How To Achieve A Better Work-Life Balance For Small Business Owners

Work-life balance is a common goal amongst business owners. However, it is often found to be hard to achieve.

Business owners have numerous responsibilities that will oftentimes spill over into the time they would have allocated to their personal life.

Understandably, it will often seem business owners put more effort and work twice as much as regular employees. Mainly due to the fact that they are building their enterprise, but also because they are continuously working at keeping things running smoothly, on a daily basis.

Whether you are a veteran or a beginner in the entrepreneurial world, we all know businesses face many ups and downs.

Therefore, a good work-life balance can help preserve your reasoning, your mental clarity and emotional state, when met with rising work issues.

The question remains: is it actually possible for business owners to enjoy a work-life balance with so many critical decisions, busy schedules, and various responsibilities? How is it possible for entrepreneurs to achieve a balanced life, and actually enjoy it? If you’re sitting here reading this and don’t think you’re one of them, I’ll let you in on a secret: you are probably lying to yourself.

Set Boundaries

The first step in achieving a balanced work-life is setting boundaries. Many business owners develop feelings of guilt and think they have to be available all hours of the day or work seven days a week to run a successful business.

🚨The lie detector test determined that was a lie.🚨

Boundaries start with you – the business owner. The boundaries you set for yourself is how much of your business will operate. Setting strict boundaries around when and how you choose to communicate with clients, employees, suppliers, etc. have a huge impact around work-life balance. It’s best to be clear on how and when you wish to communicate with your business contacts and set aside time for your personal life. Setting boundaries in business — and learning to stick to them — is an important part of achieving a better work-life balance. Achieving an appropriate balance will be beneficial in the long term success and growth of your small business

What’s next?

After setting up processes and structure that manage boundaries and getting on the journey of better regulating your communication with clients, suppliers or employees, you will then need to create some ground rules for yourself.

Ensure you set some time aside to receive work calls throughout the day, allowing you to interact with vendors and clients. Utilise a calendar to block out time appropriately every week. Carve out time in your schedule to do things for yourself; go to the gym, do some midday networking, plan that vacation day, call your mother (we recommend this one). Anything that brings joy to your day, FOR YOU. This will not only be beneficial for your well being, but reinforce the positivity in entrepreneurship we sometimes seem to forget when we are in the thick of it.

After all, part of the reason you started your own business was for freedom, right?

Develop a list of unacceptable actions that oppose your boundaries. Preserve the list in an accessible area where you can regularly check to ensure you respect your boundaries, such as a post it note on your computer or the notes app on your phone.

Fortunately, these things are easier to do than you might think—just remember to plan accordingly and to set friendly reminders to yourself!

Prioritize Things that are of Importance

The reality is that some business owners tend to focus on things that don’t matter. Often these are areas we are most comfortable in but we’ve hired people to help us with them – so it’s not our job anymore and our business needs us to do more work on the business rather than in it. If your best hours come from the morning hours of the day, make sure to get the highest priority items scheduled into that part of the day.

Implement the 3 P’s

PRIORITISE – choose the most important task you need to accomplish

PUT – that task at the top of your schedule with a realistic time envelope to accomplish it. Then tier down the next tasks entering them in the same manner.

PROMISE – Promise yourself you will stay on point and complete your scheduled tasks. Whenever you hit some adversity refocus on your “why’s”. Why is it so important for you to have this flourishing business? You must be willing to no longer accept your current situation and take action to change it. From now on Be Better Than Your Best Excuse…

If it’s not in your calendar – it’s not important to you.

As business owners, it is all too easy to get caught up in your business and lose sight of the importance of not only your business, but also your personal life. It can be particularly challenging if you are running a small business alone, or with just a handful of employees.

The bottom line is, you have to do what’s best for your business—even if it doesn’t feel good. You will need to say “no” so that you can focus on the truly important issues in your business or on a single project.

Your focus should be on projects, accounts or clients that will bring your business success and learn to let go of the things that can be handled by others. Don’t feel like you have to suffer through unnecessary projects or hard-to-manage clients just because it’s your business; take the steps you need to make your business successful without sacrificing your sanity.

Hire services for Cloud Accounting and Bookkeeping

An extra easy way for you to have a better work-life balance is hiring for services, specifically bookkeeping services, that can help you get some of your personal/work time back. You may spend long hours handling your business finances and bookkeeping and, in the process, waste much of your personal time.

Luckily, you can hire Indigo Bookkeeping to handle all your bookkeeping and cloud accounting and have ample time to spend with your friends and family.

We understand numbers which help you to achieve a robust cash flow. We also offer more innovative and accurate accounting practices that significantly lessen the manual effort on your part.

Did you know? A business requires a rescue job when the bookkeeping is more than four months behind. Cleanup services can help you avoid the mental burden of being behind on your responsibilities.

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