Keeping your business life and personal life separate is important…
As a business owner, you’re never really off the clock. This has become more of a case with the rise of mobile phones and the internet – clients and employees expect 24 hour communication. Keeping your business life and personal life separate is important as it could prevent you being able to relax as well as damaging relationships with friends and family. Here are five tips for stopping your business life from interfering with your personal life.
Schedule your time
The simplest way to keep your business life separate from your personal life is to create shifts for yourself. By setting yourself designated work hours and a cut-off point each day, you can still have time for your personal life each day. Outside of these hours it’s important to not do anything business-related unless its absolute emergency. You shouldn’t be interrupting family time in the evening to take work phone calls and read emails.
Work away from the house
If you work from home, you may want to consider getting out of the house if you find that your business life and personal life are getting mixed up. You could work from a coffee bar or use library as a change of environment. Alternatively, you could take the bold step of renting out office space so that you’ve always got a designated work zone. Choose the option that’s most practical for you.
Get yourself a separate work phone
It can be worth having two phones – one for business and one for your personal life. This can allow you to use your phone in the evenings and one weekends without having constant work email notifications popping up or having to answer work-related phone calls. You could even turn off your work phone in your free time so that your forcing yourself not to deal with business. Separating your phones could also have other perks such as allowing you to calculate phone call expenses more easily.
Outsource support
If 24 hours contact is important for the reputation and security of your business, you could always consider outsourcing a phone answering service who can take calls for you out of hours. Such companies will relay only the most important information to you whilst filtering out the sales calls and general enquiries so that the phone is always being answered but you don’t always have to be there to answer it. This could also outsource a HR service to deal with employee enquiries regarding the likes of holiday, shift times and sickness.
Don’t give clients your home address
One thing you don’t want is clients turning up on your doorstep when you’re trying to enjoy family time. Whether you work from home or not, you should try to avoid giving out your home address to clients. You can use a virtual address for mailing purposes – this allows all your mail to be directed to another address before being redirected to you. There are even virtual mailbox services that can scan your physical mail and send electronic copies to you.
