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You have to generate income to survive. The fact is that if you don’t work, you can’t pay the bills. It can be hard for anyone to keep a healthy work-life balance, but that’s especially true when you’re the one that owns the business!
If you don’t take an active role in creating your work time and your personal time, the work can go on 24 hours a day. This article addresses what a work-life balance is, how to live harmoniously and why that’s important, how that can be different for entrepreneurs, and gives some tips on how to make sure a franchisee isn’t neglecting family or other aspects of their personal life in favor of their franchise.
Work Life-Balance and Why it Matters
Yes, work-life balance matters as a call-to-action for all of us in the marketplace. The reason for balancing what we do all day is to live a fulfilling life. While this concept is well-founded, in this post we expand the concept to include living your whole life, how to balance life and business, in harmony.
Harmony, as cited in dictionary.com, means “a pleasing arrangement of parts” and “any simultaneous combination of tones.”
Your life is made of different parts, yes? Your concerns (or tones) include work, family, spirituality, social time, education, play, and more. So the even more important question than how to balance life and business is how to live your life harmoniously. How do you take care of all your concerns as needed from day to day?
In the real world, we’re trying to take care of multiple things at the same time, and we can’t consider one aspect of our lives to be more important than another. If we stop taking care of one concern or if we minimize its importance, we suffer; harmony is lost.
Keep reading to learn how business owners are even more susceptible to suffering when trying to balance or harmonize their lives. You’ll pick up some tips that will help alleviate the suffering and enable more peace and joy.
The Difference for Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs are workers on steroids. People choose to become entrepreneurs for many reasons: wanting to change the world, not wanting a boss, enjoying the risks involved, and more. With over 400 million entrepreneurs internationally, there is something different about entrepreneurs that makes them want to run their own show. However, that “something different” can also give them an extra dose of discord in their lives.
Why do they experience more discord than harmony? Entrepreneurs and franchisees like you become the ultimate responsible party for everything. Everything good that happens is attributed to you, and everything bad that happens is accountable to only you. So, entrepreneurs live in a world they feel they must control at all times. This need to control leads to 24-hour days between being physically present at your business and mentally at your business when you’re not there. Living your life without “a pleasing arrangement of parts” soon makes your life more difficult and can negatively affect your life in the following ways:
A diminished social life - when you’re living life without balance or harmony your time with friends and family is usually the first thing to go.
Filling any kind of free time with work - there will always be more to do with no end in sight.
Missing important events - honestly, how many family and friend events have you missed because you felt you were needed at work?
Becoming physically out of shape - spending all your time at work cuts into the time you could be working on your physical health. It’s important that you stay healthy; have good blood pressure, low cholesterol, good muscle mass so you can continue to have the energy and stamina needed to run your business.
Becoming depressed - too much work without harmony with the rest of your life’s concerns can lead to depression and anxiety.
Losing important relationships - what is the purpose of being an entrepreneur and making money if not to have a good life with friends and people you love? Living without balance and harmony can lead to hard losses.
Tips to Balance Life and Business
Learning to balance life and business in a harmonious way is achievable. So, how can business owners find balance at work? You may choose to open a home-based franchise. Either way, use the following tips to help bring balance and harmony back into your life:
Prioritize Your Time
When balancing life and business, prioritize. Think about what really matters. What actually makes a difference in your life? Where have you made promises you need to keep? Most of us throw everything together, have long unattainable “to do” lists, and are always lamenting that we can’t get everything done. You don’t need to get everything done.
Start by prioritizing the promises you need to keep to others: family, customers, suppliers, etc... Your promises affect them because they probably rely on your commitments in order to do what they need to.
You will find that just keeping your promises makes a big difference in your feeling of balance and harmony. Once your promises are kept you may find that other tasks become easier to manage.
Set goals and stick to them. Use the SMART goal formula. Make sure all your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Create a master list every day of all your “to-dos”. We recommend that you make this list the old-school way, by hand. Label your promises (remember those?) with a star. The star means you will get that item done that day. Carry the list with you and check off what you complete as you go. At the end of the day or the beginning of the next put a “T”, for transfer, next to what you didn’t get done, go through the list and make sure that your starred items are checked because you completed them, and start your next day list with a star next to your promises for the day and carry the “T” items from the previous day to the list.
Your list becomes a running history of all your actions and allows you to track progress. This practice will help you feel relieved and closer to a life-business balance.
Delegate When Possible
It’s very difficult for many entrepreneurs to delegate or appoint tasks for someone else to accomplish. They have some notion that they have to do it all. This is because most entrepreneurs are smart, creative, strong-willed, and have a vision of what they want. The idea of losing control by giving others the reins is common. If you do everything yourself, living harmoniously will evade you.
As an entrepreneur, you probably have employees and a network of help lined up to support your vision and efforts. Use them.
Delegate what you don’t need to do, because someone may be able to do it just as well. For example, delegate bookkeeping, accounting/tax prep, social media management, employee scheduling, store/office clean up, technical support, etc.
Schedule Everything
Scheduling allows you to plan in advance how you choose to spend your time. You are in charge of how you will move toward accomplishing your goals. Scheduling gives you a visual of your day so you can avoid distractions and be better prepared for what to do when the unexpected happens, which it always does.
Depending on your business, scheduling can also help you plan and keep costs down. If you work with people on a contract basis and hourly wage, scheduling helps you keep track of expenditures and stay within budget.
Embrace the Challenge
Being an entrepreneur has its perks—working for yourself, setting your own schedule, the opportunity for making good money, making a difference in your community, possibly leaving a legacy for your children, and many more.
With these perks also come the challenges such as the balance of life and business. We’ve shown you that many of the challenges can be met with good practices, good help, and a willingness to grow and learn. As a franchisee, you’ve chosen to get the perks, so embrace the challenges. It can be well worth it.
Find a franchise that can help you achieve the work-life balance you are looking for! Get started with Franchise123 today.
