#027: Work/Life Balance: How to Set Healthy Boundaries You Can Actually Keep

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey everyone, thanks for joining me for episode 27 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. You can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 27 so if you're somewhere right now where you can't take notes, don't worry, I got your back. These are very detailed notes that you can reference later at your convenience. So you know it's very easy to talk about achieving a healthy work life balance, right? You know, I can talk about this all day long. You've read the articles, you've listened to the podcast to talk about it. But we all know that it's much harder to put this idea into practice. Now, I'm not a believer in this concept or this ideal that the goal here is to always be in balance. I think being in balance all the time is unrealistic. I don't know of anyone who can do that. I don't think we're meant to be doing that. However, I think what we should be striving for is to be in balance, to achieve some sort of healthy work life balance over a period of time, over the course of a year. I think it's natural to be off balance. And my co author, Pete Savage talks about this in the book we wrote together with Steve Sloan White, the wealthy freelancer, and he explains this very, very well. Now I think that this is an issue though, that most of us really struggle with. And it happens. And it's something we struggle with at every, every phase of our business. So don't think that this is something that impacts you only once you're very successful. It happens all the time. When you're getting started, you're trying to prospect like a mad person and you're spending a lot of time learning about building your business or learning about your craft. So where do you draw the line? Where do you stop? It's very difficult as you get going and you keep building and growing your business and you're getting clients, you're working through those early inefficiencies of your business. You're trying to figure out where you stop. You don't want to stop, you want to do a really good job for your client. So you maybe work A little bit harder than you should. And then once you're established and you're financially successful, it's just difficult to decide when to dial things down. You're just afraid that, oh my gosh, I don't want to turn this down or I don't want to say no to these people because I don't know when the next project's going to come, when the next client's going to come. Even if you're doing extremely well, that fear is always there. So I'm very impressed when I run into freelancers who can achieve a healthy balance over time despite these challenges that we all face. And that's why I asked Rachel Foster to come into the show. Rachel is a very successful six figure freelancer and she is based in Toronto. We worked together this past summer on a coaching basis and I just immediately loved the clarity that Rachel has about her business, her values, her purpose and the boundaries that she sets in her business. She's very clear about these things, she's very passionate and I asked her, hey, would you mind coming into the show and talking about this? I would say that if achieving any sort of healthy balance in your business and work life is important to you, I really think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. So I hope you enjoy it and I'll come back to you here at the end of the interview. Hey, Rachel, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

So, you know, you and I have been talking for a long time and I know we've had quite a few coaching calls and I think that's where this came up, this issue of work life balance. Work life balance, for lack of a better term. Right. And we talked about setting boundaries and you had some really interesting ideas and thoughts on this topic. So it's great to have you here to discuss something that I think it's so important, but we just don't seem to really address it as much as we do in this community.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about it.

So before we get to that though, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do for a living, what type of clients you work with, that sort of thing.

Okay, so I'm a freelance BE the bee copywriter and I'm based out of Toronto and the companies that I work with tend to be. Be the. Be. Be technology companies, mid size to larger. And I do all sorts of things for them for website copy, white papers, case studies, press releases. Pretty much anything they need there.

Gotcha. Okay. And how long have you been doing this?

I've been freelance for about four years now.

Okay. Okay. So you're. Yeah. You've been at it a while and I know from just our relationship that you stay pretty busy.

Yeah, definitely. I have a good amount of clients right now. I try to keep the schedule balanced so that I could keep everyone happy and then still maintain my own schedule too, and things I have going on.

That's a good segue into my first question. Just to kind of add some context to this conversation, give us an idea of what a typical work week looks like for you. Specifically, I'm wondering how many hours you work when, if you have times when you start and end or that you shoot for. And how many clients or projects do you have at any given time?

So I'm typically Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. I tend to wake up in the morning. I do a short yoga workout just to get my mind focused and to get balance for the day. And I find that that helps a lot with clarity and then keeping me energized throughout the day. And then when I start right at nine, I could be really focused and just jump right into that writing. So then I think sometimes in the late afternoon or in the evening, I'll do another workout later on too, just because I like working out a lot. And so sometimes if I work out in the afternoon, I might work a little bit later, maybe till about 6, 6:30. But for the most part it's pretty balanced. And as for clients, I think I typically, I find that if I have three clients I'm working with in any given week, that is a good workload for me. Although it depends on the scope of the projects. Like if I have a client and I'm waiting a long time for them to get back to me, I might pick up another client or two just to keep things balanced.

Okay. Okay. And in terms of so 9 to 5. So this is. I mean, you try to keep a 40 hour workweek.

Mm, yeah, I find that's the best because I really want to keep take my weekends off. Sometimes I get so busy that I have to go into the weekend. And for a while I was going into a lot of my weekends and I just started to really get frustrated with that because I felt like I didn't have time for anything else other than work. And so I've tried to do some strategies and some techniques to help me so that I can get those weekends off.

Well, definitely want to talk about that. Today because I think this is something that we all fall into. I know I'm guilty of it. It's very easy to fall into this. Well, I'll just let it kind of fall into the weekend and carry over into the weekend. And you try to catch up on the weekend, but it seems like you never catch up anyway.

Yeah, that's true. When I was going into a lot of my weekends, my assistant, she had a talk with me or talking to, and she told me I had to straighten out my schedule during the week, so I didn't work the weekends. And so we came up with some ideas and one of the things that I had to really get good at was making sure that I wasn't doing a lot of personal things during business hours. So I made a rule with myself that said if I get it done, all my personal stuff for an hour during the day, whether it's a workout or going to the grocery store or something like that, then that would have to wait until the weekend because there's just no time for it. Otherwise I'd be cutting into my evenings and weekends with a lot of work that would just start to drain me after a while.

I think it's really smart and a lot of people say, oh my gosh, but I want that freedom and flexibility. But the thing is, right, if you want that freedom and flexibility, you got to do what, what you got to do during work hours so that you can have that freedom later in the evenings and the weekends.

Definitely.

Let's talk about. Okay, so you mentioned time. What other boundaries have you set in your business? Tell me a little bit about those.

Well, I have a dedicated office space. Last year we moved and now I have my own in home office with a door that shuts so I could keep everything else out. Last year we were living in a one bedroom apartment, so I was working out of my living room for many years. And you know, it's just very distracting because the TV was in there and it was just so open to everything else. And I was always staring at my computer, even when I wasn't working because it would be there, piles of work next to it. So having the dedicated office space, I noticed that ever since we moved and I have an office where I could shut the door. I'm a lot more efficient because I don't have the distractions in my office. It's just work. And then later on when I want to, when I don't want to work, I just shut the door and I don't have to look at it.

Yeah, so you keep it locked away. Okay, that makes sense that. I've heard a lot of people say that. I kind of take it for granted because I've always had a home office, but I can imagine how difficult it would be for me to work out of my living room.

Yeah, it's very distracting.

What other boundaries have you found are helpful?

I always make time for exercise. No excuses right there. Because I find that I like to exercise in the late afternoon, usually around 3, 3:30, when you're starting to get slump. And I find that for me, exercising is a way to pick me up sometimes. I also get to the point where I'm writing and things are going and I'm writing a lot and it's flowing, then it will stop flowing and I might spend 20 minutes nitpicking over a sentence. And that's when I realize that I really need to take a break, I need to get moving. And then I do my workout. And when I come back to things, I find that things flow a lot easier. So I think I'm even gaining more time by taking time to exercise.

Tell me, would you mind sharing a little bit about your workout and what kind of exercise you do?

Oh, yeah. So I think I said in the morning I just do a very short yoga workout just to kind of energize myself and wake up. And I'm doing these videos right now through a website called My Yoga Online, and they're doing a morning yoga challenge. And so the videos are anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. But I tend to do the shorter ones because I really don't have more than a half hour in the morning. And because I don't commute, you know, it's. That's my commuting time right there put to better use. Then in the afternoon, a couple times a week, I do more of a hardcore strength workout, kettlebell and things like that. Then if I don't do that, it's because in the evenings I'm either going to do Pilates at my Pilates studio or I'm going dancing because my husband and I are swing dancers and we're really active with all sorts of swing dancing here in Toronto.

Now, I think you told me that one of the reasons why you decided to keep actual work hours is you also didn't want to cut into some of those hobbies and outside activities. Right? Including the swing dancing.

Yes, we have a ton of hobbies. And I was just talking to my husband about living in Toronto and, you know, it could be expensive living in a big city like this. And he was saying that if our hobbies were just working and then coming home and sitting around the walk watching TV and then we wouldn't need to live in the city. But because we have so many activities that we like to do and friends we like to hang out with, that that's really important for us to be here. And so at the same time, we want to make use of that and go out and do things and have fun. So that's very important to both of us.

Now it's got to be difficult to keep some of these boundaries intact. So I'm wondering, how do you handle this voice in your head that says, you know what, it's okay to skip this workout today, or it's okay to work till 6, 7 tonight. Or I mean, I understand that sometimes there are deadlines or pressing deadlines, that there's just no way around it. But the day to day stuff, how do you handle that nagging voice?

Well, if there's a pressing deadline, then I will work and I will put other things aside or move things around or rework my schedule so that I can meet that deadline. And I usually leave a couple of nights open a week in case something comes up like that where I need to work late. So I could do that, but not every night because I don't want to be working every night. So I have other personal things that I schedule in there and I make a point of scheduling them. Things that I cannot miss, I must go to. So I have those in my schedule as well. And as for, you know, skipping a workout, you know, sometimes it happens, sometimes you just have to listen to your body and if you're feeling tired from over training or something like that, you just need to take a break and just give yourself some rest. So skipping a workout here and there doesn't really bother me that much. But I don't want to, I don't want to skip too often because it really affects my mood. If I, if I had missed too much exercise.

Yeah. So you've identified how important it is and you're in a way kind of cheating yourself. I'm curious what happens if you ever, if you've had a couple of weeks where it's been just back to back deadlines and you seem to be making compromises, do you stop and kind of when it's all over and look back to see how you could have maybe done things better? And I mean, I'm not leading you on here, I don't do that. But I'm wondering If you've done that before and if it's helped.

I think a few months ago, when I was working quite a bit and it was going into the weekends, that's when my assistant gave me a talking to. And she looked at my schedule and said, okay, you don't really need to do this during the day. You could do that on the weekend. And then all of a sudden, all those times started coming together. And I think another thing that's important is doing what you're the best at and then outsourcing all the rest of it. So, for example, I do the writing, but I outsource the proofreading because that's really time intensive. I'm not the best at it. I think that those are two different skill sets, writing and proofreading. So when I'm done with something, I send it to my proofreader and then they send it back to me, and I don't have to spend a ton of time reviewing that final copy there and then. Also, having an assistant is really important because she takes on all of the things that I don't really like to do. And she's an online business manager, which means that she has a company herself, and she has all these people that work for her. And so because she has all these people, they can handle anything from helping me with my business strategy to updating my website, to handling all my phone calls.

Interesting.

Right now, they're handling all of my phone calls. So she suggested that I have my phone line go directly to her and that she would handle all my scheduling. And at first I wasn't really sure about that because I thought, well, you know, I don't really get a ton of phone calls. I don't do a whole lot of scheduling. But ever since I sent all that work to her, I realized how much time I would spend scheduling meetings, scheduling interviews with people if I was writing an article or a case study, scheduling phone calls, you know, them canceling things and then rescheduling. It's a lot of time. So it has been a big help having her do all of that stuff.