What is work-life balance?

Around 80% of UK entrepreneurs report periods of stress and unhappiness, but how can they fix this? Achieving work-life balance needs to be a vital goal if you’re to build a successful and sustainable business and make it all worthwhile for you and your family.

Read on to discover our steps for achieving work-life balance, including:

• What is work-life balance?
• How to achieve work-life balance
• How to save time from your business’ admin using Countingup

At Countingup, we want to empower new business owners and help budding innovators become successful. Find out how you can save time from your business’ operations and keep doing what you love instead.

In essence, work-life balance is where a person has manageable demands across each aspect of their life (work and personal), whether needing to email suppliers back or take the dog to the vet. Having a work-life balance should be an essential priority for all new entrepreneurs as they look to grow their business. 

It’s understandable that starting a business and transitioning your finances to your self-employed income is stressful and worrisome. As a new or aspiring business owner, it can sometimes feel like your ability to enjoy time in your personal life is critically tied to your success in business. This might cause you to devote more and more time to building your business and fixing whatever needs to be done. However, this is an unsustainable business practice and is only useful for small or short term problems – not as a method for your entire organisation.

It’s unfortunately not the case that you can achieve balance at the flick of a switch. Therefore, you need to be able to manage your work-life balance as a long term project. 

It’s not enough to be organised and have a list of things you need to complete. Achieving work-life balance is about completing tasks in a timely manner so nothing spills over into the hours you’d set aside for something else. It’s for this reason that you should work on managing your time well. 

Consider using apps like Microsoft’s To Do, TickTick, ClickUp or Monday.com to stay productive and find out where you’re losing time while working.

Whether you’ve managed to be extra productive during a certain day or have just reached your monthly net profit goal, give yourself rewards and incentives while running your business. Not only can taking these small steps to enjoy what you do can help your productivity but you’ll be in a better position when talking to customers and listening to their feedback for how to improve your business.

Done is better than perfect. 

If you’re to build a successful business, a reliable brand with reputable customer testimonies is almost invaluable. Therefore, if you’re working on developing your product or service, or tweaking other parts of your business in search of perfection, you should be wary that consistency is more important.

Even if it’s the case that you want to be perfect and lead your industry as the best at what you do, you need to be able to let customers decide. Therefore, take regular breaks from development within your business and see what works well before you look to change anything.

So far, we’ve discussed how to avoid periods of stress or unhappiness in the first place. However, they’re going to happen and it’s important to know your signs before they get too powerful. 

Some key indicators of stress for many people are restless sleeping, tense muscles or headaches, an inability to switch off from thinking about work (even while you’re doing something else), and a short temper with others.

Therefore, if you’re experiencing some of the above indicators of stress, or other ones you’re familiar with, it may be time to take a break from your work and spend time doing something else.

Finally, if it’s the case that you’ve reached a point where you’re stressed or unhappy and, for whatever reason, you’ve been unable to take a break from work because something important has come up – what then?

Talking to someone you trust, whether it’s a friend, family member, or licensed counsellor, can be an easy way to get things off your chest and work through stress. If you’re the type of person who struggles to open up, you may be hesitant to approach someone to talk to. However, finding someone who understands and is willing to listen can not only help you but your business in the long term. 

Achieving a work-life balance is made all the easier if you have quick and easy ways to save time. Don’t let your financial admin drag on your time – use Countingup. 

Countingup is the business current account with free, built-in accounting software. It automates financial admin for thousands of business owners across the UK.

With automatic expense categorisation, receipt capture tools and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances every day and spend more time focussing on the road ahead. Find out more here.