How to Have a Happy, Well-Balanced Home and Work Life

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One of an entrepreneur’s greatest challenges is that of finding a healthy work-life balance, and this challenge is even greater when you’re running a hobby farm, ranching or other business from home. While the early days of a startup venture can be hectic, making sure you’re taking good care of yourself, your health, and your family’s well-being are all essential.

To help you get a handle on that ever-elusive work-life balance, United Country Real Estate offers the following advice.

Take a Holistic Approach To Life

Finding and maintaining consistency as an entrepreneur means looking at your business, and your life, in an overarching and all-encompassing way. Much of this can be done through intentional planning on the work front, and the home and personal life fronts.

●     Consider setting a work schedule and adhering to it as much as possible.

●     Decide what’s important to you as an individual, and as a family.

●     Prioritize how you spend your time and energy.

Living and working in an intentional fashion can help ensure you’re giving time and thought to everything that’s important to you without making any single part of your life your primary focus.

Help Your Business Run Efficiently

Strategizing and pre-planning on the front end can make your business run more smoothly than trying to put out fires as they arise.

●     Create a business and marketing plan.

●     Establish operational objectives.

●     Ensure you have the right types of insurance, financial management, licenses, and business structure in place.

For example, forming a limited liability company, or LLC, can help protect you from some kinds of liability, give you more flexibility, and make it easier to file your taxes. You can hire an attorney to do the work, handle matters yourself, or better yet, use a formation service to manage the details. LLC formation laws vary from one state to another, so learn about yours in advance.

Buy “Extra” Time

Make room in your business and household budget for hiring help as necessary to make your life and your work more manageable. Freelancers and independent contractors can often take the place of full-time employees. For example, consider hiring a professional and outsourcing tasks like:

●     Website design.

●     Social media management.

●     Accounting and bookkeeping.

This can be much more cost-efficient and effective than trying to tackle multiple specialized tasks yourself. Of course, you can always use easy DIY methods to help run your business. For instance, building your brand is made easier when you put a custom logo maker to work. You can quickly and easily make an attractive logo to carry your message across multiple platforms like your website and social media. Depending on what you sell, you can open an online store that offers customers a chance to buy your products directly. A site like Shopify can help you make short work of this.

Lifewise, you’re also better served hiring a house cleaning service than you are using a day off to mop your floors and clean your bathrooms. Instead, spend that time with your family, enjoying much-needed downtime.

Balance Your Budgets

According to Ask Money, you can reduce money stresses at work and at home by developing reasonable budgets and sticking to them.

●     Prioritize necessities.

●     Take a lean approach to other expenditures.

●     Avoid getting into debt, especially in the form of high-interest credit cards.

Getting in over your head can lead to a snowball effect in which you’re paying an excessive amount of interest while never making progress on reducing balances. You can also damage your business and personal credit if you overextend yourself. If you need a business loan, look to institutions that specialize in small business banking and lending practices. These institutions can help you explore different loan products that can help you meet your objectives.

Stay Healthy

When you are the heart and soul of your business and your home, it’s vital that you keep yourself healthy. If you get rundown, you, your business, and your family can all suffer.

●     Get good rest by going to bed and waking up at about the same time every day.

●     Limit screen time before bed if it interferes with your sleep.

●     Eat healthy, well-balanced, natural food meals.

●     Resist the urge to try fad diets.

Also make an effort to stay hydrated, exercise on a regular basis, and get annual physicals so you can identify and treat any problems before they get out of hand. If you have a chronic illness, make sure it’s well managed and under control.

Being an entrepreneur can be exhilarating, fulfilling, and stressful, all at the same time. Making an effort to balance your passion for your work with your need for self-care takes concentrated effort, but can pay big dividends down the line.  

About the author:

Natalie Jones enjoys writing about home buying and hopes to inspire homeowners of all stages to enjoy the perks of homeownership. She created homeownerbliss.info to help soon-to-be homeowners in making their decision during house-hunting. Natalie also loves spending time with her husband working on DIY projects for their home.