#280 3 Tips to Set Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
Let’s talk about boundaries.
Fostering a healthy work-life balance is really hard, especially as a small business owner. When your work is your passion, it’s so easy for the boundaries between your work life and your personal life to become blurred.
If you can relate to this, you’re not alone! This is a problem the majority of employees in the United States deal with.
When you’re the CEO of your own business, there can be even MORE pressure to work longer, harder, and on weekends and holidays.
Unfortunately, that’s a one-way ticket to burnout. Been there, done that – it’s not worth it.
While it’s an ongoing process to find the perfect work-life balance, it’s never too late to reevaluate and start setting boundaries in your business.
Here are 3 important ways you can establish work-life boundaries ASAP…
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Set Communication Guidelines
Do your co-workers, employees, and clients know your office hours? If you’re thinking, “Office hours? What office hours?” now is probably a good time to reevaluate.
Having a complete “open door” policy might not always be the best idea for your business. It puts more stress on you and makes it more challenging to develop a healthy work/life balance.
Instead, set your ideal working hours and be flexible only when it’s needed.
Most importantly, communicate these hours to your team and let them know the appropriate expectations and steps to take if they have questions or concerns in off-hour periods.
Schedule “Me Time” In Your Calendar
Work meetings with clients and employees should always be a high priority, but how often do you find yourself canceling or “rescheduling” time for friends, family, hobbies, and self-care?
For busy entrepreneurs, this is often one of the first boundaries to erode.
Try treating personal time like a work meeting – literally schedule it into your calendar. After all, it’s just as important.
Seeing it in writing makes it harder to cancel and serves as a reminder to take your personal wellbeing seriously. Time away from work to recharge is vital to show up as your best self for your biz.
Get Comfortable With the Word “No”
Have you fallen into the trap of saying “yes!” to everything, even if you don’t truly have the bandwidth for it?
Flip the script on the word no: Saying no allows you to show up as your very best self to the commitments you’ve already made.
You have to make a conscious effort to block out time and energy to invest back in yourself. After all, you’re the visionary, the artist, the genius behind the business!
Establish your top priorities/areas of focus for your life and biz – if a proposed opportunity doesn’t fit those priorities or get you excited, it’s 100% okay to say no.
And “No.” is a complete sentence.
xo, Tracy
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