Maintaining a work/life balance is easy when you’re a sole trader, right? You typically work from home and you have no one else to answer to, so it should be easy to switch off.
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. In fact, many home-based sole traders struggle to strike a healthy work/life balance because the lines are more blurred.
Ella Legg, founder of copywriting consultancy Ella Smith Communications, knows how difficult it can be to strike that balance, having experienced it firsthand.
Here are her top 9 tips for achieving and maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
1. Play to your strengths
Don’t try and be all things to all people. Focus on your strengths and outsource the others. If you’re not a whiz at accounts or graphic design, outsource them instead of wasting time.
2. Prioritise your time
You may have a to-do list with 50 tasks on it, so you need to prioritize those tasks into four categories.
They are:
- Urgent and important
- Important but not urgent
- Urgent but not important
- Neither urgent nor important.
3. Know your peaks and troughs
Are you a morning person?
If you are, assign tough, high-concentration tasks to the mornings. Don’t leave the tough tasks until its night time and vice versa.
4. Plot some personal time
When personal issues arise, it can be tempting to bury yourself in your work. Don’t do it If you don’t make time for your personal life – your “me” time, including your family and your health – you won’t have a business to go back to.
5. Have set work hours – and stick to them
Set work hours for yourself and do everything in your power to stick to them. Otherwise, before you know it, you’ll be working until midnight every night.
6. Manage your time, long term
Create a timeline of your activities. Specific computer programs can help with this, or you can customize your own Excel spreadsheet or Word table.
Put dates across the top and activities down the side. Break each task into components.
Include family commitments – such as holidays, birthday parties, etc. – so you don’t forget that you are unavailable for work on those days.
7. Make your workspace work for you
Working for yourself does tend to require long hours and not much downtime, so invest in equipment that will support you.
That includes getting a comfortable chair, an ergonomic keyboard, a support stand for your laptop, etc.
An ergonomic assessment of your workspace is worth every cent.
8. Tap into technology
Instead of driving to a meeting, use Skype or conferencing technologies like GoToMeeting. But remember to switch them off.
9. Make exercise a must-do, not a should-do
It’s easy to cancel the gym, the evening run, or the yoga class because a client wants something done yesterday.
Instead, ensure the exercise is given as much priority as your clients and making money. A healthy body means a fresh mind, which means you will function better and complete tasks in less time.
Source:
Roche
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