1. The self-employment dilemma: is work-life balance possible?
Just a few months after starting my business number 4, I found myself one evening sitting at my desk in my yoga outfit, mindlessly staring at a half-empty cup of cold coffee.
It was 8 pm and I had been working, head down, since early morning. I was shaking from a sugar crash, didn’t get to that yoga practice I dressed for, not even speaking about a walk I swore to myself I’d get out for in the afternoon.
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been outside for days….
And a scary part was that eating, going to the bathroom and moving my body were just the basic physical needs I didn’t get to that day.
This was definitely not what I imagined when I left my job as an executive at a small high-tech company to start this business.
On the contrary, just like thousands of other people out there, I was excited about the freedom and flexibility being my own boss would bring me.
I figured, that being in charge of my schedule would let me catch up on my health, interests, personal improvement projects and other things I wanted to do with my life but couldn’t find the time for.
Instead, I was spending my days glued to my chair, forgetting to eat and take breaks. And it’s not that I couldn’t stand up and do other things, I just didn’t.
Many self-employed people struggle with finding a healthy balance between work and personal life.
When we start a new venture, we imagine finding time for ourselves: to establish a workout routine we’ve been struggling to get going, travel, spend more time with friends and family, read, be outdoors and do all the other things that bring us joy.
We are excited about the flexibility to have the lifestyle we want and one thing we definitely don’t plan for is working even more than before and having no life at all…
What many of us quickly realize is that running a business is a lot of work, especially for one person. And it can be a very lonely place too. It’s tough to stew in all this without anyone to even soundboard ideas off.
We are trying to be careful not to consume too much of our partner’s or friends’ time, but there isn’t necessarily anyone else around who can really understand.
Thoughts about how nice it was to just have a regular job start creeping in, tempting us to quit and go back to the safety of 9 to 5, getting a good paycheck and not having to worry about all the headaches that come with running a business.
That is where I found myself that night.
I don’t like quitting, so I decided to take a step back and figure out what I can do differently.
Once I made some space to think about it, I realized that I already knew everything I needed about managing endless streams of conflicting priorities from my extensive experience as a project and product manager, executive and many-time business founder.
I had an idea… I wanted to try applying the same approaches I used for working with startup teams to my own life.
In just a couple of weeks, I was pretty stoked to learn that my new cheeky ‘self-employed Scrum’ was working!
I was making progress on many fronts and felt fulfilled with what I accomplished.
I found time for yoga, walks, workouts, using my language learning apps and all the other things I had on my ‘want to do’ list forever.
At the same time, my business didn’t suffer. Quite the opposite happened. Because I was more relaxed, my mind got fresher and sharper, so I became more productive and was able to spend less time working while getting more done.
It felt extremely satisfying to be completing what I planned while taking care of myself.
A few weeks later, with improved health and wellness came additional energy, that in turn made even more possible.
I was now actually living the life I wanted when I decided to become self-employed again, instead of hoping to enjoy it at some undefined point later.
I told a few friends about this. They were intrigued and asked to learn about the framework. I was surprised but happy to share. After spending some time watching them try it, another epiphany occurred.
Until then, I didn’t realize that the high-tech industry is unique in terms of how people work.
Because technology evolves so rapidly, businesses need to be extremely responsive to change.
High-tech companies embrace the ‘workplace of the future’ philosophy and due to often having to work with limited resources, have a ‘no-waste’ mindset as well.
I think tech startups and self-employed people have a lot in common:
- There are never enough hands at the table
- You are in charge of as many things as you can handle
- Resources are limited…
I think there is a lot that solopreneurs can learn from how tech companies work.
This is how this program came to be and at this point, I would like to share its main concepts as a series of stories.
Work-Life Harmony series
- The self-employment dilemma: is work-life balance possible?
- Managing 3 important realities of self-employment
- More coming soon…
