Jake PopistWhen running a business, you’re pulled from pillar to post if you’re not careful. There’s so much distraction too with the UK media full of attention-grabbing stories to pull you away from your busy day, putting you behind even more.
If you’re struggling to run your business without working insane hours, you could benefit from some work-life balance to even things out. Here’s some advice on how to achieve that.
Work-Life Balance Ebbs and Flows
There’s no perfect plan. If you try to have a strict start and end time for your workday, business life will get in the way. It’s best to use a time range, e.g. 9 am to 10:30 am for your start time and work the same way for when your working day is over. This allows for some fluidity when there’s a long day ahead. You can deliberately make the next day shorter to redress the balance.
Life happens. As long as there’s some balance in your daily and weekly life, then you’re getting somewhere. If you’re a workaholic, you’ll eventually burn out and it’s extremely bad for your long-term health too.
Take Time Out of Your Day
Look for pockets of time during your day to take a breather. This is energy renewing and avoids the burnout. While you might not believe it, you get more done in less time when taking regular breaks. There’s also a higher error rate when not taking breaks, which requires extra time (or money) to fix.
As author Jim Loehr wrote in his book, “The Power of Full Engagement”, sustaining high-performance while under stress from heavy workloads requires pacing yourself. Trying to sprint the whole time won’t work; nor will putting 12-hours days, seven days a week to get more done. Loehr should know – he trained busy managers and successful athletes on how to sustain their performance.
Avoiding Taking Work Home with You
Whether your business is as a solopreneur working from a home office or being the owner and operator of a large company, taking work home should be avoided at all costs. Mentally and physically, we all need downtime to recharge and renew. When work stays on our mind, we only get necessary rest when sleeping, and even then, it’s likely to be a restless night’s sleep.
Use an autoresponder for your email out of hours to automatically respond to people who contact you after the day is over. Let them know that you’ll be back in the office to reply the following day. You can also apply a filter to Gmail (or another email app) to alert you if an urgent email comes in from a specific contact that you must reply to promptly. Otherwise, turn off email notifications to get some peace after hours.
Get Help When It’s Needed
To lessen your daily workload, consider adding temporary staff. While your business might not be ready to take on full-time staff right now, potential workers can find temp jobs in London with this app. It’s then easy to find them in the list of available temps, select them and make a booking. The bookings get confirmed within just a few hours of making the request.
Temps allow you to be flexible and adaptable to different kinds of work assignments. They don’t hold a vice grip on a job description and question assignments that fall outside of it. Having temporary staff for times when business picks up avoids your work-life balance going out the window.
Achieving good work-life balance relies on your ability to be mindful of when your workload just doubled suddenly. Mindfulness is key here.
Jake Popist
