4 tips for Business owners to make more time for themselves

Image credit: Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Running a business is a huge commitment. It can take up all your time and energy, leaving little left for yourself. But looking after your mental health and wellbeing should be your number one priority. If you work too hard without a break you risk succumbing to stress, anxiety, and eventually total burnout. 

This fast-paced lifestyle is unsustainable in the long term, so you need to make a conscious effort to make time for yourself. Use this leisure to spend time with family, travel, exercise, read, or do whatever you are passionate about. This will ultimately make you happier and more fulfilled in your life, while also refreshing and recharging your mind so you can be more productive when you return to work.

But how can you fit this me-time into your schedule? Your daily itinerary is so packed with business meetings, sales pitches, and events that you feel guilty booking aside three hours to play a round of golf. But it’s important you make the effort, for the sake of your mental health and personal relationships. To get you started, here are four tips to help you prioritize self-care.

Schedule it in
If you try to fit self-care in the gaps between work appointments then it will never happen. Things will keep coming up and getting in the way. Schedule your me-time into your day, the same way you would with client meetings and conference calls. This way you are committing your time and are less likely to cancel your plans.

Be more productive
If there was a way to accomplish more work in a shorter space of time, then you’d have a lot more freedom in your day to spend time on your hobbies and passions. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways for business leaders to be more productive. Shorten hour-long meetings to thirty minutes and you’ll be amazed by how much your team can get done in half the time. Use project management programs and delegate tasks to your employees and you’ll find your business processes become a lot more efficient. 

Eliminate time wasters
Some activities are productivity black holes, devouring your attention and reducing your ability to focus on important jobs. Email is probably the worst offender. The compulsion to constantly check your inbox and send replies is an inefficient use of your time. It would be much more practical to limit your email checking to twice a day - once in the morning and once in the afternoon - rather than constantly being a slave to your inbox.

Social media is another time waster. Although you might need to monitor Twitter and LinkedIn occasionally for business purposes, how often do you end up scrolling aimlessly through your feed? By eliminating this bad habit from your life you will have much more free time.

Outsource
Sometimes in business, it’s worth spending a little money to get the best results. By outsourcing important areas of your business, you can free up a huge amount of resources within your own company. Hire a first-rate experiential agency to manage your marketing, or a recruitment firm to take care of your hiring process and you’ll have a lot more time on your hands.