Running a business requires dedicating every hour you have in the day.
Basically, an entrepreneur’s life consists of late nights, early mornings, no weekends, and no sick days. It can be hard to manage your time and find a balance between work and maintaining a relationship. Making time for your partner and spending time with them is one of the basic needs in making a relationship work.
Don’t worry, having a thriving business and a successful relationship doesn’t have to be impossible. Majority of the tips and advice that you can do come down to simple time management in order to manage the demands of a business and a relationship simultaneously.
Here are some strategies that you can do to maintain that work-relationship balance that you want.
1. Delegate and Automate
Do everything to make some free time in your business. If you don’t already have one, it’s probably best to get an assistant to take care of the administrative and financial areas of your business. If you can’t afford an assistant you can opt to hire interns instead. The more you delegate, the more time you can spend outside your business.
2. Prioritize
Make a list of your daily, weekly, and monthly goals in order of importance so that you have a clear view of what needs to be done immediately and what can wait. This way you don’t miss major events in your personal life while also making sure you are not neglecting your business.
3. Create a Plan
Now that you have your priorities straight, follow through with the schedule you have made. Try to have a plan that includes your work family, friends, partner, and self so that your time is truly optimized and spent doing something productive or meaningful. It will help if you turn your notifications off to ignore emails, text messages, or phone calls.
4. Be Prepared for Hard Work
To remain organized, follow your plan, and stick to your priorities, you’ll need to put in extra effort and make some sacrifices. To make sure neither your business and your personal life suffers. You might need to make up for lost time in the office by coming really early or staying late at night.
You can also try the GTD method to help you further in prioritizing and creating plans. The Getting Things Done method is a time management method by David Allen. Basically, the GTD method tells you to remove your plans, tasks, objectives, and projects from your mind and record them externally and break them into actionable work items. This will allow your attention to be focused when taking on tasks.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t just have to be all you. Remember, it’s not your partner vs your business. It is equally important to have a partner that is supportive of you especially because there are unavoidable circumstances that you will have to cancel plans. Communication can help with your relationship a lot. It makes things clear and you will have a deeper understanding with your partner.
