Thinking about being your own boss?  Starting a business is tricky, maintaining a business is hard!  Working smarter not harder is the trick to a successful working relationship between you and your new business venture!  Think about that, working relationship between you and basically you.  Weird, but that is what it is.  Once you as an entreprenuer or a  freelancer learn to separate both relationships, you will find the time it takes for a healthy personal life as well!

Most of the time when a new business venture is started, entreprenuer’s and freelancer’s personal lives often get pushed by the wayside and seem like a fond memory.  We all get so focused on first securing the seed money for our new startup, planning strategies for making it successful and then we are just sucked into working on our new venture 24/7.  Somehow, along the way our personal life began slipping away from us.

To take control of your personal life, you need to:

• Learn to delegate those pesky tasks that suck the life out of you, you know the ones…you absolutely avoid doing them until you can’t put them off any longer.  Outsource if you dont’ have any other options.
• Learn to set boundaries and stick to them!  Set office hours or set phone hours, just because you are the proud owner of a business venture does not mean that you have to be available around the clock.
• Schedule your time off as if you were scheduling an employee’s time off.  Keep this sacred and set up appointments around those times.  There is no secret rule that says the “boss” doesn’t deserve some time off.  Your personal appointments are appointments and no one needs to know what they are for.
• Include your family if possible in your business…set aside busy work tasks that can be done with your family and ask them to help you once in a great while.  Busy work tasks could include stuffing mailers, packaging up stuff, anything that you can do while visiting and catching up with one another!
• Adopt a new motto:  Family first, then business.  Or tailor it to your lifestyle.  It goes with the financial motto:  Pay yourself first.

Invest in yourself first and then your business. Eventually you will realize that you didn’t have to burn the candle at both ends in the beginning, you just needed to work smarter.  Working smarter will ensure that you have a personal life rather than just a work life.  Entrepreneurs and freelancers can have it all, a work life separate from their personal life.  Balancing the two by working smarter not harder is the secret you need to know if your personal life is going to WIN.

photo credit: Lel4nd