Public Service Announcement: It’s your business and it’s your life. The best place to start is by designing your business to fit you personally.
If you’ve come out of a corporate or a traditional business model, you are probably accustomed to a 9-5 (or maybe 7-7?) workday. When I jumped into my entrepreneurial career, I kept to that schedule like a madwoman, and never questioned it. Keeping to a hard-charging schedule was the essence of productivity, wasn’t it? My fear was that if I wasn’t logging the hours, I was not going to get to where I wanted to go.
With age comes wisdom, and after multiple rounds of burn out, and quite a few grey hairs, I’ve changed my perspective.
Work/life balance (a myth right there) is an ongoing negotiation, but you need to begin somewhere. Start by putting a few stakes in the ground for the aspects of your life and biz that are the most important to you, and make them non-negotiable.
For me, it’s 3 things:
Working out. I started working with a personal trainer in the last few months. It felt self-indulgent, vain, and it cost a pretty penny But here’s the thing: I’m in it for the long haul. I hope to live a very long time and I’m the full-time caregiver for my husband. I want to be as healthy and fit as I can well into my 90’s. I had to make a commitment to that long view. I know I work best when I have some accountability and a mentor. I’ve done that in my business life, and I saw that I needed it in my personal life as well. So I’m plunking down hundreds of dollars a month and showing up. Not just for my training sessions, but working out or at least walking almost every day on my own as well.
Honoring my energy cycles. I am an early, early bird. I am at my best, most creative and clear thinking at 7 am. I’m fairly spent after about 3 pm. I’ve mapped out my daily and weekly calendar (more on that next week) to fit that cycle. I start my day at 7. I take a lunch break at noon. I quit at around 3. I don’t work on Friday afternoons because I’m already in “relax mode. I don’t work nights – ever. That’s when I magically turn into a wife and mother and can barely remember what’s going on in my business. But I do work some weekend mornings if I feel like it. That’s my design!
Family time. This will differ for all of us, but unless you build it into your schedule, it’s going to slip away or be given a lower priority. Every year I block out planned family vacation time. When my kids were smaller, I blocked out every event that I knew about – school plays, field trips, days off, birthday parties, etc. These became un-moveable blocks of time in my schedule (for the most part…there are always exceptions). Evenings, (for me that’s after 3 pm,) are for family. I plan and cook dinners, spend time just hanging out with them without thoughts of business creeping in. It’s cherished time and I don’t take it lightly! Down time – being completely away from biz refreshes me for the next day.
These 3 changes have been game changers for me. I had to give myself permission to make my work life fit into my personal life. Not the other way around.
Next week I’m going to go into more detail on this principle: How to map out your week and month to fit your business and life for the most efficient, productive and powerful results. Plus a happy life. Stay tuned!