5 Tips to Have a Better Work-Life Balance as an Entrepreneur

If you’re anything like me, you likely started your business to get a better life-work balance.

And being your own boss, and working remotely from home has some major benefits, but it can also make it harder to maintain a healthy work-life balance as an entrepreneur.

Overstretching yourself, overworking and burnout are real (trust me, I’ve done all three!). So when running your business from home you do need to be more conscious about your work routines and habits to avoid burning yourself out.

I’m sharing my 5 best tips that help me maintain a healthy work-life balance as an entrepreneur in this post. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, these tips and tricks will help you get your balance back on track.

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1) Set Your Boundaries

Having healthy boundaries is critical in both life and business. They are how you define what you will and won’t do, and communicate to others how and what you want to work on.

However, as entrepreneurs, it can be easy to slip into not setting - and definitely not holding - your boundaries, especially when it comes to clients and customers. However, by not setting and upholding out boundaries we end up doing a major disservice to both ourselves and those we serve. Because when we’re overstepping our boundaries we are also often resentful, upset and overstretched which doesn’t exactly lead to us doing our best work, does it?

If you are a bit wobbly on our boundaries, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Have a set time that you start and stop working and communicate that on your website, email footer and in client conversations

• Decide ahead of time the type of work you are willing to do before offering solutions to clients. Having Productized Services can be a great way to share your set offers with clients before ever hopping on a sales call.

• Don’t feel you have to say ‘yes’ to things right away; sometimes, you might need to consider something for a night before jumping in (and then regretting saying yes later)

• Have pre-prepared scripts ready to handle tricky client & customer interactions. My friend Meneske has some amazing canned responses for just this inside of the Crap Sandwiches Customer Service Templates*!

2) Ask for Help

As a CEO and business owner, it’s important to know when to ask for help. We all need help sometimes and collaborating, or hiring is essential for business growth.

Look for business networks, memberships, mastermind and communities to connect with like-minded peers to help support you as you grow your business.

Or if you prefer more direct, 1:1 support consider booking in an Untangling Session where we can unravel whatever’s got you feeling stuck and craft a clear plan to move forward taking your goals and life circumstances into careful consideration.

3) Take Breaks

It’s easy to get into hyper-focus when working on something you’re passionate about. And as an entrepreneur, a lot of what you do is hopefully tied to your passion, so it can be tough sometimes to take the regular breaks your brain and body need to recharge.

Adding a regular schedule of breaks throughout your work day is a great place to start. Or if you tend to go off-schedule or struggle with sticking to a set rhythm, you could try setting alarms on your phone to remind you to take a pause.

4) Map Out Your Weeks & Days

If you’re running your business around your life, whether you have caregiving responsibilities or need extra time & flexibility to accommodate your own mental or physical health, you may not be able to fully control your schedule or know when or how much you’ll get to work each week.

However, having an idea of what you want to accomplish each day and week is a great way to set realistic priorities when you sit down to work.

I much prefer to set goals and projects to work on rather than deadlines and timelines since I personally can’t predict what my schedule will look like ahead of time.

I actually teach my whole adaptable planning process that works super well for business owners with a lot of life stuff going on inside my Elastic Planning Workshop.

Here’s how I map out my goals for the week:

1. Take a look at the projects, schedule, and tasks you’d like to accomplish for the week

2. Identify which of tasks are most urgent and important so you can prioritize those first

3. Then rank your other tasks and projects in order of importance, and the amount of time or energy they’ll take to complete

4. Sketch out a rough plan for when each of those tasks could be accomplished throughout the week, considering first any life commitments and your own capacity as you allocate work into your schedule. If possible, try to clump similar tasks together to avoid lots of task-switching which can be more energetically draining than sticking with one type of work for a period of time.

Each day, I then review the goals and tasks set for that day and come up with the priority & workflow. This is a great opportunity to check in with your energy levels to see which tasks to start with first. If you’re full if beans and ready to kick off your day with some deep work, maybe get stuck into a larger project first. Or if you’re a little sluggish or tired, perhaps some more mindless admin tasks are a better way t o ease into your work day.

Of course there will always be urgent or important things that pop up throughout the week, both in your life and work, so do try to remain flexible with your planning and check in regularly with yourself to reassess what’s realistic and sensible to focus your time & energy on next.

5) Check-In With Yourself to Avoid Burnout

Make checking in with yourself a priority. Do a check-in at the end of the week to reflect on how your week went - were you overbooked? Did you try to take on too much? What can you do next week to avoid that?

If introspection isn’t one of your strengths, find a friend or business buddy to check in with regularly so you can keep tabs on your workload, stress levels and overall well-being. This is something I regularly do with my 1:1 clients and is often their favorite part of our regular Voxer chats!

Final Thoughts

Balancing entrepreneurship and all of life’s demands can be really tough. Setting yourself up with clear boundaries, support and systems to maintain a healthy work-life balance is key to your success as both a business and as a human, so do take the time to check in with yourself regularly to make sure you’re well taken care of.

If you’d like to work on shaping your business to better fit around and support your life, go ahead and book in an Untangling Session and we’ll figure out your best way forward together!