Welcome to episode number 74 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm talking about balancing work and life as an online entrepreneur, and even not necessarily as an online entrepreneur, but just someone who's juggling multiple projects all at once. I think this is something that's overlooked by a lot of people. In the hustle of growing our ventures, it's easy to lose track of your personal life and it's easy to lose that balance that hopefully you're striving for. 

So in this podcast today, I want to sort of break it into multiple parts and talk about understanding the challenge, why it's something that I believe is important, and also then provide you with practical strategies for achieving that balance, as well as tips to stay motivated and avoid burnout in the first place.

Now, balance is obviously something that is subjective. I've seen people who think that having a balanced work life means that it's fine, that they're traveling away from home 15 days a month, and that's absolutely fine. For me, my focus, and things that are important to me is being home and being around my family. So that would be out of balance for me. That's not to say that it's out of balance for something else. I think this whole idea of work balance needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it's different for everyone. Ultimately, what I think you want to be striving for is something that is fulfilling and makes you and your loved ones happy. 

I think as online entrepreneurs, we face a few fairly unique challenges, one of them being that there's this culture of always being on and it's probably not helped by the fact that if you're running an online business, then you can interact with it and do things with it anytime you've got an internet connection. It could be replying to something on social media, sending an email, monitoring something that you've published, or some stats, or looking at your products or anything else. It's just all-consuming and on all the time. So I think that's one unique challenge for sure.

Another one that we have, and this is probably more relevant now than ever before, are the blurred lines of working from home. So many online entrepreneurs start out working from home, and their home is also their office. It can be pretty challenging sometimes to differentiate the two and they end up overlapping with one another, and sometimes that can be counterproductive if you're looking to achieve a successful balance. 

Another challenge that comes to mind is isolation and working alone. This is something that can impact some people on a, you know, a mental well-being level. Some people who need social interaction and need to be around other people struggle with the isolation. So that's something to be aware of. 

I think if you look at the day in the life of an entrepreneur, at least speaking from my own experience, I can share what that looks like. I'm up before six most days, up before 6AM most days and I'm having breakfast with my kids, that's something I want to do. And then I take them to school and then I've got a work block of a few hours and then it'll be lunch break. My kids are still young so they're still home for lunch. Then I'll have another block in the afternoon of potential work time. 

But amongst all of this, I need to get some exercise in, and I'll talk more about this shortly, I need to make sure all the household items are managed. We've got doctor's appointments to deal with and dozens and dozens of little things on top of this.

All of this can be overwhelming, can become overwhelming. There are things that you can do though that I'm going to get to in a moment which I think will help you keep this under control. I think one of the first things to be aware of is recognizing when there might be a problem and when things might be starting to get a little bit out of balance or unbalanced. And I think for me, the triggers that I see are things like tiredness, constantly feeling tired, lacking personal time when I feel like I haven't had any time for myself, strained relationships or declining productivity when my life is out of balance. These are the things that tend to happen to me, and it might be different for you, but these are the things that happen to me. 

These are always a warning sign for me because if I don't change anything, then I'm going to get into a burnout cycle which has got no positives that can come from it at all. When you start seeing that things are out of balance you need to break that trend as quickly as you can and get back on a more sustainable track. A lack of balance is not something that only affects the business, but it can also affect the personal life and actually the business success as well.

I think understanding the challenge is the first step towards achieving a work life balance. If you can recognize these unique challenges that us as online entrepreneurs face and begin addressing them and begin building a framework that sort of embraces them and fosters them, then you can work towards a healthier and more balanced lifestyle.

I think now if I talk briefly about why I think it's so important and then get into some strategies and ideas that you can use, I think there's a mental element to it or a psychological and a physical element to health. The psychological impacts of a life that is out of balance can include things like stress, anxiety and depression, just to name a few. From a physical standpoint, if you are neglecting your personal well-being, then you might experience sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease has been shown to increase, and a weakened immune system. When you feel like you're running on fumes and you're burnt out, you're more likely to get sick. I've experienced this in the past for sure. 

I think the influence of productivity and creativity is huge as well because if you are running on fumes and you're in burnout mode, then you get decreased productivity and your creativity goes way down as well. There are so many negatives that come out of this having a life which is not in that work-life balance that we're striving for. That’s just a no brainer that you would want to make sure that you're doing things to make sure that you are staying in that pattern of balance. 

I think there's also a tendency amongst entrepreneurs to try to win the game of business through brute force, which sometimes means working 20 hours a day, for example. But in my experience, you always reach the point of diminishing returns. If I work 12 hours per day versus 10 hours per day, those last 2 hours that I do, are they really going to be that productive? Or if I were to focus more on making sure I was really doing the right things. And for example, this idea of deep work, and I've got a good book up here behind me, if you're watching the video version of this, called Deep Work. I think it's by Cal Newport. I've got a podcast episode all about deep work. It's episode number seven over at The Growth Booth, if you want to check that out. 

