5 Tips for Balancing Your Business with the Rest of Your Life

 

1. Define your priorities.

What goals must be reached to make your business successful? What tasks are crucial to achieving them?
What goals are essential to the rest of your life? What tasks are crucial to achieving them?

Note: The only things that are important to long-term goals should be considered priorities, though some, such as project deadlines may be urgent, while others, such as business relationship building may have more scheduling flexibility.

Note: In business, what matters most are results...the opposite is true in one's personal life where the amount and quality of time spent is the measure of success.

 

2. Determine areas in which you are constantly overbooking yourself. For example, do you neglect to build in enough travel time when you schedule client visits? Are you establishing unrealistic deadlines for the completion of projects assuming that there will be no unexpected issues to deal with on those projects and that there will be no crisis situations with other clients which require your attention?

 

3. Develop good systems (preferably digital) to schedule your time.

Have you built a calendar to include personal as well as business obligations?
How do you work on the personal calendar with your family or relevant support caregivers?
How are you taking advantage of technology to share parts of your calendar with significant others?
 

4. Organize your life.

How is your business set up so that you can easily find everything you need quickly?
How do you organize your home to minimize stress and maximize quality time with those who are important to you? Examples might be a "command center" where everyone knows to find important documents, cell phone chargers, keys, etc...or picking out clothes for small children and filling their backpacks at night.

Note: According to an Atlanta productivity consultant, if you can eliminate the clutter and maximize efficiency, you will gain between 240 and 290 hours a year.

 

5. Put support systems in place.

What tasks can/have you outsourced or delegated?
How do you communicate with those who are helping you?
How do you say "no"when you need to?
To whom and when do you turn to be a sounding board?