Struggling to find that work-life balance? This can help.

It can be difficult to draw boundaries between your personal life and your work life—especially if you own a small business. Despite your best intentions, it may feel as though you’re never giving enough effort to one or the other. The elusive work-life balance can feel impossible to attain.

While we don’t have a magic wand that can stretch time (still working on that!), we do have some advice for managing work-life balance based on the experiences of small business owners.

Look at the big picture

This concept is simple and yet hard to overemphasize: don’t look at each day individually to determine if your work and personal lives are balanced. If you tally the number of hours on any given day you spent on work and the number you spent on your personal life, you will rarely come out feeling good about the ratio.

Why? Because on some workdays, there is a disaster at every turn. The shipment is late, the customer is unhappy, the new hire doesn’t show, and your computer decides to quit. On those days, work is going to require more of your time and attention than it normally would.

On other days, your youngest wakes up with a fever, your oldest forgot about his science project, and the refrigerator repairman is supposed to show up to your house … sometime between 8am and 5pm. On days like that, work is not going to get your highest and best.

So instead of tallying up the score one day at a time, it’s better to look at larger chunks of time to evaluate your work-life balance. Set aside time every twelve weeks to go over a set of questions. Think through each one and write down your responses. If you can get into this habit, you’ll start to see patterns that were hidden when you were only focused on the day-to-day. Sure, that one day was awful, but how did things go overall the past three months?

Questions for your (quarterly) consideration

Here are some specific questions to ask yourself to help you evaluate your work-life balance:

• What were the big highlights or achievements?

• What were the setbacks?

• Is there anything I could have done differently? If so, what?

• How are my relationships with my family?

• How are my relationships with my friends?

• How is my business?

This is also a good opportunity to look ahead at your schedule for the next quarter. Are there any big events coming up? Any holidays? Any significant changes to routine, either in work or at home? Taking note of these shifts can help you be more prepared for when they come. Your expectations will be adjusted to the reality of how much time you have available for certain projects.

For example, if you know that you will be implementing a new software system at work the next month, it’s probably not a good time to start adding volunteer hours to your schedule. Or if you are moving to a new home, don’t take on any additional work projects. Allowing for the ebb and flow of work and personal life makes it easier to strike a balance.

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At The ReWild Group, we believe that work is a fundamental part of human existence. When a person is part of an exceptional workplace, they can apply their natural talents, grow as an individual, and develop new skills. This person returns to home and society as the best version of themselves. We invite you to learn more about our mission and explore the resources we make available for small businesses (many are free!).

There’s no time for burnout.

Your cell phone is ringing. It’s also beeping, letting you know that a text message has come through. The afternoon is full of back-to-back meetings. You’re sitting at your desk, wondering how the day could already be half over when it feels like you just got started. Looks like it will be another late night …

Sound familiar? If you’re a small business owner, we’re writing with you in mind. We understand all too well the way a person can get swept up in the day-to-day details of running a business, making it difficult to keep your head above water. We also recognize that burnout is a very real issue for small business owners. Whether it’s after one year or ten, everyone finds their breaking point if they are constantly under the gun.

Working on your business vs working in your business

The fact is burnout is inevitable if you don’t have a plan for change. It’s possible to dig deep and work hard for a season of time, especially if it’s in the service of a longer-term possibility; but to be faced with an overwhelming amount of work with no end in sight isn’t tenable, even for the most resilient of spirits.

When small business owners say that they don’t have time to stop working, what they really mean is that they can’t let up on the work they’re doing in the business. These are the day-to-day operations that keep a business afloat. If they don’t pitch in, deadlines will be missed, clients will be lost, and vendors will go unpaid.

They are so preoccupied with working in the business they don’t even realize that they are missing something more critical, which is working on the business.

What’s the difference? Time spent working on the business refers to time spent thinking critically about why the business exists and where it’s headed. It’s time spent working on strategies that can govern day-to-day decisions and proactively steer the company in a certain direction.

When business owners step back from the day-to-day and dedicate time to this type of planning and strategy, they find new solutions from a new perspective. It’s like hopping on the interstate at rush hour and finding yourself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. You were in a hurry, so you didn’t check traffic beforehand. But taking just one or two minutes at the front end to plan your route would have ultimately saved you time, not cost you.

This is why we caution business owners: you don’t have time for burnout. You’ve invested too much and come too far to give up now. Take some time to plot your course. This post on the Thinking-Doing Sequence is a great place to start.

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The ReWild Group is dedicated to multiplying the number of exceptional businesses in the world. Towards that end, we’ve made a number of tools and resources available for free on our website. To go even deeper, check out our series of books for small business owners.

