Do you remember when you first started your business? If you were anything like me, you LOVED it. Like me, you probably still do.
In the early days, I spent every spare moment working on and in my biz. Holidays were spent away from the day-to-day running of my business but still planning for the future of it.
I must admit it’s still a bit like this. I did most of my 2016 planning while on an overseas holiday with my husband recently. After 5 days of not thinking about business, I was ready to dive in deep with a clear mind and fresh ideas, so the final few days of the holiday were spent writing, writing, writing. It was truly invigorating.
But back in the early days, working on the business itself would have been considered “down time”. It was that enjoyable. And definitely still is, but I’ve learned that as a business sucks a lot of energy and creativity, it’s crucial to revitalise in ways that don’t have anything to do with business.
I found that working on the business didn’t quite cut it for “down time” and I actually needed to schedule in regular total breaks from any kind of business work or planning.
As we head in to a new year, I’m hearing a lot about work-life balance. This happens every year about this time. People reflect on the year that’s been and lament that their balance wasn’t really there, but they have high hopes for a better year ahead.
Maybe you were really awesome at the work-life balance thing during the past year (if you were, leave a comment and tell me what made the difference!). Or maybe you were more like me and hit it sometimes, but also kind of sucked at it from time to time.
What can I say, I’m a work in progress 🙂
One thing I did feel worked really well this year was my strategy for regular down time. As mentioned above, at first, business WAS my down time, then after a while that got a bit stale and I realised I needed actual REAL down time. So I put systems in place to make this happen.
Systems to help me relax when I was meant to be relaxing.
Systems to help me walk away and let it go.
Systems that would allow my business to keep working even if I wasn’t.
You can read more about my systems HERE.
If more work-life balance is on your radar for 2016, I hope that these strategies will give you something to implement right away.
Remember, even just taking off one day a week can make a big difference.
When planning for better work-life balance in 2016, remember not to just say “I’m going to have better work-life balance”. You actually need to get really specific about exactly WHAT you are going to do and HOW you are going to do it.
This is how mine looks.
WHAT: Sunday will be a total digital detox day.
HOW: By asking my family to keep me accountable!
Now over to you, what specific things will you do this year to enjoy better work-life balance?
