Submitted For Your Consideration

May 2009

Balancing Act

Work-life balance for the self-employed. Does that sound oxymoronic? Is it the impossible dream? If not, how can one achieve it?

Sometimes, I think the process of achieving balance is more important than the balance itself. (Am I obfuscating things here? Probably.) Let me put it this way.

If you think of work-life balance as a process, instead of an end, you can more easily achieve it. (I think I'm getting closer to my point now.) Achieving balance is a process of doing the right things in the right way. Being organized and following through. And (forgive the cliché) working smarter, not harder.

So the question remains -- how does one do this? What is the process? The answer is -- well, if I had the answer, I could write a book about it, give seminars and make a million bucks. (Yeah, sure.)

I may not have all the answers, but do have some guidelines for achieving work-life balance when you're self-employed. They've helped me get my work done faster, more efficiently and allowed me to squeeze time in for a life.

So here are my suggestions. And, in summary, they involve four basic principles: plan, prioritize, schedule and perform.

Approach each big project as a series of small projects. Sometimes, when we're faced with a great, big project, we get paralyzed by the size of it. We don't know where to start or how to start, what to do first—we start doing things, only to realize we need to do other things first. In short, you need to plan.

Before you start a big project, analyze it. Break it down into its component parts and figure out what order they probably need to be done in. If you run into a brick wall . . . stop. Rethink your strategy. Just take each step at a time and plan ahead, so you'll have time to do so.

Prioritize all your tasks. Think of your business as being like an emergency room at a hospital (this may not be much of a stretch for many of you). Think of all the things you need to do as being like patients. In emergency rooms, they don't try to see every patient at once—they couldn't. They'd be overwhelmed. They perform triage, a process of assessing who's seriously wounded—separating the heart attacks from the broken ankles from the sprained knees (in other words, prioritizing)—and attending to the life-threatening cases first. Consider your own work. How much of it really needs to be done right now, this minute? How much of it can wait for a few hours? Or even a few days? How urgent is it?

I'm not advocating procrastination here. I'm advocating good judgment. Assess your work and figure out what needs to be done first according to importance. But don't use this excuse to avoid the unpleasant tasks. Which leads me to my next point.

What do you hate? Make it the first thing on your to-do list. Hate making phone calls? Do it first. Get the stuff you hate doing out of the way. (The emphasis here would be performance.) Whether it's bookkeeping or filing. Make it the first thing on the list and just do it. If marketing is a pain or a bugaboo, schedule time to make your phone calls or write queries or whatever marketing you do early. Get it done. You'll feel so much better once that's behind you and you can focus on the stuff you like—the stuff that prompted you to start a business.

Focus on completing no more than three major tasks per day. Now, I know this sounds impossible, but it can be done. Make a long-range plan for which tasks you will handle on what day (i.e., establish their priority and a schedule for getting them done). Put them on your to-do list for that day, then perform them. By focusing on a few major tasks, you can really give them your attention, get them done right the first time and move on to the next one. Trying to do six or seven major things in one day is overloading yourself and hurrying through them will just wear you down and your work will suffer as a result.

Will it take less than two minutes? Just do it. David Allen has a great approach to the small, unscheduled stuff that interrupts our day. He has a Two Minute Rule, which (quoting from Allen's book) states:

"If the Next Action can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up." Even if that item is not a "high priority", because it takes longer to store and track any item than to deal with it the first time it's in your head.

David Allen, GETTING THINGS DONE, p. 131

Found this in the following blog post. (And I don't have to tell you that this is about performance, do I?)

Do the small stuff in "bunches." If you know you have to send a lot of emails or make a bunch of phone calls, schedule an hour or so devoted to that. If you have a lot of annoying administrative work, designate (i.e., schedule) a time for that. You can cram all those small things into an hour or two sometimes—then, you have the rest of the day to deal with the bigger stuff.

Have a schedule, but be flexible. When I say, have a schedule, I mean try scheduling your tasks (literally, like appointments). Mark on your calendar what times you'd like to spend doing different things. This works—I've tried it. You may run into a little slippage now and then. Your "appointment" with a project that was supposed to run until 3 may run until 3:15 or 3:30, instead. This is where being flexible comes in. Don't worry. Be kind to yourself. Shave a little time off the next one. It may take less time than you planned to get it done, anyway. They say work expands to fill the time allotted. If you give yourself a firm deadline to get work done, you'll be surprised what you can accomplish.

Be flexible, but don’t forget to have a life other than work. One problem with being a freelancer is also one of its benefits—flexibility. Freelancers have so much discretion to set their own schedules, they can work anytime. So they end up working all the time. All the time is way too much. This is where discipline comes in. Sticking to your schedule and performing according to it, as much as possible. You have to impose a limit on the number of hours you work a day. Even a regular employer wouldn't expect you to work all the time. Why should you expect that of yourself?

So plan your tasks, prioritize them, schedule them—and if you can't get everything done today, they'll be waiting patiently for you to get to them tomorrow. (Particularly, if you've followed the other guidelines.)

Don’t beat yourself up about what you haven't done, but don’t defer it forever. Remember that analogy I made about emergency rooms? Let's say, one of your projects is a stomach ache, in terms of priorities. So you put it off and put it off and the deadline grows closer and closer. And you keep putting it off, until one day you realize your stomach ache has turned into a case of appendicitis. Omigod—now it's an emergency! You scramble and work long hours to finish it. You're stressed out and rushed, but you manage to complete it. Yes, it took working all weekend straight and staying up half the night to get it done, but you did it. But the thing is, you could have avoided that, if you just applied the above principles. Plan, prioritize, schedule and perform.

You could have avoided the stress, the extra hours, the lack of sleep—and had some time to enjoy life. And isn't having control over your life part of why you decided to start your own business?

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