Managing the work life balance with running an online business can be a challenge. If you’re in charge of your day, there’s all sorts of things which will encroach on your time if you let them. Friends and relatives dropping by or calling for a chat, for example. Of course social media is a massive distraction to if you allow it to be. Before long, you can find yourself not working on your business at all and instead spending your time chatting with friends and sharing memes on social media (guilty as charged)!
Whoops, the whole week has passed and I hardly did any work! Before you know it, the sales from your online business are drying up, or worse still this happens before you get any traction and you deem your business a failure and quit! “This business doesn’t work”, you declare, despite not having put much effort in!
You also need to make room for a life, as well as building your business. “Too much work makes Jack a dull boy”, as the saying goes. So where do you draw the line and how can you make sure that the work gets done, before you start patting yourself on the back and celebrating?
The Work Life Balance And Your Online Business – The Lifestyle Blueprint
My mentor Stuart created a “lifestyle blueprint” which you can access through the free video series here. This is an important thing to understand because unless you know where you’re going in life and in business, you can easily burn out due to overwork, or get so distracted (with your lifestyle) that your online business fails.
With a lifestyle “blueprint”, you’re reminding yourself what you ultimately want from your life. Why are you building a business in the first place? You can easily fall into the trap of over working and lose sight of your “why?”. Looking at your lifestyle, and what you want your lifestyle to look like (in future) can help here.
Not only can it act as inspiration for your work, but it also gives you a framework to build up over time. That way you don’t forget what’s important.
The Failure? Success Curve
The failure success curve is something you might be familiar with. It looks like this:
When you’re working hard towards “success” in life, in any area, you are full steam ahead. You work every day on the things which matter. As you reach the “pinnacle” of what you’ve decided “success” to be, you celebrate. At this point you are more than likely to loosen up a little and let yourself go! You have a few drinks and perhaps celebrate with some kind of reward. At this point, you lose traction in your business.
The next day, you let yourself off the hook and give yourself some time off. After all, you’ve worked hard and you “deserve” it! Here’s the top of the curve where you start falling downwards again towards the lower trough.
It is at the bottom of the trough where you wonder how you let yourself drift for so long. You become angry with yourself and wonder why success is evading you. At this point you put your foot down and start putting the work in again. The curve begins to head back to the top until the process starts again. If only you were aware of the curve, your behaviour might change!
The Work Life Balance And Your Online Business
Everyone has a different calibration for success in terms of financial rewards and the lifestyle they want to attain and maintain. If you’re leaning towards a lifestyle which doesn’t support your business, you’ll find your business suffering. But if you over work, you’ll burn out and eventually won’t be able to sustain the effort. So somewhere in between is a good way to find balance.
However you define what success means to you, you will find the curve above is a universal phenomenom. It works in all areas of life whether business, fitness relationships or lifestyle. You will tend to bounce between two extremes and the middle sector is what’s normal for you – your reality or your comfort zone.
Depending on where you find your comfort zone, you might need a change in order to support your business or lifestyle. So according to where you are, something might have to shift in order to move your business forwards. For example, if you’re out every night partying, you’ll probably struggle to build an online business.
Shifting The Success/Failure Curve To Your Benefit
This little “hack” is great if you find your lifestyle isn’t helping you earn a living from your online lifestyle business, for example, or vice versa. Often the mistake we make is to strain for some high achievement to change our circumstances, rather than lifting our standards instead (which can be much easier). The constant strain on our mind/body in pursuit of “success” only boomerangs back when we hit rock bottom or burnout. We rebel by throwing all our success away and doing the opposite – effectively destroying all our hard work!
Instead of aiming so high it would throw us out of kilter, lift the base trough of the curve and use a reasonable goal/intention. This is easier to maintain than throwing yourself into a lofty goal which is beyond your capacity. As you gradually improve you shift the curve upwards, gently improving while lifting your standards. The curve looks like this now:
Making Your Business A Priority
If you find yourself on the side of work/lifestyle balance where your lifestyle exceeds your finances, you can take stock and make a priority of your business for a while, putting social events to one side. However, if you do this for long enough, the elastic band theory will pull you back towards over-compensating with your celebration at the top of the curve!
You fall back down through your comfort zone only to meet your typical rebound at the trough – where you’ve been partying for too long! Take stock of this graph (above) and start to see your patterns. It will surly appear in some if not many aspects of your life. Think about where you can shift the pattern. Over working can be just as bad as over partying! Each has its opposite. The trick is to carefully balance work with your relationships and other commitments to create order, peace and happiness in your life as a whole, not just in one area alone.
However, depending on the area you are working on, you may want to reconsider certain aspects of your life which contradict your best intentions as they can easily erode them away if they are not a good match for each other!
See also the mindset of successful affiliates.