Balancing act

Jason Woolfe looks at why a work/life balance is even more important in today’s environment – and what advice is out there to help you achieve it

A good work/life balance is what we all want, but it is particularly difficult for small business owners. Hiscox research has found that they work nearly two hours a day more than the average – that’s 2,500 working hours a year – and often it is relationships that suffer from reduced time for leisure, family and friends.

Today’s 24/7 business culture makes it difficult to balance the demands of work. Organisational theorist Dr Peter Vaill coined the term ‘permanent white water’ to describe the rapidly changing and highly competitive environment that today’s entrepreneurs must navigate.

Our iPhones and BlackBerrys put email in our pockets wherever we are, but we pay the price in terms of what sociologist Dalton Conley calls ‘weisure’ – the seeping together of work and leisure that eliminates clearly defined rest time. Indeed, Bryan E Robinson, author of Chained to the Desk, writes of a time when “blackberries were something you consumed, not something that consumed you”, suggesting that technology creates new problems as well as solving old ones.

Time to take action
Small business owners typically believe that everything relies on them, and that turning work away isn’t an option, particularly in today’s economic climate, according to Gina Gardiner, founder of Recovering Workaholics. She says that a good work/life balance can benefit your work life as well as your home or leisure life.

Gina suggests taking time to examine your business life and grading your typical activities on how much they contribute to your targets. “Put a value on your time and use that to decide what to do,” she says. “Don’t skew your priorities. Give things the level of importance and urgency they deserve.”

If half your meetings contribute little to the business, they can be cut right back. Gina says: “Often our time gets slurped up and isn’t serving our needs in terms of making the business work. Sometimes being productive is about sitting and contemplating, so build in some reflection time to ask yourself: is this the best use of my time?”

Plan your life
Not only can your business benefit from a better work/life balance, work itself can also be made more rewarding. “Most people say they prefer being at home to being at work,” writes Winifred Gallagher in Rapt, a book on the psychology of paying attention. But research into ‘flow’ – the highly focused, rewarding state associated with great productivity – suggests we are more likely to find it at work than at home.

Winifred suggests we should pay as much attention to scheduling a great evening or weekend as we do to the working day. She advises abandoning vain attempts to ‘multitask’, because when you try to attend to two things at once, you simply switch rapidly between them. It takes longer and generates errors, meaning you’ll have to work twice as hard as you did before.

Thinking about the priority of work tasks and the importance of social plans can help achieve a balance, so that there is time for family and friends and the quality of your working life also improves.