How To Best Balance Your Time As An Entrepreneur

It is no secret. If you want to succeed, you must give up your valuable time for the cause. Finding a good balance between work and life is essential to your health and success. While your venture should be your passion, and should not necessarily feel like work as an entrepreneur is stressful. You must find a way to balance you work and your life to keep from feeling overrun or burning out. It can and has happened to the best. Absorbing these five simple tips is key to making your life run smoothly and enjoyably.

Step 1: Make a Schedule

It sounds like elementary school, but there is a reason that you were taught to plan out your day. Quite simply, without a plan, you just will never get everything done. You will skip things, forget things, start on new projects before old ones are finished. A schedule keeps your day organized. It lets you see how your day will play out. You will know where you can fit a call in, take 30 minutes to complete a task or to attend a meeting. Even just seeing it written out calms you down. Why do you want to remember everything that gets laid upon you. If you really are against scheduling, then maybe try a to-do list. While it is not as rigid, it will still help you track your progress and keep you from forgetting things.

Step 2: Separate your Personal Calls from Business Calls

While this may not seem like an issue, it is probably one of the hardest issues to overcome as an entrepreneur. Most of your friends are slaving away at their less fulfilling corporate jobs and you will be out in the world creating for yourself. Even though to you this means you will be hard at work, to your friends it means that you do not have to go to work. The ones that are free will call and call, inviting you here, saying to meet up there. You need to have the self-discipline to ignore calls from your friends all day, and call them back after the workday. They should understand. If they don’t, their priorities are seriously out of wack or they are just selfish. Remember, while they are hanging out all day now, they will be forced to deal with the repercussions of their choices later.

Step 3: Don’t work when you eat

This may sound stupid, but that iPhone looks really enticing when you away from the office but still waiting for an email from a distributor or an alert about a sale. Taking 45 minutes out of your day to eat lunch helps you relax and refresh. You have just been sitting in an office or at meetings for hours on end, don’t bring the office to your meal. Take a break, release and come back feeling energized and ready to continue pushing forward.

Step 4: Take a random afternoon off if you feel overworked

If you have completed your entire schedule for the day, or are just feeling plain tired, take the rest of the day off. You will come back the next day feeling so much more productive, so the afternoon off will translate to more completed work. There is no reason to sit there slaving away at your job and completing it to only 50% of your ability. Take an afternoon off, play some basketball, see a movie with some friends. You will come back the next day ready to go!

Step 5: Have a place to work, and a place to relax

While young entrepreneurs are sometimes confined to their houses, apartments, etc., having a specific place to work is essential for getting in the right state of mind. When you show up to work, you should be ready to get things done. If you are working on your couch, you will simply be less productive. You will travel from tab to tab on your browser, or only complete tasks halfway. Having a nice work area is key to creating an environment for success. While you can still work away from that spot, you will know that when you are there, you are ready to work and when you leave, you have that option to release. It is all about productivity in entrepreneurship!