How to Create Better Work Life Balance When You Run Your Own Business

Running your own business has plenty of benefits.

You can control your time, make your own decisions and attend an appointment without asking somebody else for permission.

That freedom is real, and I value it enormously.

But there are also things about running a business that I could quite happily live without.

Some of them appeared gradually. There was no dramatic moment when the business announced that it planned to take over my life. It happened one evening email, one working weekend and one interrupted dinner at a time.

Eventually, I realised that running a business does not automatically give you freedom.

It gives you the opportunity to create freedom.

If you do not deliberately decide how the business fits into your life, it can quietly consume the life it was supposed to support.

These are five things I hate about running my own business and what I have done to manage them.

1. The isolation

There are decisions, risks and responsibilities that ultimately sit with you.

Your employees may support the business. They may be excellent at what they do and genuinely care about its success.

But they do not carry the business in the same way you do.

There will be conversations you cannot have with them. You cannot always discuss concerns about money, staffing or the future with the people who may be directly affected by the outcome.

Even when you have a team, you can still feel remarkably alone.

Traditional workplaces create a certain amount of connection automatically. You have colleagues nearby. There are conversations between meetings, shared frustrations and people who understand the environment because they are standing inside it with you.

When you run your own business, you have to create much of that support for yourself.

What helped me

I became intentional about building relationships with other business owners.

I needed people who understood the pressure without requiring an extensive explanation first. People I could discuss ideas with, ask questions and occasionally say, “Is this happening to you too?”

Sometimes I needed advice. Sometimes I needed perspective. Sometimes I simply needed somebody to say, “Yes, I have been there. It is not just you.”

I also recognised that one relationship could not meet every need.

Business owners can understand the responsibility. Mentors can offer experience and perspective. Friends outside business can remind you that you are a whole person with interests that have nothing to do with revenue, clients or growth.

Community did not remove the responsibility.

It stopped me from carrying all of it alone.

If running your business feels isolating, do not simply try to meet more people. Think about which kinds of relationships are missing.

Do you need business peers, a mentor, professional advice or people with whom you can talk about something completely unrelated to work?

Those are different needs, and they may require different people.

2. The way flexibility can quietly become unlimited working hours

One of the attractions of running a business is flexibility.

You can decide when you work, change your day when necessary and create a schedule that fits your life.

The difficulty is that when you can work whenever you want, it becomes very easy to work all the time.

Every evening is available.

Every weekend becomes an option.

You answer one email after dinner because it will only take a minute. You use Saturday to catch up because the week was busy. You open the laptop on Sunday because you want to get ahead.

There is always something else you could do.

The work does not finish because businesses rarely run out of possible work. You have to decide where work stops.

What helped me

I created default boundaries.

The default is that I do not work at weekends.

The default is that work finishes at a particular time.

There are exceptions. A genuine emergency may need my attention. A demanding period may require longer hours. Sometimes I may choose to work at an unusual time because that flexibility genuinely suits me.

But the exception cannot become my normal way of working.

If I work one weekend, that does not automatically mean the next weekend is also available. If I answer one evening call, clients do not suddenly have permanent access to every evening for the rest of my natural life.

It also helps to decide what genuinely counts as urgent.

Good service does not require permanent availability. If everything is treated as an emergency, nothing has been defined properly.

Flexibility should allow us to adjust our working lives.

It should not give work permission to occupy all of them.

3. The difficulty of switching off

The working day can end while your mind continues working.

You close the laptop, but you are still replaying a conversation, solving a problem or mentally writing tomorrow’s list.

Your body may be sitting at dinner. Your brain is still at work conducting a meeting nobody else can see.

For a long time, I treated switching off as something I should be able to do through willpower.

I had finished work, therefore my mind should simply cooperate and stop thinking about it.

My mind did not receive the memo.

What helped me

I began creating a clear transition between work and the rest of my life.

One thing I did was deliberately schedule my Spanish lesson for 6 p.m. on a Friday.

