“According to the annual Women In the Workplace report from McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org, which polled more than 65,000 North American employees, 42% of women and 35% of men reported feeling burned out often or almost always in 2021.” Time.com
You may have seen our previous blog about the inevitable enemy: burnout. We know it all too well. In that blog, we went over tons of different tools that help to avoid burnout or even pull yourself out of it.
However, we omitted a very important aspect in the art of avoiding burnout, simply because it is such a significant part that it deserves its very own blog about it: work-life balance.
As a small business owner, it is especially challenging to find the right balance between your business self and your personal self. Since they’re so closely intertwined, it feels like an impossible web to detangle.
The first step to detangling this web is to simply… not treat it like a web anymore. Take a clean cut right down the middle and separate your work goals and your life goals that you can work on at different times.
At work, the key is to not overpromise. It is best to set reasonable and manageable goals for every day. This is so that you still get a good amount of tasks done in the day while not feeling the need to come home and complete any unfinished work. Additionally, being open to asking for flexibility and understanding with difficult and/or time consuming tasks is key to making sure you don’t feel pressured to minimize your personal time. Be realistic in the amount of time you know you need so that you can ask for it rather than promising a deadline that is unattainable.
And while this may seem counterintuitive, take breaks! Allowing yourself a bit of time in the day to look away from the screen and reset is the perfect way to refuel your mind and body and optimize yourself for completing the rest of the day’s work. We recommend the Pomodoro technique.
At home, the key is to prioritize yourself. Don’t bring work home with you, simple as that. Turn off your notifications, don’t bring home any work-related technology or paperwork, and completely unplug from work responsibilities. Additionally, refine the quality of your personal time so that you have something to look forward to at the end of every day! Set goals for yourself, whether they’re financial, familial, mental, etc.
Prioritizing what makes you happy is going to help develop a solid foundation of who you are outside of work, rather than seeing your offtime as simply the time period before your next shift.