Can you ever find balance?
Do you ever find yourself pondering why you can’t find balance?
Balance between work and home? Balance between achieving and rest? Balance between chilling out on instagram and actually folding the washing?
As a small business owner it’s very easy to find that balance between work and home life swings like a seesaw. It can be the same with spending time working ON your business and working IN your business. You can find a lot of time and energy trying to get things perfectly in the middle and find yourself exhausted from the effort.
Perhaps one of the most important realisations that I had when contemplating (fighting with) the idea of balance was it’s just not possible to stay perfectly balanced. That sounds really defeatist but bear with me as I explain through an example.
What are you trying to balance?
As a business owner you have to spend time working IN your business - doing the everyday things that have to happen to keep the business functioning- reacting and responding to enquiries, customer services, people management, packing orders and resources management,. You will also need to spend time working ON your business - anything that enables you to help your business to grow - creating new resources, doing new designs, meeting new clients and marketing.
In the above situation in one day you are unlikely to ever balance between IN and ON. Maybe in one week you will find it hard to find a balance between IN and ON. Maybe balance is less about staying right in the middle every day and more about averaging the middle over a week or a month?
The same can be said for business and home life. There will be some days and weeks where home takes a higher priority and other times when work has to be done and therefore take more of your time and energy. The important thing is deciding how you can find a balance over a time frame you are comfortable with.
How can you work out if things are balanced?
You’ll often know quite quickly if things aren’t balanced. Your patience is shots or you find yourself getting really cross with people or yourself for small things. Normally that’s a sign of overwhelm and that something is either unbalanced or missing.
I’ve found that colouring my week and/or my month can help me see if I’ve got any balance. Below are three working Mum week examples. Purple is ‘me time’, yellow is family needs and blue is working time.
With the colours showing the priority for each half hour increment of the day you can easily see the Monday to Friday balance and some weeks with have more than others and some weeks will be quite balanced. I like how quickly you can see how focus is used.
You can also do this across a month where yellow is family heavier, blue is work heavier, purple is you heavier and green is a good balance in that day
At a really quick galance at your month you can get an idea how balanced things look. Then you can consider whether you need more in one area or another. You might find that work is always just taking more time than you want it to or that you are having to focus on family more than your business can handle.
What can help in that situation?
Using planning, reflection and sometime hiring outside help like a virtual assistant is a really positive step to help you to find a balance in your business. I could say that getting a virtual assistant will save you time but it may be that what it is more likely to do is open up some time where I can be working IN your business whilst you have more time to work ON your business helping it to grow and some time where you choose to do life over work.
Can you ever find balance? In one hour or one day? Maybe not. In a week or a month? With a mindset shift, planning and possibly asking for help - I’d say it’s definitely achievable.
If you’d like help finding that balance in your business, get in touch.