Work Life Balance

Whether your chill out time is; reading a book, going to the gym, spending time with your children, taking a walk or like me playing with my dog in a sunny garden – it’s important to ensure you do it!

This advice is coming from a workaholic! I would walk into my office and disappear into the black hole; I would only reappear weary eyed hours later.  Don’t get me wrong I love what I do, but after years of doing this day in day out, long hours and weekends, I was losing sight of why I was working at all – surely that is to be able to do the nice things – like playing with my dog.

Whether you have been working for yourself for many years or you are looking to start out on a new business venture, remember that work-life balance is an important aspect of a healthy work environment. Maintaining a work-life balance helps to reduce stress and helps prevent burnout.  Chronic stress is one of the most common health issues in the workplace – don’t let your business be one of these statistics!

A good work-life balance can enable you and your team to feel more in control of your working life and lead to benefits for the business overall whether this is:-

• a happier, less stressed workforce leading to increased productivity
• less instances of sickness and absenteeism
• greater employee loyalty, commitment and motivation, because staff feel valued

But how do you achieve this?

Work-life balance for anyone means having great time-management skills. If you allow your workday to drag on, you’re stealing precious leisure and family time.

There are various techniques you can use for time management, here are just a few:

Default Diary – You book in blocks of time to do specific tasks and at specific times.

Allowing you to be more structured with your workday and the jobs / tasks that must be completed.  It will stop you procrastinating on that job you know needs to be done, but don’t really want to do it (often your bookkeeping!).

Another way of ensuring you can dedicate time to a task – especially if you are in an open plan office is ‘Red Flag’ – a way of making sure people know you are ‘Do Not Disturb’ for a period of time.  Messages can be taken for you – don’t forget if you are in a meeting you can’t take that call – this is the same, treat your Red Flag time as a client appointment and don’t cancel it!

To Do List & Delegate – Learn to love a to-do-list, not only do you get great satisfaction from crossing off a completed task, but it will allow you to truly see what needs to be done, set priorities and deadlines and delegate those tasks that can be done by someone else, freeing up your time to dedicate elsewhere, or taking that much needed break!

Maybe you don’t have a team yet to take away some of your workload, consider a subcontractor to help you – for example look at the tasks you have to do, what do you not enjoy doing:

• Bookkeeping? – use an accountant
• Marketing? – use a marketeer
• Administration? – use a Virtual Assistant

Consider how long it takes you to do that task, and work out whether the cost of paying someone else to do it for you – free’s up enough time for you to work other tasks that make more money – or allowing you more time to be able to relax, recharge your batteries ready to be more productive.

5-Tips for Better Work-Life Balance While Working Remotely

If you work in an office, the travelling provides a barrier between workplace and home.  However, if you are working from home, which can have massive advantages, it is much harder to separate that time between work and personal life – so it is probably more important to be dedicated to making this happen:

1. Get up, get dressed, do your hair (and makeup) – just like you would if you were travelling into an office environment. Feeling prepared for work allows you to have that right mindset.
2. Design a home office space that separates life from work.
3. Use a default diary to help structure your work day
4. Avoid sitting at your home office space on weekends (or days off).
5. Make sure to take a lunch break.

See my next post for benefits of processes to help with time management, productivity and efficiency…

How Can Whitley Morgan help you?  Together with a strong financial background we are able to support you and your business bringing your ideas to reality.  With 25+ years’ experience in starting, building, growing, franchising and selling companies we provide training, advice, support and guidance to businesses either starting up or established firms that look to increase their service/product range or improve an area to help the company grow.  For more information please visit www.whitleymorgan.co.uk