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Easy ways to make good habits, a habit as a busy entrepreneur
Rebecca Appleton • 28 February 2020
3 strategies to try now
There’s no doubt that life as an entrepreneur is a busy one – long hours in the office, deadlines, perhaps a team to manage, sales to bring in and all of the responsibilities that come along with running and growing a business.
It’s all too easy to work late to get proposals finished after the phone calls and emails stop for the day. Firing off a quick email response as you’re grabbing dinner because your phone pinged with a message is second nature. Going into the office on a Saturday morning or pulling your laptop out on a Sunday afternoon to get ahead for next week is a weekend ritual.
The flip side of this is that you miss your planned gym session, you hurry your meals with your mind still on week and you never really switch off. Some of this is part of the hustle and it’s what fires you up as an entrepreneur. Some of it is a bad habit. The good news is that forming good habits can be easy too. Here are a few ways you can redress that work life balance and create good habits that led to more productivity with fewer late nights in the office…
1. Reframe your intentions
When you tell yourself you must do something, you feel bad when you don’t. You’ve set yourself up to feel a failure. So after a few days when you have told yourself you must go to the gym but find you had a last minute sales pitch to send out or simply didn’t have the energy after a long week of long hours, you feel like you’ve failed.
Redress this balance by creating a list of things you absolutely must do – things like attend that new client meeting, send that new project contract and get your invoices to the accountant. Now, think of the things that you must do for your own personal sanity – you must go to the gym two nights out of seven. You must leave work by 6 on a Friday so you can enjoy a family meal.
Reframing your intentions so you both take the weight off but also make your own need for downtime, exercise and family time a priority is the first step to drawing that line. If you must go to the gym, that non-essential email can wait until tomorrow.
2. Delegate
It’s all too easy as an entrepreneur to feel like you have the world on your shoulders and to ensure things get done right, you need to be the one to do it. That may be true of certain tasks but it isn’t for all. For example, delegating book keeping, invoicing and accounting to an accountant not only frees up a bg chunk of time, it ensures that this important business function is being handled by a professional. You are also more likely to take full advantage of schemes such as tax relief allowances by calling in a pro.
Likewise, you may want to run your social media but, you could outsource that. Get into the habit of asking yourself if something is a job only you can do, or, if someone else could do it with the same outcome. You don’t need a huge team to make this change either – freelancing and on demand or gig economy sites put professionals from around the world at your fingertips for very competitive rates.
3. Repeat for 30 days
Habits are formed in 30 days so once you have set your intentions, repeat for the month. Don’t give up after a few days or a couple of weeks. Challenge yourself to make the change for a full 30 days and then take stock.
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