“I’m afraid that I won’t have time for anything else because my career or business will make me a workaholic.”
This is a very legitimate concern for Entrepreneurs, because too often the workaholics are the ones that get highlighted or you watch a movie and the seemingly successful person is the one working all the time. You know– those movies where the successful person is missing their children’s school events, cancelling dinner with their spouse, waking up before the sun comes up, off to work in a stressful environment and running on 2 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, while this is the reality for some business owners, this is not the whole picture of entrepreneurship and business ownership.
Now don’t get me wrong, to be successful you will have to put some serious work in, there are no shortcuts but there are smart tips you can use.
Before I share these smart tips let us establish the following:
There can be a fine line between working smart and laziness. Yes, when you work smart you won’t have to put in as much effort to get the same results but when you’re lazy you just don’t work much. The goal of these two are very different; one is focused on the results while the other is focused on not working much. So ask yourself; are you taking this approach because you are focused on getting results with less effort (efficiency)? or are you just focused on working less? (Hint people who work smart are trying to get things done faster because they have other productive things to focus on after they are finished; family, other critical business projects, leadership, vacation, etc.)
Now that we’ve gotten that out-of-the-way here are a few things that can help you work smarter and improve your work-life balance:
1) Be okay with somethings not getting done – one of the keys to being very productive is knowing what matters most and how to adjust your priorities as needed.
2) Build a good process- very successful typically become very predictable because they are following a consistent habit/process that they have tested and proven to show the results that they want.
3) Be a leader – very successful people learn how to get things accomplished through the efforts of a group even when they don’t have a leader title. Work on your ability to understand the objective, communicate it to others and help them see why working together would be a good idea.
4) Hire well – Find ways to hire the right people that you need to help you achieve the goals that matter, whether its accounting and finance, legal, medical, labor, janitorial, family care etc.
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