How to ease the pressure of starting your own business

Starting your own business is hard enough for anyone, let alone a father trying to raise a family at the same time. You never realise what a luxury it can be to work a 9-to-5 job until you’re an entrepreneur with kids at home vying for your limited attention. At the same time, you’ve got bills to pay, clients to help and potentially, workers looking to you to help them make sure they can take care of their own families.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tactics to help you ease these pressures and make you a more effective entrepreneur and dad.

Time management

One of the biggest pressures for working dads starting their own business is making enough time for family. Managing your time effectively is essential for maintaining that vital work-life balance that makes for a prosperous business and family alike.

One way to help improve your time management is to streamline your activities and resources, whether on the job or at home. Consider your viewing entertainment, such as the TV shows, movies and sporting events you watch.

As everything is so accessible, it’s easy to get distracted or even watch whilst you work. This probably isn’t the best use of your time and distracts focus. The great thing about streaming is that you have access to content on demand, with the ability to watch whatever you want whenever you want. Therefore, set aside leisure time after work when you can fully enjoy it, whether that’s time by yourself or with your family.

Set strong boundaries

Whether you work in a physical office separate from where you live or you’re one of the increasing multitudes who work from home, setting clear boundaries between your work space and your living space is crucial to easing stress in both your work and home lives by keeping the two separate (or as separate as possible.)

These boundaries are as much for you as for your family, if not more so. No matter how much you instruct your family to not disturb you while you’re working, it means nothing if you’re browsing social media, playing fantasy football or handling important household duties.

One challenge you may find to setting and keeping these boundaries as a business owner may be that the responsibilities of running a business don’t always operate during ‘normal’ business hours. This is why using a digital calendar, like Google Calendar, that you can sync across all your computers and mobile devices can help you switch between your work and home life throughout each day as your responsibilities require.

Set an end time

You can arrange and rearrange your calendar as flexibly and frequently as you need, but at some point your workday must end, you need to rest and recuperate for the next day – and to remember why you’re doing it all in the first place. To make sure your business is sustainable, set a time when your workday will end every day, bar none and stick to it. Remember, running a successful business is a marathon, not a sprint!

Prioritise and delegate

Not every task before you is of equal importance and not every one requires your direct attention. Learn to recognise which tasks require your unique skills and expertise to handle personally and if you have the resources, delegate everything else to other people. If you are a company of one, then prioritising is even more crucial to your productivity. Once you’ve winnowed down your company’s list of to-dos to those you’re to-do on your own, prioritise those in order of importance. If certain items are of equal importance, prioritise them in order of your ability to complete them, working on those easiest and quickest to complete first.

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