Putting in 12-hour days. Constantly being stressed about work. Not being able to sleep because you’re thinking about your job. Not spending quality time with your loved ones because you’re always at the office…

No one wants to live like this. Working non-stop is not a life anyone aspires to. The problem is that kind of life can be an easy trap to fall into if you don’t have clear boundaries between your work and the rest of your life.

When you separate work and life and focus on them individually you get better focus, attention and results in each. Not only that, but people deserve a separation between you work and your life.

Customers & Clients

Your clients/customers/employer are paying you for your time, and they deserve to get what they pay for. If you are constantly letting yourself be distracted from your job by making dinner, chatting with friends, or working on your kids Halloween costume you are doing your clients/customers/employer a disservice. Actually, you’re cheating them of what they rightfully paid for.

Clients deserve to have your full attention on their project while you’re on the clock. If you work from home it helps to have a separate, specific space for work. When you’re there you’re at work and shouldn’t be disturbed. But its the same wherever you work. While you are getting paid focus on giving value to the people paying you.

Family

Your family and friends deserve for you to pay attention to them while you are with them too. Continuing to work (so easy to do now with smart phones, laptops and tablets) even while physically present doesn’t fly. It devalues the relationships of the people you’re with. When you’re with your family they deserve all of your thoughts and attention. This is a lesson Henry learned the hard way when his daughter essentially called him “Daddy Who Seems To Be Here But Actually Isn’t”.

Likewise, even being mentally distracted by work can really hinder your experience of life. Practice being present in relationships (your spouse will thank you), conversations and even menial activities. Zone in on who you’re with and what you’re doing.

You

Know who else it helps when you separate work and life? You.

You deserve to not be working all the time, you deserve to have a life too. If you constantly have work thoughts fluttering in the back of your head while  living the rest of your life – doing activities you enjoy – you are robbing those experiences of their full richness. Even if you love your job, be more than your job! Be a fuller, richer person who doesn’t always have to be thinking about one thing. Take a break, get away, relax! You can’t fully do that if you’re work-brain is always on.

Do This Now:

Tonight, spend an entire evening with your family. No work calls, emails, tweets – nothing related to your job. If you need to, schedule it with your boss or your clients – let them know you’ll be unavailable. Completely focus on your family, your friends and yourself.

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Or, read one of these:

1. The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance
2. Share Life
3. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance

Now that you know what you want in life and you’ve set your priorities based on that, its time to start making changes that will get you to that life. As I mentioned in my last post, one of your greatest resources is your time. More often than not its a resource that we too easily let slip away and then wonder where it went.

Numerous distractions, “important” projects and mindless activities can quietly suck away our time, time that we could be using to create the work-life balance we want. Focus on removing these little things that are stealing your time and you’ll have more to spend where you want –  on things that help you reach your goals and priorities in life. Guard your time, protect, and value it as the resource it truly is.

Look at where your time is going

The first step to good time management is to realize where you are currently spending your time. You probably don’t realize the amount of time that you’re spending on certain things – it may be water-cooler talk at the office, constantly checking your farm on Farmville, or even just mindlessly basking in the glow of your TV every night.

There are a variety of ways to actually see where you spend your time. When you are on your computer (a place where we all waste massive amounts of our day) you can use a time-tracker like RescueTime, which can also block distractions to help you focus on your current task. But if you are really struggling with needing more time I would recommend tracking where you spend all your time every day. At the end of every hour record what you’ve been doing for that hour. There are a plethora of generic time-tracker apps out there, pick one that works best for you – or just use a pencil and paper! Is this a boring and anal-retentive exercise? You bet. But I guarantee at the end of the week you’ll be surprised to see where all your time went!

Learn to Say No

After you’ve seen where you’re spending your time the next step in guarding your time is learning to say “No” to the things you don’t want to spend your time on. A lot of time is wasted at work in inefficient things like pointless meetings, and you may need to talk to your boss about this. Timothy Ferriss has some great points about saying No at the office in chapter 7 of his controversial book, The 4-Hour Work Week.

Learning to say no may involve you choosing to discipline yourself enough to turn off a video game and go exercise. It could even involve you saying no to activities you enjoy or organizations whose goals you agree with. But if you are drowning in commitments you need to review your priorities and not say yes to everything. Leo at ZenHabits offers some practical help on how to say No.

The choice is always yours. Learn to say No.

Set boundaries

Too often the reason we say Yes to too many things is because we think we can do more than we can. And we all know the feeling of stretching ourselves too thin. The first step in not doing this is to know your limits. I wrote about this important concept (and how marathoner Ryan Hall used it) in my post at Graphic Design Blender: Creating a Healthy Work-Life Balance as a Freelance Designer. The idea is simple in theory but can be hard to implement – know your limits on how much time you can give to other people and activities, give yourself some padding, and then set your boundaries there and don’t let anything else in.

Overall guarding your time is an integral part of creating work/life balance. The better you get at it the more you choose how your life will be balanced.

Do This Now:

Right now look at your least important, most disliked, or biggest time commitment and drop it. Call or email those that need to know right now and tell them you’re done. There you go! A quick, bloodless step to getting more time to create the work/life balance you want!