This idea of deep work is that you can get more done and make a bigger difference on your business and your life with 1 hour of focused work versus 10 hours of a scatterbrained approach. This is something that I really believe in, and as time goes by, I'm more and mor building this “less is more” idea into my life and my business and focusing on the things that matter versus trying to do absolutely everything because you definitely reach a point where the results that you get just turn to rubbish essentially.

Now I think for personal relationships and leisure, the balance is really important as well because if you get out of balance then you're more likely to have strain on relationships. For me, I like to think about things that I can add into my day that are not work- or business-related. So things like hobbies. I recently shared how I've been learning Italian and that's turning into a hobby that I'm really enjoying. Exercise has been sort of the backbone, if you like, of my non-work life for many years now. Reading books, taking my kids to the park, going out to enjoy a coffee with my wife, or whatever it might be. These are things that you can do outside of work to really break the mold and give yourself a healthy distraction. 

Burnout for me has always been a slippery slope and it's something that I've experienced multiple times and it has always stemmed from an imbalance or from doing too much, taking on too much at one time. The result of the burnout has always been exhaustion, low motivation, frustration, and recognizing when it's happening is pretty easy, but the challenge, I think, is recognizing it before it happens.

The stakes of neglecting this work-life balance are pretty high because as we've spoken about it, it influences your mental and physical health, your productivity, your creativity, your personal relationships, your business success, and so much more. So if you can sort of acknowledge this, then I think it can become a priority. 

I want to now transition to giving you a few practical strategies that you can use to deal with burnout and to deal with making sure that you don't get out of balance in your life. 

Now, in podcast episodes number 12 and 13, we spoke a lot about setting up boundaries, about productivity, about lifestyle design. If you want to learn more about designing your lifestyle, if you like, then check out The Growth Booth number 12 and 13. You really can design your lifestyle to be the way that you want it to be, if you sit down and think about it a little bit. 

In terms of physical design, you can have a designated workspace and instead of working on the kitchen table, maybe you can set up a little corner in a different area of the house. It doesn't matter where it is, maybe you're working from a coworking space and that's your designated work area. And when you leave that area, your work stays in that area. You're trying to deliberately create almost like physical boundaries there. 

Another thing you can do is to limit the working hours. I started doing this quite a few years ago because it was too easy just to keep working into the evening. Once I became my own boss and started working for myself, then there was nothing stopping me from working until midnight perhaps. I now try to adopt more sort of a nine-to-five lifestyle and actually a lot less than that, but make sure that I don't try to go past that 5PM, because then that starts digging into my family time. 

I think unplugging from technology during non-work hours is something that is important to do as well. I've always done my best work when I've been able to keep that balance. Nowadays my routine is pretty vital and doing less and unplugging from technology from time to time and really striving for that balance has become a bit of a mantra for me and a way of doing business.

Time management is something that can help you a lot here as well. So sometimes if you're feeling flustered and overwhelmed, it could be a result of not being able to manage your time effectively enough. One of the best time management methods that I've come across is the twelve week year. And I speak about this in detail with the creator of the 12-Week Year or the author of the 12-Week Year book in The Growth Booth episode number 19. The 12-week year is basically taking activities and putting them into a 12-week plan. This is something that you can repeat four times a year, essentially. And there are lots of benefits to doing that. 

But there are other methods you can use that will help you blast through procrastination and get more done. One good example is the Pomodoro technique, which is where you essentially use a timer and you do 20-minute blocks of work at a time, and you give yourself a goal, something that you need to complete in that 20 minutes, and then you take a break and you rinse and repeat. That gives you a bit of an urgency around completing a task in a certain time. 

Another one that's useful that I've come back to over the years is the Eisenhower Box. Now, the Eisenhower box has a y axis and an x axis. On the Y axis, the vertical axis, you got two rows, you've got important and not important, and then on the X axis or the horizontal axis, you've got urgent and not urgent. 

In one of the squares on this matrix, there's the intersection of things that are Important and things that are also Urgent. These are things that you need to do today. You can knock them out either immediately or today. In another square, you've got things that are Not Urgent, but they are Important. This is something that you should schedule a time for. So it might be exercising, it might be calling a family member, it might be researching something, it might be booking a holiday, something like that. Then you've got things that are Urgent but Not Important, and you want to be delegating those, and the Not Urgent and also Not Important, and just deleting them. So that's the Eisenhower box or the Eisenhower matrix, and like I say, head over to The Growth Booth episode number 74 to check that out for yourself. But this can be a useful tool when you really want to trim the fat and just focus on the things that are really important in your business. 

I've got a couple of episodes which dive deep into productivity hacking. You can check them out at The Growth Booth episode number 65 and 66. In these we talk about delegating tasks, we talk about outsourcing, and hot topic right now, using AI tools like Chat GPT to save you time. I mean, this opens up a whole new realm of possibility with regards to what you can now get done in a matter of moments, essentially, just by leveraging this technology. 

