Photo Credit: Purpose Wood Co.
How to Balance Entrepreneurship with Family Life
Hey, Steve here from Woodpreneur Life. Today we’re going to talk about how to balance entrepreneurship with family life. It is very challenging, but not impossible to balance your family and your entrepreneurship.
Day Chunking
For me, I like to do what I call day chunking. Every day has different themes, my mornings are pretty much the same, I have a routine, and then at a certain time, I do family time for about an hour and a half, and then I get to work. When I’m at work, I’m focused on work.
Whatever my theme is for the day, so for you, it could be an office day, it could be a marketing day, it could be outreach to clients, an in-shop day, or whatever it is. Start to day chunk your time. For example you could set up Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays to be office marketing time such as prospecting. Then Tuesday and Wednesday doing dedicated shop time.
That’s if you’re solo, if you have other people, then they could be working on shop time, getting projects done out the door for clients allowing you to focus on your high value tasks. Once you have time to focus on the high value tasks, you can really make the pivotal jumps and leaps in your business.
The Value of Family
The challenge is that life happens, and you’ve got a family. It is really important that when it’s family time, it’s family time. In my mornings, there’s no phone, no work at all, and the same for family time in the evenings. I cut out at a certain time today to just spend a little bit of time with my family, then I go back to wrap up, and then I’m done for the day. You just need to get to a point where you are done working for the day.
It’s actually best if your family, your wife or husband is on board with your schedule, too. Show them your schedule, show them what you’re planning to do, how are you going to spend time with them, and how that’s going to be dedicated time. Literally leave your phone in another room or leave it in the shop or do something so that it’s not distracting you and you’re not thinking about it.
Once you get to a point where you feel really good about the work that you’re doing during the day, and it’s your high value task, and then the other thing, which we’ll probably do another video about involves outsourcing certain work. You can focus on your high value tasks, the things that only you can do and then outsource the rest. Then you feel good about not working when you’re with your family.
At the end of the day, the thing that I’ve noticed is that the most successful entrepreneurs and Woodpreneurs have good, committed, supportive relationships, and ones that are even more than that. They have harmonious relationships where everybody is happy and thrilled. Not everything is going to be perfect all the time but it will be better once you start compartmentalizing and you are present with your family when you need them.
All right. I’ll see you next time, and thanks so much for reading!