Work-Life Balance Habits

Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

Are you struggling with work-life balance? If so, you aren't alone. It's a struggle that we face too. Join us in our Facebook group www.growwithusmastermind.com where we will further discuss this and many topics related to our Teacher Pay Teachers businesses. We will be completely honest here, we struggle with work-life balance. And, we're guessing that you do too. It seems like this is something that everyone is struggling with right now. I can get a lot done when I work long 12-hour days. But, that's usually followed by burnout, that feeling you get when you can't bring yourself to get anything productive accomplished. It might seem like cranking out large amounts of work at once is a good idea, but if it stops you from doing work the next day, or longer, it's not that helpful. It works better to balance each day and avoid going through the crazy ups and downs. We found an article online that shares 10 habits that successful entrepreneurs have for work-life balance. We'll admit that we could improve in more than one of these areas. Here they are: 1. Set working hours This is hard for us because we are both working on and off throughout the entire day. It can be hard to step away because our work is all around us. We have access to it on our computers, iPads, and phones. We can check on our results when the kids are eating dinner, taking baths, or we just have a minute to ourselves. When you run your own business you could work nonstop 24 hours a day. That's why setting working hours is so important. One way that I have been making progress in this area is by keeping set hours when I am able to check my email. I started doing this because it's really easy to fall down the rabbit hole when checking email. In order to stop wasting so much time on my email, I started checking it only between 6:00 and 6:30 am and then again at 6:30 pm. That's it. Angie's great about setting work hours when the kids are at school but struggles with shutting it down once the kids and her husband are back home. She wants the evenings to be focused on family time, but it's so easy to think of something that needs to be done that should be a "quick" little thing. But, we have both found that all these "quick" little work tasks really add up and steal time from our non-working hours. This leads us to #2. 2. Unplug when you're not working This is something that we are constantly thinking about doing, but it's difficult to actually do. Personally, I find myself on my phone a lot during my downtime and I usually regret it. I end up feeling bad from just staring at the screen for so long. I actually read something that shared how many successful CEOs have hobbies that aren't computer related. Outside of their working hours, they don't hang out on technology and their families don't either. Now that TpT is a source of income and "work" it shouldn't also be a hobby. It's important to have time that you unplug, step away and focus on other things. This is one reason why I wish that they would just get rid of the TpT app (I know, I know). I end up checking the app about a thousand times a day. It's so easy to do, but it causes me not to be present in the moment that I'm in. Doing this actually steals time away when I'm spending time with my family. When I really think about all the little things I do like this throughout the day, I probably waste at least 5 or 6 hours a week on things that don't really matter. In the podcast, Angie and I talked about a few ways to fight this. The first is to try putting my email check tactic to work with our social media accounts and only allow ourselves to check a few times a day. The second is to batch work like social media posts. If we can devote some of our working time t