How To Set Work-Life Boundaries As A Small Business Owner |
Although it’s only three lines, I often get questions about my out-of-office reply—because it states that I reply to email on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Other business owners are often quietly inspired by this, but also puzzled: how can I even run a business with this (limited) availability?
The ability to decide when, how and where they work is one of the reasons many small business owners start their business in the first place. Yet this flexibility doesn’t prevent burnout: research suggests that 40% of small business owners experience poor work-life balance or feel like they’re working too much or too hard.
While countries such as France, Belgium and Australia have enshrined “the right to be unavailable” into law—Australia even for the employees of small businesses—there are no such laws for small business owners. There’s no shortage of advice on boundaries for employees, but what if you’re the manager and employee at the same time? We decide on our availability; and that often means we make ourselves as available as possible, as often as possible: on the weekends, in the evenings, while we’re trying to tend to other demands. This, we have been taught, is what it means to run a business: to be always “on,” to hustle, to........