Struggling with time management? These three barriers might explain why.

One of the most frequent challenges we hear from small business owners and leaders relates to time management. Many tell us that that part of the reason they wanted to own their business was to have more control over their schedules, but in reality, the opposite is true. They feel like their business owns them, not the other way around. Despite working long hours and most weekends, they can’t get ahead.

Following are the three most common barriers we see keeping business leaders from effectively managing their time.

Rationalization

It’s only 15 minutes. I can do it faster anyway.

I don’t have time to train someone else how to do it.

Nobody else knows how to do this as well as I do.

Recognize any of these thoughts? They’re all examples of rationalization. These are excuses we tell ourselves when we spend time on activities that are not important. The problem is it’s possible to rationalize away large portions of your day, every day. 

After all, if you’re spending your time doing routine tasks that could be delegated, it means you’re not spending time on other tasks that could be far more important. Urgency tends to dominate our schedule, controlling our decisions about how we spend our time throughout the day. It makes rationalization a persistent barrier for many people. It won’t go away on its own, either, which is why it’s so important to adopt a new habit.

Every time you begin working on something, ask yourself, “Have I made up an excuse that rationalizes why I am doing something that is not important?” Get in this habit and you will be equipped to combat rationalization.

Distractions

The second barrier to effective time management is distractions. Distractions are anything that impact our ability to stay focused on work. 

We all face them, too! The distractions in today’s workforce are more invasive than any previous time. Our ever-connectedness to our phones and the limitless access they provide means that something else is always vying for our attention—and that’s not counting all the distractions in the office.

In order to get the most out of your time, it’s important to identify frequent distractions and work to moderate them. You can think of these as healthy boundaries that protect your time.

Here are a few suggestions on how you can do that:

• Turn your work phone on Do Not Disturb and place your cell phone face-down on your desk.

• Turn email pop-up notifications off so you’re not tempted to divert your attention from what you’re doing and respond to an email the second it hits your inbox.

• Schedule periodic, recurring meetings to work through your team’s challenges as opposed to allowing them to be raised at any time of the day.

• Designate “power hours” where you concentrate on an important activity for 60 minutes. (These can work well the for the entire team, too.)

Lack of Delegation

The third barrier is lack of delegation. If you work in a very small office, you might not think of delegation as an option, but in today’s gig economy, it’s viable for almost anyone. You can find hourly help online for routine tasks like bookkeeping or scheduling.

Delegation doesn’t always have to be to someone in a junior position, either. The idea is to hand off any tasks that you can. This can mean sharing work responsibilities with peers and colleagues as well.

Delegation is important because it achieves two critical things:

First, it provides your team members the opportunity to grow in their skills and responsibility.  This helps them to be more engaged in their work as they experience greater levels of achievement. 

Second, delegation provides you an opportunity to grow as well. The time freed through delegation can be used on work that builds you as a manager and leader. The failure to delegate usually means that this critical work, that can only be done by you, never gets done.

Delegation is the great multiplier of a leader’s abilities. Your effectiveness as an individual has finite limits, but as a leader who delegates work to a growing, learning team, your effectiveness multiplies.

Put this knowledge to work

One of our philosophies at The ReWild Group is that the enemy who is known is better than the enemy who is unknown. Simply naming and describing the problem goes a long way towards solving it. Know these barriers that are keeping you from effectively using your time. Look out for them in your day. Ask yourself if you’re rationalizing your time away, set healthy boundaries to avoid distraction, and provide opportunities for others to grow through delegation.

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The concepts presented in this article are taken from the Strong Management Team engagement (known previously as the Exceptional Manager Program), one of the 11 elements of an exceptional business. Visit us online for more resources, tips, and tools to help you become a more effective leader.

How to avoid the reactive trap: the Thinking-Doing Sequence

Many small business owners are caught in a trap of reaction: they spend nearly all their energy reacting to requests and urgent demands. Think of the salon owner who finds herself serving clients and dealing with employee issues, leaving her zero time to think about the big picture of her business. Or the head of an engineering firm who is buried in projects and in a cycle of responding to one crisis after another, without time to get his head above water to try and prevent the next one.

No one sets out to start a business with the goal of it consuming 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On the contrary, most small business owners are looking for independence. Unfortunately, the demands of a business are often urgent and can easily become overwhelming.

One of the cornerstones of Organizational ReWilding is structure. Structure plays an integral role in each of the 11 elements because it helps organize large amounts of information and sets the stage for clarity and focus, all of which are vital to the health of a business. (To read more, see our blog post on Structure, Clarity, and Focus.)

