

If you find it difficult to remove yourself from the office, book an appointment you need to attend every evening that will pull you away from work. Perhaps it’s a dinner with your wife, a spin class, or a movie with your dog.

Whatever it is, it will encourage you to work more efficiently during the day, so you can leave on time, and it will feel like a reward for all the hard work you did during the day.

Tip. If you want some ideas for fun appointments, check out meetup.com, bucketlist.org or if you live in Vancouver, BC, boredinvancouver.com.

Balancing life and work can be tough. We get it. Give us a call to find out how we can help you save more time in your accounting, so that you can work on the things that really matter to you.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

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