As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to separate life from work. Your work follows you wherever you go, especially with smartphones, tablets, and lightweight laptops. It can be quite easy to work every hour of the day you aren’t sleeping, which leaves no time to spend with family, friends, or alone. While working is important to make a living, it shouldn’t take over your life. It should only be a part of it. Knowing how to do that will help you start letting go to enjoy life.
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Schedule No Work Time
If you allow yourself to work whenever you can, you’ll work all of the time. However, if you schedule ‘no work time’, you’ll work around it, and actually have time to spend with others or yourself.
You have to be honest with yourself when you do this, so you don’t end up rescheduling time you shouldn’t be working. Ask someone to help you, or schedule a meet up with a loved one that you can’t break.
Pay Attention to How You Feel
Stress will creep up on you when you aren’t taking care of yourself properly. If you’re starting to feel out of control, it’s probably time to step back. Take care of what is front of you, but then close the computer, put away the smartphone and tablet and get away from it all. You can do this at any time, and it’s a good idea to do it daily, if possible.
The more you pay attention to the way you feel, the more you’ll be able to know when it’s time to take a break. The problem with many people, who lose control of the amount of work they do, is that they ignore themselves. This only leads them to feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied with life.
Find Out What You’re Escaping From in Life
Many entrepreneurs working over 12 hours a day are trying to escape something in their life. It could be a bad marriage, the loneliness of being single, or the reality of the financial situation they’ve put themselves in. While it can feel good to escape from life by burying yourself in work, it will only make the situation worse later on. By not attending to the situations you’re trying to escape, they will just worsen. When you finally step away from your work, you’ll be so horrified by what was happening outside of work that you end up very unsatisfied with life. Deal with challenges as they come, and you’ll be better able to balance your life with work because you won’t fear it.
The Better You Feel, the Better You’ll Work
When you’re tired, sad, or unsatisfied with life, you won’t work as well as you would if you are rested, happy, and fulfilled. You want to be successful in life, and the best way to do that is to succeed in life and work. You can do this by attending to both areas of your life. You don’t have to spend the same time working and living life. Some days, you’ll work more than you live, while other days, you’ll live more than you work. As long as you don’t always work or always live, you’ll end up balancing your work and life just as you should to make you happy.
How do you balance work and life?
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles from freedigitalphotos.net
About Carson Derrow
I don’t work from home. The big advantage of that is that I can draw a clear line between work life and home life. Even if I have work that can be done from home, I always go in to the office to do it. This line is important for my balance.