The Thinking-Doing Sequence is a structure that helps shine light on what it is that business owners are doing with their time and why adjustments may be necessary.

The Thinking-Doing Sequence

As illustrated in the above graphic, there are two major areas of classification and four steps in the Thinking-Doing Sequence. The major areas are working on the business and working in the business. The four steps are Critical Thinking, Focusing, Planning, and Doing.

Ideally, the owner will spend a significant amount of time working on the business, but we all know that reality doesn’t always align with the ideal. Oftentimes, working in the business takes priority. That’s why, as we look more closely at each of the four steps in the Thinking-Doing Sequence, we’re going to start with the end of the sequence and work backwards.

Doing

Doing encompasses any activities involved with the execution of the business. It speaks to what: What is required to deliver our service or product to customers?

If, as a business owner, you are stuck in a place where doing the work is all that you do, you’re in survival mode. You are constantly reacting to the next email, phone call, or other immediate need that is before you.

While many businesses function this way, it’s suboptimal. Chaos is the norm for a reactive business and brings with it persistent problems such as high employee turnover and tight cash flow.  Over time the trauma of this chaos leads to owner burn-out and frustrated employees.

Planning

If you take one step back in the Thinking-Doing Sequence, you’re now in Planning. Planning is focused on the how. How are we going to do the work? It involves looking ahead to the future, perhaps three to 12 months at a time, but it can also mean as soon as the next day or the upcoming week.

Planning occurs at an operational level. It accounts for the scope of the work and the logistics required to complete it, factoring in such contingencies as staff capacity, tools or equipment that will be needed, and scheduling.

The ability to plan gives a business an advantage over one that is caught up only in Doing. It helps to alleviate some problems before they occur and to reduce the organizational trauma that comes with disorder. Even with planning, though, a business may not be very competitive or distinguished in the marketplace, because it does not consider the bigger picture questions.

Focusing

Focusing is related to priorities; it establishes which of the many projects and initiatives the business will choose to prioritize. Of all our options, which projects will we be pursuing?

Focusing looks further down the road than Planning; a business is looking beyond just the coming months to one or more years in the future. At this stage in the sequence, a business is setting goals and coming up with strategies that will help achieve those goals.

Once a business has some strategies and goals in place, it can measure against those goals. This provides clarity as the business plans and executes on which activities are bringing them closer to their goals and which are not. Adjustments can be made throughout the year, keeping a business more agile and responsive to its environment.

A business that can achieve some level of focus more consistently directs its energy to initiatives that move the organization towards its long-term goals. 

Critical Thinking

As the first step in the sequence, Critical Thinking addresses the highest-level question that faces a business: Why are we in business in the first place? Why should the marketplace do business with us?   

Understanding the why informs every aspect of the business. It feeds into the business model, which drives structures; it influences values, which shape the culture; it informs decisions about how the business goes to market and which customer segments are ideal.

While Critical Thinking has such a great influence on a business, it’s often skipped over by business owners. When that happens, the business tends to have poorly defined strategies. Rather than being anchored to solid identities, these strategies tend to look more like a lot of ideas about what might be possible.

An organization that has spent sufficient energy on critical thinking has a strategic advantage over those that do not. The clear picture of why the organization exists creates a vision for the entire organization to pursue and informs values that unify its people.

Each step influences the next

While it’s common for businesses to be stuck in the Doing part of the business, it’s also not unusual for a business to start with strategy or planning. The reason why the order of the Thinking-Doing Sequence is so important is that each step influences the next.

Critical Thinking establishes the foundation for the business, which then informs the goals and strategies that are developed during the Focusing phase. Focus is critical to Planning because it provides structure around how the business can accomplish the big picture ideas it came up with during Critical Thinking. And Planning hones in on the best and most efficient ways to carry out the work – the Doing.

The Thinking-Doing Sequence can be applied to smaller decisions as well. It’s a great way to reassess the old ways of doing things. When a company feels stuck in a process or a decision, walking through the sequence gives clarity as to whether the outcomes are serving the goals of the organization or not.

When a company begins with Critical Thinking and moves through the Thinking-Doing Sequence, it gains a strong foothold to avoid the trap of reactionary chaos. Rather than responding to the random demands of the moment, the business can execute and measure its progress against a well thought out plan that is anchored in its reason for existence.

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The Thinking-Doing Sequence is part of Business Model – one of the 11 elements of an exceptional business. Our mission is to multiply the number of exceptional businesses globally. Join the conversation on LinkedIn.