Are you just crazy madly busy at the moment? Do you feel that you are juggling so many balls and just praying that they stay in the air and don’t all come crashing down? It’s a common theme I’m hearing amongst my SME colleagues and friends at this time of year and we all know why – our work/life balance is out of kilter!!
When you are a solo entrepreneur or “solopreneur” you manage everything yourself – selling new products and services to give you billable revenue for the future months, delivering the services that you have already sold plus all the associated admin work that comes with running a business – bookkeeping, invoicing, quoting, writing proposals, marketing, PR and Social Media. Each one of those tasks is a full-time job in itself and I haven’t even mentioned putting time aside to brainstorm and plan your company growth! Plus of course, my all-time favourite – customer service! You need to nurture and spend time with your existing customers too.
But how do you manage your time to make sure that you are still getting a good work/life balance and making sure that you give yourself some precious “down” time??
These last few weeks I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, selling and delivering work and also trying to carve out time to spend with my young son. I haven’t been succeeding on the latter! I mean, that’s the reason why I left the corporate world in the first place – to run my own show and be able to spend quality time with my lovely boy as he grows up.
So, time to get that balance back by designing my own life. But how do I set and enforce the boundaries that I want to live by but also get everything done that I need to do? By making small adjustments to my everyday – the small things matter. With the smallest investments in the right place, I can make a real difference.
So, here are my 5 “small things”:
(1) Make sure that I do something mentally relaxing every day – be that walking the dogs or having a quick coffee with a friend. It doesn’t have to be all morning or I will start to panic about time lost but just 20 mins/half an hour to give me time to pause for breath!
(2) Get more sleep. We all know that sleep deprivation impacts mental ability and falling asleep on the keyboard isn’t productive!
(3) No phones at bedtime – put the phone on sleep mode. Emails can wait until the morning.
(4) Keep my sense of humour – laughter is most definitely the best medicine.
(5) Hug my son every day.
I’ll let you know how I get on!
