Strategies to Support Your Healthy Work-Life Balance
Now that you have a new perception of work-life balance, you may suddenly begin to experience this state of balance more consistently. Embrace it and enjoy it! And most importantly, make it a permanent addition to your life. Let’s review a few of the best strategies you can use to support your ideal work-life vision over the long term.
Get Each Project Moving Right Away
If you get a project with a due date that’s far away, the temptation is to put off starting that project for a while. Don’t!
As soon as you’re given an assignment, get right into your regular start-up routine. Print all your reference material, create a folder on your computer, start a physical file folder, and do some initial work. There’s nothing worse than starting a project late and then having to rush to complete it. That’s a surefire way to eat up your personal time.
Outsource and Grow Rich
If you want to be a wealthy freelancer, it’s time to give up chores that take up too much of your precious time. This includes shoveling the driveway, mowing the lawn, and cleaning the bathrooms. You simply cannot afford to do these things when you work for yourself. Your time is money.
This can be hard to get your head around if your upbringing was anything like mine. I’m the proud son of hardworking, middle-class immigrant parents who lived through World War II. If your parents were frugal like mine were, you probably have deep-rooted beliefs that it’s frivolous—even scandalous—to pay someone to do work around the house you can do yourself. You must rid yourself of this belief.
Come on, be honest. If you spend three hours cleaning the eaves troughs, what have you got, really? Clean eaves troughs. Whoopee. But after those three hours, is your business, or your bank account, any further ahead? Certainly not. Are you any happier or less stressed? Probably not as happy or stress-free as you would have been had you met your best friend for coffee, gone for a massage, attended a yoga class, or read a great novel while lying in your chaise lounge.
Pay someone else to do the things you hate doing, and spend the time you gain back making money or doing something you enjoy.
Train Clients to Respect Your Time
This great strategy comes from freelance graphic designer Ben Hagon (HagonDesign.com), and it’s especially helpful when you’re moonlighting. Says Ben:
Never send emails to clients outside non-business hours. As soon as you do that, you set the perception that you’re a hungry freelancer, someone who works all hours of the day and night and is at the client’s beck and call. This actually trains clients to expect round the clock response. What’s more, they’ll think nothing of calling you on Friday with an assignment that they want done by Monday.
While moonlighting as a freelancer, Ben always waited until mid-morning to send design work to clients that he’d done the night before. He credits this disciplined strategy with allowing him to hold down a job as creative director at a design firm, doing freelance design at night, and being an involved family man. “As a result, my freelance clients never contacted me during non-business hours, which means the time I set aside to spend with wife and kids was never interrupted.”
Wind Down Before Bed
Who among us hasn’t lain in bed, exhausted and wanting desperately to fall asleep, while work-related thoughts raced around our minds, sometimes for hours?
Not getting quality sleep throws everything out of whack. Even if you routinely work at night, you should take at least half an hour, and ideally more, to do a relaxing nonwork activity that quiets your mind before you go to sleep. Meditation, light yoga, reading fiction, or just relaxing with an herbal tea are great prebed rituals that can help your mind and body shut down and slip more easily into a peaceful, rejuvenating slumber.
A Wealthy Freelancer Is a Healthy Freelancer!
Although you should expect to work long hours in your start-up phase, don’t kill yourself. There’s no honor in working yourself so hard it makes you miserable, strains your relationships, or makes you physically ill.
No one who has ever experienced true burnout ever looks back fondly at the experience. Unfortunately, I know many freelancers who have been there, including me. You must allocate time into your schedule for regular exercise and some relaxation, or you will surely burn your poor self out.
Yoga, running, meditation, hitting the gym—whatever it is you find energizing and rewarding, do not sacrifice it! Make time to do it frequently so you stay balanced.
One of the people I approached to interview for this chapter made no bones about the fact that I had suggested an interview time that conflicted with his morning workout. I so admired his commitment to staying balanced! We picked an alternate time, and everyone was happy.
Wealthy Words
Everyone should treat themselves to daily relaxation. You deserve it (and need it).
—Dr. Joe Vitale
Handle Technology with Care
I love BlackBerries and iPhones. They’re wonderful tools for staying in touch. They’re also very, very dangerous. For a long time, I allowed my BlackBerry to creep into my personal time which, for me, is my evenings with my wife and kids. I was always quite good about not responding to e-mails after I had left my home office, but whenever I saw that flashing red “You’ve got mail!” light on my BlackBerry, I would always open it up and read it. The trouble was, if I read an e-mail at 7 P.M., it would be on my mind for hours, and this prevented me from detaching from work after a long day and being fully mentally present with my family. Even if I didn’t physically reply to any e-mails until the next day, I found myself beginning to craft replies in my mind all evening!
After letting this problem go on for too long, one day I just decided to take the “drastic” step of cancelling the data plan on my phone, meaning I stopped paying for the service that delivered the e-mails to the phone itself. Presto. My evenings have been a delight ever since.
I suppose if I were really brave I would have gotten rid of the BlackBerry altogether. However, I find having the device itself a tremendous convenience in my personal life. My wife and I phone or text one another over details about who’s picking up the kids, etc.
The point here is that I eliminated the technology that was hindering my personal life, and I retained and use the technology that helps it. I’m not telling you to cancel your data plan or trash your cell phone. All I’m saying is, take a good, hard look at your use of technology like BlackBerries and iPhones and ask yourself this one question: “Is this technology supporting or upsetting my work-life balance?” If so, take steps to make the technology work for you, not against you.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.