Yet we intuitively understand what the phrase means. And what it means, I think, is the feeling that you aren’t working too much; a state where you’re enjoying the values from both home life and work life, and one isn’t being sacrificed to the other. That’s not easy to achieve for entrepreneurs. Below are nine (or maybe eight) strategies entrepreneurs use to achieve that elusive work-life balance.
1. Schedule time to relax
We schedule meetings, we schedule interviews, we schedule doctor’s appointments; but somewhere in that mass of work, personal time gets lost. Relaxation seems like a luxury rather than a necessity, when it’s actually one of the keys to sanity. So some entrepreneurs actually block off time to wind down, whether that’s evenings, weekends, Sundays, Friday nights, or in the morning. Danny Boice, the cofounder and CTO of Speek, a Tech Cocktail contributor, and a husband and father, takes his time off in chunks: gym in the mornings with his wife, martial arts class with the kids on Thursday, and “Daddy day” on Saturday. Cofounder Bridgette Hylton of ShopRagHouse takes an hour during the work day to play with her son.
2. Take your mind off work
Easier said than done, this strategy is different from relaxing because it means actively focusing on something other than work. Entrepreneurs in particular tend to have work on the brain 24/7, so sometimes this calls for extreme measures. Other options might include yoga (assuming you’re good at the “mind clearing” part), poker, a dance party, jet skiing, or baking. You can also try Ready, Set, Pause, an eight-minute meeting you schedule with yourself every day where you listen to music, meditate, or walk – anything to get away from the stress of work. And these breaks shouldn’t be guilt-inducing. Creativity often comes from combining ideas from different domains, so it helps to expand your perspective beyond just the rectangle of your desk. These activities also give you a hearty dose of perspective. You can have an identity – and interests and hobbies and a family – that is separate from your job, so work problems and stresses don’t seem as important.
3. Make friends with your coworkers
This one is simple: if your coworkers are your friends, work isn’t just work anymore. The lines between work and life start to blur. You’ll see this strategy at work if you ever visit the Downtown Project in Las Vegas. Meetings are conducted in bars, employees get their own theme song, robots wander the floors – it’s what Tony Hsieh likes to call work-life integration.
4. Choose the right spouse
In a world where most people rush out of their offices at 5:01 pm, not everyone understands the allure of 12-hour days and work-filled weekends. So finding a partner who accepts your crazy lifestyle is key. As mentioned below, that person can also keep you accountable and make sure you don’t overwork yourself into exhaustion. You’ll find many insights about this topic in an upcoming book from TechStars cofounder Brad Feld and his wife, Amy Batchelor, Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur.
5. Set expectations
One of the best ways to ensure that people don’t make unreasonable demands on your time is to set expectations. At work, that starts with telling employees, customers, and partners when you will and won’t be working. For example, web agency Ethercycle includes an “availability policy” in their proposals to clients that explains when they will respond to email and phone calls and be available for meetings. This ensures that the client isn’t sitting by the computer waiting for a response on Sunday night. At home, your family deserves to know how often they can expect to see you. That might include blocking off specific times, as discussed above; one entrepreneur spends Friday nights catching up with his wife over wine. You might also explain what constitutes a “work emergency” that could pull you away from your family. And finally, one entrepreneur talked about setting his own expectations about what startup life is like. He realized that he couldn’t delay the “life” part of the equation while waiting for things to get easier.
6. Be accountable to someone
Vows to take a break, relax, or go to the gym can end up as empty promises unless you have an external source of accountability. That might be a spouse who makes sure you get home at a certain time, or a friend who refuses to let you cancel your weekly hangout. Or even a dog:
7. Say no
Another common piece of advice is to say no: say no to extra projects, commitments, and anything else that will eat up your time. To figure out what to say no to, take inventory of the goals you’re hoping to accomplish in your personal and work lives. That networking event might be fun, but is building a network really one of your business’s goals right now? Maybe not. The corollary is that you can’t do everything – something Marlowe realized when her extensive work hours cut into time she could have spent with her toddler.
8. Ask for help
Recognize that you can’t do everything – and if all else fails – ask for help. That goes for delegation, too. Some people are afraid to delegate work because they worry things won’t turn out well. But if you’re floundering under a crazy work-life imbalance, things already aren’t turning out well.
9. Forget balance
Many entrepreneurs just reject the notion of work-life balance outright. They love their jobs, so work doesn’t seem like work anymore. Work is life and life is work. Or, you can just forget about life for a while (as Billy Joel said). “To succeed, you need to be off balance and a bit insane. Breakthroughs take life-consuming obsessiveness,” says CEO Sam Lawrence of Crushpath. But that’s a short-term strategy, at best.
Conclusion
Whether or not you believe in work-life balance, these strategies should at least make work and life a little more enjoyable. And whatever you do, do something. “You have to force the work-life balance to come into place,” says Joel Gross, founder and CEO of Coalition Technologies. “Because I speak from experience: it will never come on its own.”