I think looking after yourself both physically and mentally and spending some time doing this each day should be one of the strategies that you add to your toolbox. So on a physical level, regular exercise I think is important. It doesn't have to necessarily be strenuous, but doing something to get yourself moving, I think everyone would agree that that's important. Healthy eating, there's a correlation between your health and what you eat. There's the old saying of “You are what you eat,” so there are a lot of flow on effects based on to do with what you eat. Getting enough sleep is really important as well. 

And then there's a whole range of mindfulness activities that you can do, things like meditation, potentially yoga. The old saying of “Success leaves clues,” we've seen this over and over again where the most successful people in the world swear by starting at a foundation with looking after themselves. They do regular exercise every day and they eat healthy and they get the sleep that they need, even though they're some of the most successful people on the planet. I'm talking about the likes of Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff and many, many more. These are people that look after themselves and as a result get better results in their businesses and their lives. 

I think having a support system is really important and something that you should try to build into your toolbox to look after yourself as well. So things like family members, friends, people who add to you rather than provide a layer of toxicity, if you like. You want to avoid that kind of a thing in your life, but if someone can add value and be a real asset to bringing out the best in you, then there are people that you want to have as part of your support system. So family, hopefully, friends, hopefully, definitely mentors. If you can work with coaches, I think that's a great idea. We've seen over and over again, by the way, that success leaves clues. The most successful people in the world, guess what? They have coaches as well. It’s certainly a big shortcut there. My coach helps me stay on that balanced equilibrium, if you like, much more than if I was going it alone. 

Finally, a few tips to just to avoid burnout and stay motivated in the first place. I think, firstly, recognizing the signs is a big one, so feeling tired all the time, losing interest in something physical fatigue, headaches, stomach issues, feeling disinterested in socialization for some people. These are often signs of burnout. Taking a break is really important and this is a great way to stay motivated. Regular breaks will do great things for your creativity and just help you see the forest from the trees, so a regular break and disconnecting from what you're doing, even if it's sometimes to go for a walk around the block for 10 minutes or just go and do something completely different, it'll allow you to get that 10,000 ft viewpoint and maybe approach a problem from a new angle. Sometimes you may have heard the saying, “I'll sleep on it.” You're making a decision or you're attacking a problem, and after a good night's sleep, you come back from it and you can solve it. So taking a break is important. 

There are different ways that you can sort of hack yourself to stay inspired and motivated. Some of the ways that I do it, for example, are setting and tracking personal and business goals. I've got a tracking sheet even for my Italian study, which might seem a little bit obsessive, but it keeps me motivated. It's one of those things that I don't want to break the streak of my studying because it's going so well. 

Celebrating the small wins, and there are lots of different ways that you can celebrate. It doesn't have to be anything overly elaborate. It could be any number of different things, but celebrating the small wins. 

Continuously learning will keep you motivated. Some people often think that they'll get motivated and then they'll take action, but I've come to believe that it sort of works the other way around. You take action and then you get motivated. 

Developing new skills is a great way to stay inspired as well. 

Also, constantly training yourself and reminding yourself about different positive mindset techniques. Every morning when I wake up, I think of three things that I'm grateful for, three wins from yesterday, and three things that I'm looking forward to achieving today. Sometimes it's the most trivial thing, but at least it gets me out of bed in the morning after this little 30-second routine inside my head. It gets me out of bed in the right frame of mind to start the day. 

The entrepreneurial journey can often feel like you're walking on a tightrope between work and life, but achieving a healthy work-life balance is not only possible, but it's probable when you set about achieving it. I think you get what you ultimately want to achieve. When you're focused on something, you get what you focus on, and if you're focused on having a good work life balance and you make it a priority, then it's something that you can do.

You can strive for success not at the cost of your health and your happiness, but by embracing that balanced approach, by setting boundaries, by using good time management, by looking after yourself, by leaning on a good support system and avoiding burnout at all costs because that will absolutely stifle things that you've got going on in your personal and your business life. 

And remember, the journey of entrepreneurship isn't just about success, it's about enjoying the ride along the way. Because if you focus just on an end objective, then I think you're kind of missing the point, and life is too short for that. 

As always, you can get all the show notes over at The Growth Booth, and this one is on episode number 74, so navigate to thegrowthbooth.com, go to episode number 74. You can also check us out on YouTube if you want to watch the video version of this. You can listen to us wherever you want to listen to your podcasts. We get a lot of people tuning into Spotify these days. We get a lot of people on the Apple Podcast app, Google Podcasts, and many, many others. 

I would also encourage you to take a couple of minutes to come and connect with me on social media. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook. If you search for Aidan Booth Online, you'll be able to find me and follow along with what I'm up to and get notifications when we release new episodes here at The Growth Booth. And of course, over at thegrowthbooth.com, you can subscribe to the email list as well and make sure you get notifications that way. That's a wrap for this episode. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. Bye for now.