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While work-life balance has been part of the public narrative since the 1970s, entrepreneurs still struggle to figure out how to level the scales when it comes to building their businesses while still taking time to enjoy life.
Over the past decade of my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve learned that the same skills that made my business successful have also helped me achieve the elusive balance in my life.
So I come to you with an unusual proposal. Instead of turning off your entrepreneurial mojo in an attempt to achieve balance, increase it. Here are four items I use daily to maintain balance.
Related: 6 Secrets Smart Leaders Employ to Achieve Work-Life Balance
Analyze opportunity costs and trade-offs
Instead of thinking of “equilibrium” as “all things being equal and excellent,” analyze the opportunity costs of the activities you are involved in. Then, determine the tradeoffs you’re willing to make, just as you would in your business.
As entrepreneurs, we understand that everything has a cost. The root of making good trade-offs to benefit your work-life balance is taking time to analyze the opportunity costs of how you spend time, resources, money and energy in relation to all areas of your life.
As an entrepreneur who runs multiple businesses, I actively make decisions about things I’m willing to let go of in my attempt to honor what I care about most. Of course, those decisions can change, but I make decisions without letting outside forces make them for me.
One compromise I made recently was to reduce my relationship with social media. Since one of my companies is a marketing communications agency, this could be seen as a poor compromise since social media is a key vehicle for client marketing. What I discovered was that I was spending too much time on social media as a consumer (and not as a leader, influencer, or producer). This was reducing the time I could spend on other activities that I value more.
I value my time and prioritize the trade-offs that benefit me the most. In my search for work-life balance, time has become a core value for me, but yours may be different.
Spin like your life depends on it, because it does
When we don’t experience our ideal work-life balance scenario, we may feel stuck or even adopt an “it is what it is” mentality. But if there’s one thing we know about entrepreneurship, it’s the power of pivoting to help us see the growth we need.
Pivoting allows you to course-correct while still maintaining enough familiarity to avoid cognitive overload or biting off more than you can chew.
In my world, the need to pivot is completely driven by problems, challenges, or discomfort. I like to say that “discomfort is given” and data, as you know, is a powerful tool.
If you feel uncomfortable with finding work-life balance, it means there has been an increase in your awareness that you can identify changing needs. The power lies in pivoting around this discomfort to experiment with temporary or long-term solutions.
For example, I implemented this tool to solve a source of discomfort for me: my morning routine. My solution was to change direction and start experimenting. I kept some things the same, including the rising time, but I wanted to change almost everything else. I started pivoting to see what worked for me and what didn’t. First I paired the activities. Then I decoupled some activities. I also removed some tasks and edited others.
The most important place to start is to ask yourself: Where am I experiencing discomfort in my work-life balance journey, and what is one pivot I can make today to improve it?
Related: 4 Business Practices That Will Improve Your Personal Life, Too
Create a balance plan
Think back to when you started your business: What was the one thing everyone and their mom told you to start? A business plan!
Your quest for work-life balance is no different. Do you have a “balance plan?”
Just as you would spend time strategically planning your business, do the same for your personal life. Maybe you have some non-negotiables that you do daily to help you balance. Maybe your balance plan is more of a manual for how you handle certain things.
For example, do you have “calendar rules” for when you are online or offline at work? Do you have specific personal goals that you track and report on with an accountability buddy just as you do with your professional goals? I do all of these things and each of them contributes to my work-life balance.
Additionally, part of my balance plan is regular strategic planning on work-life balance with annual, quarterly and weekly goals. I also keep a spreadsheet with all my goals together.
Because I am the person at the center of my business, it is important for me to value the work I do in my personal life as much as in my professional life.
Before your next work-life balance pivot, take 30-60 minutes and come up with a balance plan for yourself. Start by asking yourself: What do I want my work-life balance to look like?
Complete a plus/delta or post-mortem review
When you complete a launch in your business, the best way to improve your success, mitigate future problems, and plan for the next launch is to perform a post-mortem on the project, complete a plus/delta analysis, or perform a performance review.
But analytics and measurement shouldn’t just be reserved for business operations. This same strategy can be used outside of your business to align your daily actions with your vision for managing your life.
Analyze your work-life balance efforts at the same or similar cadence as your business efforts.
In my life I have adopted the “12 week year” methodology for strategic planning. Each week I briefly review how well I achieved my goals and use that information to plan the following week. At the end of the 12 weeks I analyze the entire process. Since I track my personal goals alongside my professional ones, I see balance, because I’ve kept all the elements of my life mixed together in my strategic planning pages as they are in real life.
Related: 10 Leaders Who Set Examples of Good Work-Life Balance
Let’s be real. Adulting is difficult, and when you consider the additional challenges that entrepreneurship brings, it can seem like an insurmountable effort to keep all the plates spinning. The truth is, being an entrepreneur means taking responsibility for your own success, but that sense of responsibility and accountability doesn’t end when you close the laptop and switch from business mode to personal mode.
Whether it’s applying strategic planning to your personal life and creating a balancing plan, accepting compromises, experimenting with pivoting on particular issues, or conducting regular autopsies on your balancing act, these are all tools in your arsenal. They’ve been proven to work in business empires, so now it’s time to apply them to You, Inc. and see what amazing growth you can achieve.