Business owners can find getting the balance between work and home quite hard. When it’s your own business you tend you pour hours into it, sometimes letting your home life suffer. If you’re passionate about it, and something you care about, it’s hard not to. Especially when it’s what you and your family survive on to live.
For those in a normal job, finding family time can be a lot easier. Everyone is different, and certain situations may stress some people out more than others. Here are some tips to help you get the balance right. They may not work for you, but they can help you shift your perspective a little and potentially come up with more ideas.
1. Don’t Burn Out.
You might think like you’re doing the right thing by pouring hours into your business, but you can overdo it. You might be working too hard, putting too many hours in. If it is a physical job then you might end up hurting yourself. If you’re a vital driving force in your business, to the extent where it couldn’t exist without you, this could be a catastrophe where you end up looking for help with bankruptcy.
Stay healthy. Don’t work yourself to sickness. Because doing that could be worse for your business. Try to stick to relatively safe hours if at all possible. It isn’t always easy, but it’s better to put the hours in when you have to and then coast, rather than constantly dump all of your time into it and get sick.
2. Don’t Take Work Home.
This is so easy to say but so hard to do! Don’t take it home if you can help it. If you operate under business hours try to adhere to them. You’d be better off leaving your laptop at your place of work. If your place of work is your home, lock it in your study! When your first start doing this you might be a little restless, but after a while you’ll get used to it. Keep the phone calls and emails in the office and you’ll get a proper break at home. Sometimes this might not be possible, but during business as usual this should be the case.
3. Manage Expectations.
This includes expectations of your family, and of the people you work with. Your family needs to know you’re running your own business which comes with huge pressure and responsibilities. If they understand why you’re not always there, then they can accept it a little better. The same for the people you work with. This could be employees, other staff, suppliers, partners, etc. They need to know what times you’re available and what times are simply impositions. Lay out these borders clearly so the two lives don’t bleed into each other. People find this difficult if they work erratic hours, which is fair enough, but you can still do it and when your family and work contacts get used to it everything becomes a lot more easier. If people know what to expect of you, it all becomes a bit easier.
