When you are a business owner and you work from home, it can be challenging to separate your work life from your personal life. When you are your brand, and your hobbies and your work start to overlap, differentiating between your work life and your personal life can seem impossible.
Luckily, there actually are ways to create boundaries!
Here are a few things you can do to best balance your work life and personal life as a home-based business owner:
- Start participating in “casual Fridays.” It is extremely important for productivity purposes to get dressed each day! However, I usually dress in my “comfy clothes” on the weekend, and Friday afternoons often get the same treatment. It’s my way of separating the types of work that I do: by wearing different types of clothes on two or three days of the week compared to the other four or five, I’m also telling myself that it’s time to switch the type of work that I’m doing that day.
- Begin your weekdays with some exercise, first thing in the morning. I run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and do yoga or Pilates on Tuesday and Thursday. It’s a wonderful way to start my morning off right! I take weekends off from exercising first thing in the morning to give my muscles a rest, and also so that my brain thinks of weekends differently than weekdays.
- Save your errands for weekends. Although I generally do at least a few hours of work every day, I like to take it a little bit easy on the weekends. Running errands, which is something that has to be done anyways, is a nice way to break up the week and re-energize yourself for going back to work.
- If you are able, separate creative work and practical work for different times of the day. For instance, I focus on more administrative tasks in the evenings, and plan my weekends to be the time for more of my creative work, whereas I tend to complete practical activities in the mornings on weekdays.
- Understand that in some ways, your work life and personal life can’t be separated. When you are your brand, your work life is your personal life and vice versa. Be okay with that! If you love what you are doing, it’s only natural that you – your brand – are *on,* 24 / 7.
