5 Tips For Having a Healthy Work-Life Balance

As entrepreneurs and business owners, it’s very easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of work. It’s normal to want to work longer hours than you would at a 9-5 job because it’s your business so you want to make sure that everything runs smoothly and gets completed on time. Although this may initially seem great for your business, if you work yourself too hard or burnout, it’s going to have the opposite effect on your business, so it’s very important to have a healthy work-life balance.

“You can’t do a good job if a job is all you do.”

— Katie Thurmes

How do you achieve a healthy work-life balance when you run your own business?

Here are 5 tips that I use to make sure I have a good balance so that I can enjoy spending time with my family whilst ensuring that my business thrives:

1) Turn off notifications

If you use your personal phone for work, you should turn off your notifications at a certain point in the evening and turn them back on in the morning once you’ve had breakfast. This will give you the freedom that you need so that you are not constantly seeing work-related notifications on your phone. If you have a specific phone for business, you can simply switch it off in the evening time.

2) Use work email over your personal email

You should only use your work email when it comes to speaking with clients, customers and your team, and don’t add this email to your phone. This means that when people email you out of hours, you won’t see the email unless you are in your office, so it really helps to prevent you from getting distracted during those all-important family times.

3) Set designated work hours

Having designated work hours has multiple advantages from helping you to stay productive and organised, ensuring that you have a certain number of hours every week that you can spend with your family and friends.

4) Take weekends off and holidays

Weekends and holidays are essential to maintaining a good balance. You need weekends to recuperate from a hard week at work. They give your brain and your body the rest that it needs. Having holiday off will also provide you with that much needed time away from the office, and allow you to really enjoy spending time with your family.

5) Use systems to work smarter

If you have the right systems in place, it’s a lot easier to spend less time at the office, knowing that everything is running efficiently and work is still getting done, even when you aren’t there. I recommend using a scheduler for posting on your social media channels such as ContentCal as this will allow you to be present on social media even when your phone is switched off. You can use management systems such as Trello to help with keeping your team organised and staying on top of projects. You can use Trello to delegate tasks to your team so that everyone knows what they are doing, even when you aren’t in the office. You should also consider using an email automation system such as MailChimp. Email automation systems will send emails out automatically to your email list, and the best part is you can schedule them and set them upon advance.

Each of these 5 tips will help to provide you with the freedom that you deserve, after all, you didn’t start a business so that you could for it, rather that it could work for you!

My name is Selina Johnson and I'm a Business Support Expert providing Virtual Business Support to businesses. We help SME's with administrative, technical and creative support so you are free to grow your business and increase your profits.

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