After spending an hour trying to think and speak in another language, it was much harder to slip straight back into work mode. My attention had been forced to go somewhere else.

The lesson became more than something I enjoyed. It created a firm ending to the working week.

You may not want to learn Spanish, but the principle is the same.

Do something that requires enough of your attention to help your mind change modes. Go for a walk. Exercise. Cook. Attend a class. Meet somebody. Change your clothes and leave the house.

I also use a closing routine.

I write down anything still circling in my head, decide what needs attention tomorrow and identify where I will begin. That reassures my brain that the work has not been forgotten. It has simply been placed somewhere other than my immediate thoughts.

I stopped expecting myself to switch off through willpower.

I created something that helped me leave work.

4. The way work can invade your entire home

When you work from home, every room can slowly become part of the office.

You answer emails from the sofa, take calls in the kitchen and carry your laptop from one room to another. If you are particularly committed to making your boundaries disappear, you may even take it to bed.

Eventually, your home stops feeling like a place you live.

It becomes a large office containing a kettle and some soft furnishings.

There is also no commute to tell your brain that the working day has ended. You can finish work and arrive home in approximately four seconds, because home is three steps away from the desk.

What helped me

I created physical boundaries.

Certain areas of my home are not working spaces.

I do not take work to bed. If I am away from my desk, I say, “I’m out of the office,” even if I can still see the office from where I am sitting.

The language may sound slightly ridiculous when the commute is from one side of the room to the other, but it creates a useful distinction.

I also dress for work.

I do not necessarily wear formal office clothes every day, but changing into work clothes helps signal that I am beginning. Changing out of them helps signal that I am finished.

If you work from home, look at where work has spread.

Do you have a defined working space? Are there places where the laptop is not allowed? Is there anything that tells your mind when work has started and when it has ended?

The boundaries may look small, but they give your brain clearer signals.

5. The risk of building a business while forgetting to build a life

A business can become so demanding that everything enjoyable starts to feel optional.

Rest can wait.

Friends can wait.

Interests can wait.

Holidays can wait.

You keep sacrificing parts of your life because the business needs you. There is always another target, client, project or problem that appears important enough to justify postponing everything else.

The danger is that you can eventually begin to resent the very thing you worked so hard to create.

You built the business to give yourself greater choice, independence or freedom. But somewhere along the way, it became the reason you had no time to enjoy any of those things.

What helped me

I deliberately built parts of my life that work is not allowed to absorb.

I protect time for activities I enjoy simply because I enjoy them.

Not because they improve my productivity.

Not because they create a networking opportunity.

Not because I can turn them into content.

They are allowed to exist because I like them.

I protect time for friends, dancing, walking, travelling, learning and doing absolutely nothing.

Yes, stepping away from the business can sometimes feel like a sacrifice. There may be work I could complete or money I could earn during that time.

But I am not sacrificing my business for a few hours of living.

I am protecting the life the business was supposed to help me create.

It also helps to ask a very simple question:

What did I want the freedom of running a business to make possible?

Was it time with family?

Greater control of my week?

Travel?

Rest?

The ability to care for my health?

The freedom to pursue other interests?

Whatever the answer is, it cannot remain something you hope to enjoy one day. It has to appear somewhere in the way the business operates now.

Freedom requires structure

Running a business does not automatically give you freedom.

It gives you the ability to create it.

Without deliberate boundaries, flexible working can become permanent working. Working from home can turn the whole house into an office. Responsibility can become isolation. A business built to support your life can slowly begin to replace it.

Structure is not the enemy of freedom.

Structure is how you protect it.

The boundaries, relationships and routines I have created do not work perfectly every week. There are busy periods. There are emergencies. There are times when work still spreads further than I intended.

The point is not perfection.

The point is having a normal way of working that protects the life I am trying to build, and recognising when the business has moved too far away from it.

A business should support the life you are building, not quietly replace it.

If yours has started taking over, the answer may not be working harder.

It may be redesigning how the business fits into your life.

What is one thing you love about running your own business, and one thing you could quite happily live without?

Back to contents