It’s Wednesday afternoon and you’re on your way to pick up your child from school while listening to voicemails on 3x speed and sending voice messages to your assistant about what you didn’t get to today. Life As a stay at home mom and entrepreneur always seems to be going at warp speed. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem like there are enough hours in the day to get everything done and still spend time with your family. I know this story well and I have worked hard in building a life and a business that work together to help me honor what’s most important to me and I want to share some of my road-tested tips for increasing work-life balance.
Create a Schedule for Everything
Creating a schedule helps you to visualize how your day, week, month, and year are going to go. It also helps you have a greater perspective on how your daily actions are leading you to achieving your big goals. I live by a block scheduling model, in which, I carve out intentional time to spend with my family without the distractions of my work calling. Block schedule your work so you know how much time to dedicate to meetings, events, and other needs. Break this down further into actionable steps like meal planning for the week ahead, scheduling in your workouts and time with friends. This proactive approach to managing your calendar will help diminish time spent debating on whether or not you should go to the gym today or meet up with a friend for coffee. When it’s booked in ahead of time and you’ve made a commitment to the inspired action steps that will lead you to your goals, it simplifies your life on a grander scale. Recognize you can always improve it as you go.
Integrate Helpful Time-Saving Tools into Your Business
There are so many plugins and techie tools out there to help you operate more efficiently in your business you can literally automate most aspects of your current workload. My top tip for integrating tools into your business is to write down all of the tasks in your business that take you away from doing what you love the most, ask colleagues, experts and in groups for recommendations on tools that could help simplify your process and test them out. Some of my favorite tools voice memo app that I use to communicate with my team and Google Calendar because I can integrate it into other platforms and use my block scheduling model for prioritizing.
Don’t Do It Alone
Trying to do anything in life all by ourselves is hard and most often not very fulfilling. When we find a group of people who challenge us and want to ride the waves of those challenges with us, we give ourselves an incredible gift. When we grow and stretch ourselves based on the people around us, it vastly improves our business trajectory for success. Connecting with others must be a top priority in your business and life plan. You never know what type of support you’re going to need along the way and having a powerful support group to give to and receive from makes the journey more rewarding.
Create White Space Weekends
White space weekends are days I strategically place into my schedule to not do anything related to work. No deadlines to meet. No phone calls or conferences to tend to. No blogs to write. Nothing. This is time I get to spend with my family doing whatever we want. We can stay in our pajamas all day if we feel like it, or we can head out to the park for a fun day outside. These weekends are filled with spontaneity and no rules. And often, I find myself writing some of my best stuff on these days because there are no expectations tethered to the outcomes. White space days are fully allowing us to do whatever we are wanting to do, without thinking about the next thing on the schedule.