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Or, read one of these:

1. Separate Work and Life
2. Reduce Screen Time
3. Know What You Want

I first heard about the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 Rule while reading The 4-Hour Work Week, but it is an idea that has been getting a lot of attention in the past few years.  Basically it states that 80% of your returns come from 20% of your efforts.  The 80/20 Principle has been used on everything from setting goals to information security to relationships.

Once you start thinking about it you may realize (I certainly did) how true this principle can be across many parts of your life.  What would it look like if you used this principle to cut out the 80% of your life that wasn’t productive, fulfilling, or fruitful? What if you used the 80/20 principle to take a fresh look at:

• The number of RSS subscriptions you actually read and find worthwhile
• The number of email newsletters you receive
• The websites that you visit every day
• The fluff or small talk in your conversations and emails
• The tv shows that you watch
• The unfocused energy that make chores drag on and on
• The work of your employees
• When you do your best work
• Your business’ advertising
• The amount of time you spend daydreaming instead of creating goals
• How you conduct meetings
• How you are exercising

Creating Groups in Social Networking to Get More Time

One way that I’m using the 80/20 principle to get more time is by applying it to my social networks.  Most of the time when checking in on our favorite networks there are a few people – the 20% – that we really want to find out about, whereas we don’t necessarily want to hear everything the other 80% say all day.

I’ve started creating groups that include that 20%.  (You can easily create group in the upper left of the screen in Facebook, with Twitter you’ll have to use a 3rd party app like TweetDeck.)  Then, when I log on I can quickly check in on one group to see just what they have posted.  If I have more time I may open up and read more about what everyone is thinking.  But if I don’t I’ve hit the highlights and can move on.

Give it a shot and let me know – how can using the 80/20 Rule free up more of your time?

Or, read one of these:

1. Guard Your Time

photo by Kristina B

There are considerable number of positives to business blogging.  Don’t get me wrong in this article – I think most companies should have a blog.  However, putting a blog on your site is not a quick fix; its not an automatic easy way guarantee that your traffic will boom and your website be a success.  Blogs take time, energy, and more time.  And because of this many blogs on business websites can actually hurt the business.  Few things worse looking on a professional site than a blog with one post, or a blog that hasn’t been updated in months or years.  So, take some time to think about if blogging is right for your business.  My suggestion?  Don’t start a new blog if:

You Aren’t Going to Update Consistently

Of huge importance to your blog is your consistency in posting.  I usually recommend clients try to be able to post 1 new article a week, twice a month at the least.  Even more critical though is the commitment to regular posting.  Its fine to even let your readers know how often you plan on posting to help them know when to come back for more.  Its not always easy (email me for my #1 tip on how to post consistently!), but it is important.

If you aren’t going to post consistently and just plan on updating your site with news about your business – don’t call it a blog!  Just have a Recent News section or something.

You Don’t Have Time

Image by TomStardust

As you might be starting to see, writing a blog is going to take some time.  Make sure you know that and plan for it.  If you see the potential for new business that your blog could bring you (many businesses main source of revenue stems from their blogs), plan to spend time on it just as you would other promotions.  You are planning out time for promoting your business, aren’t you?

You Don’t Know what a Blog is

This might seem silly, but many people think that by adding a blog or setting up a Twitter or Facebook account their company will automatically be inundated with orders from the internet.  Again, it has the potential for that, but it does not come easily.  If you don’t know much about blogs spend some time learning.  Read tops blogs in your industry, read blogs about your favorite hobby, read blogs by your friends.  Respond in their comment section and get involved in the site.  Spend time analyzing and seeing what works and what doesn’t in blogs.  Writing for the web is different than writing press releases or sending an email.  Expose yourself to the blogging world a bit before you dive in.

You Don’t Have a Target Audience

Promoting your business in any way begins with the knowledge of who your target market is.  Big businesses spend millions learning who will be most likely to buy their products and even more figuring out how to reach them.  You should always know who you are trying to get to in your marketing, and this is just as important with your blog (and your website in general).  The more niche a blog is, the better chance it has of standing out in an already hugely crowded market.  Also, knowing who you are writing to can really help you decide what to write about.

You Just Want to Sell Sell Sell

People don’t read blogs just to hear about how great your product or company is.  If you are expecting to draw in readers by just blogging about the latest promotion your store is running you probably have the wrong idea of what a blog is.  People read blogs to be informed of something they are interested in.  Continually tooting your own horn gets old quickly.  Make sure you are giving your readers quality content that benefits them.

You Don’t Want Feedback

The best blogs are a place for community to develop.  Authors may be the originators of the discussion, but responses comes from a huge variety of people and places.  New technologies like blogging are all about hearing from your customers and being able to engage them.  Lastly, don’t assume that all feedback on your blog will be positive (plenty of negative comments here), hearing people’s honest opinions can be tough, but its important to stay honest and transparent – something everyone can appreciate.

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Still have questions about blogging or if a blog is right for your business?  Go ahead and contact me for free consultation!

Or, read one of these:

1. 4 Ways to get More Traffic to Your Blog
2. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance