MBA1405 Q&A Wednesday: How do I get a better work/life balance?

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Hey O welcome to the 100 Arm MBA Show. Your source for business truth every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar@100mba.net Today's question is from Paul and Paul asks how do I have a better work life balance? Business is good, but my life is a mess. Literally. I have no time for household chores or errands and nearly no social life help. Thanks for sending in the question Paul. I will do my best to help because this is very common for entrepreneurs for business builders. We throw ourselves into our businesses because we want it to succeed at all costs and sometimes we sacrifice our very own lives and even just our environment. We let the laundry pile up and the vacuuming and the gardening and all that kind of stuff and we barely have time to go out to get some groceries to eat healthy. On top of that, we don't make it a priority to have a social Life, to schedule events, to do things, to meet people, to make friends, because we're hustling 24 7. I want to talk a bit about Work Life Balance. Help Paul out and in the process also help everybody else listening, looking to make sure that not only are they building a great business, but they're enjoying the journey and their life during that journey. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start by saying that Work Life Balance is not uniformed for every single person. It's going to look different for you and me and everybody else. But obviously Paul's not happy with his balance. He sees that there are many things in his life that are being neglected and we don't want that. We want to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves, our environment, and enjoying the success that we're having. What's the point of building a successful business and having this great thing on our hands if our life is not enjoyable, if we don't get a chance to enjoy the fruits of our labor? No one says you have to be totally like balling out, but making some time to take care of life and take care of yourself will help you even do better. So I'm gonna share some tips to help Paul out and help everybody else listening. Number one, the first piece of advice, this is especially important if you run a remote team is you have to have weekends. You have to allot some time for you to have some downtime. This includes, you know, having a Saturday and Sunday or two days of the week, wherever you are in the world, to allow yourself to catch up on life. Okay? If for any reason this is not possible, and for most of us it's possible, we just gotta work more efficiently, then at least have one day off. This should be non negotiable. You should have at least one rest day. Now, I say especially for remote teams because it's easy to work anytime because you can work anytime. So if you have no boundaries, if you don't set those boundaries up, you're gonna find yourself working all the time. Okay, so. So if you make it something that's important in your team culture where we do everything, we try not to get our team members to work on the weekends, it's going to be enforced and everybody's going to be recharged and be focused during the week. Now, obviously there are exceptions. There are times where you're doing a crunch, you're doing a sprint. This should be the exception and not the norm. Now you have a weekend, you have a Day off or something. You can't just say, that's it, I'm good, everything's going to be fine. No, you have to actually plan something for those days. You have to make sure you make use of those days. Whether it's planning to go to a concert or a sporting event or a dinner with your friends, or even if you're staying home, have a plan so you know that you're getting some enjoyment, some relaxation. Whether it's I'm going to cook dinner with the family and then watch a movie on Netflix or we're going to go to the park and walk the dog and ride our bikes. Whatever it is, have a plan. Just like you plan work, plan your life so you can get the most out of it. Next thing is if your business is rocking and rolling and you're making some good money, like Paul has kind of alluded to, this is a good thing. Take some of that money and spend a bit of it on improving the quality of your life, including taking care of those things that manage your life, like the chores he mentioned. You will be surprised if you check out the classified ads, if you put up on TaskRabbit or Airtasker, one of those apps, how much it costs to take care of some of the menial things that have bogged you down and made you feel guilty, like cleaning the house, like laundry, like the gardening. You need to get over yourself and try this out for a month. How much would it cost if you took care of all those things by outsourcing? You get somebody to do it for you. I know a lot of people are resistant to this because, you know, like myself, I didn't come with from a lot of money. My parents, you know, we never had cleaners or maids or any of that stuff. We did the chores of the kids and, and my parents would chip in here and there, but they worked full time, both of them. But the point here is that we're not used to spending money on these things, but it can really increase the quality of your life and allow you to enjoy your weekends and enjoy your time off and not feel so guilty. I guarantee you'll be surprised by the math if you look at, hey, how much would it cost for me to hire cleaners to come every two weeks to come clean my house, top to bottom, vacuuming, laundry, everything, right? How much would it cost if I got the gardener to come and, you know, tidy things up every month or two? Some people, their whole weekend is shot because they're doing their gardening. I find that this Is especially important for any reoccurring tasks that happen. Cleaning, laundry, even cooking. If you don't enjoy cooking and you can't afford hiring somebody to come in and cook you some meals, pre prepare some meals and put them in the freezer. This can save you a lot of time and headache and guilt. And again, do the math. Sometimes people don't realize that, wow, I can get all this done for this much. Not bad. So I would definitely look into doing that one by one. Number three, socializing. We talked about scheduling events if you are looking to meet new people or make new friends. If you've just moved somewhere and you just haven't had the chance to kind of make it happen, you definitely should prioritize this because this is your support network. We talked about this yesterday, or I believe on Monday, I'm sorry, on the must read episode. But the point here is, is that you don't have to really venture that far out. You don't have to be an outgoing person. Just go to a local meetup in a topic that you're interested in. It could be a hobby, it could be your work, it could be your business, it could be your specialty, it could be a marketing meetup, it could be a dog lovers meetup, it could be something like that that's local to you. It's not going to cost much. You go there, you meet some people, you enjoy yourself and it's something to do. Get out, dress up, look good, use that bottle of cologne that's been sitting on your shelf. You know what I'm saying? So it gives you an opportunity to live a little bit and meet some. If you are trying to meet new people, try to rekindle some of those relationships you really enjoyed. Who haven't you spoken to in a while? Who haven't you spent some time or had a dinner with? Be the person that makes that appointment and reaches out and say, hey, how about we go out for dinner next week or the weekend after that? Let's go bowling, let's go see a movie, something. Organize. You have to make sure you make time to organize it and you make time to actually do it. So you may want to put some time in your calendar to organize your outings for the weekends, for the month. And it's really cool. And we've done this in our house, which is great, where you have your calendar booked for the next few weekends, for the next few months and you're like, wow, I got something planned. It's going to be fun. You look forward to the weekend look forward to your time off and the excitement leading up to it is part of the enjoyment. Another big thing I want you to analyze is your work. You know, you say that you are really focused on the business, which is great, but how much are you really doing and need to do? Maybe you need to make a couple hires to take some things off your plate. What are some of the things that you do on a regular basis that you wouldn't mind handing over? Forget about difficulty level or training them. Everything is trainable. You can find somebody who can do the work. You're not a unique snowflake. People can do things that you could do too. I learned this the hard way after stressing out all the time. Still learning this. So the point here is is that maybe your work life balance is out of whack because you're just got too much on your plate. And if you can afford to hire somebody to take off some things, even if it's just an EA or a virtual assistant, they can take care of a lot of stuff that's sucking a lot of your time. That's not allowing you to have a life after work every day. Like to finish work at 5 or 6 or whatever it is. And by the way, these are arbitrary numbers like or time. You can end work at two if you want or noon if you can make it work for your business. That's the beauty of entrepreneurship. You make the rules. You just have to design them and then implement.

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You have to be an active member in creating a work life balance. This is just like creating your business. You gotta create your life right? You gotta plan this out, you gotta execute just like your business or it's not gonna happen. Simply, you have to make it a priority. Otherwise other forces, your business, your time, other people's time and interests are going to shape your work life balance. Those forces are going to pull and tug around you and just give you what you're given right now. Make the time to schedule these events, to outsource certain tasks to hire in your business, to line up the load a little bit if you can. Some people are going to do a better job than you do. I'm not a believer of the narrative that the people that hustle the hardest are the one that wins. Working hard is important, but it's also not sustainable to have your nose to the ground working day and night for years. You could do that for certain periods of time, but you got to start working smarter. You gotta start hiring people that are doing the work for you. I believe that you should hustle, especially at the start, to get things going, to validate the idea, to really get the income going and the money coming in, the revenue. But once you start building out your team, you want to have a sustainable model for life so you can grow this business and keep it going for as long as you can and continue to be an entrepreneur even if you sell the business down the road. So see this as your way to maintain your business and your life, how to pace yourself throughout the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Have a long term view and this is when you'll start prioritizing that work life balance. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, share it with a friend. Tell somebody you're sitting with right now. Share it on social media right now. Take a screenshot of what's on your phone, you know this episode, and tell people about the $100 MBA show. Thank you in advance for it means so much that you're sharing our show with your friends and family. If you have a question you want to ask for Q and A Wednesday, just email me over at Omar MBA Net and we'll answer it right here on the show just like we did for Paul. Thanks, Paul, for sending in that question. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There are certain things in your life I understand that are hard to control or out of your control. You have obligations, you have commitments, but we all have things under our control, and if we master that and we control them and plan them and we have some ownership over the time we do have, it's going to permeate in other parts of our life and other parts that we don't control. People are going to start recognizing that, hey, this is the direction you're going in, and let's help this person out, especially those who are close to you in your life and your family. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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