Cake Decorating Business #8: Work/Life Balance

Part #8: Work/Life Balance

When you are running a small business, it can feel as though the business has taken over your entire life. This is true of all small businesses but a little more so if you’re working from home and every time you need to work on a cake you need to spend an hour cleaning the dinner dishes first. We all seem to want to try and find that elusive ‘work / life balance,” and never seem to get there. Either we are neglecting our business and feeling guilty or we are neglecting our families and friends and feeling guilty – we can’t win. We look at other people who seem to manage both of those just fine and we wonder what we are doing wrong. You probably aren’t doing anything wrong at all, it’s just that this notion of having balance is virtually impossible to maintain. Imagine for a minute a set of scales which is in balance. As soon as someone walks past, there is movement near it, or someone touches it, it goes out of balance and it takes time for it to find it’s level again. Getting into balance might not be that difficult, but staying perfectly in balance is extremely difficult.

Our lives are not much different to that set of scales. We might find the balance, but keeping it that way is exceptionally difficult when you also consider that the things which change the situation are a bit bigger than someone just walking past. Family members need our attention, customers have problems which need immediate solutions, sometimes we ourselves get injured and suddenly our carefully crafted life of balance gets thrown out of balance. I don’t think there is any real value in trying to maintain a life of balance, but rather learn to live with the imbalance, knowing that things have a way of tipping back in the other direction, too.

One of the best ways to deal with this idea of having a balance life is to put some rules around your life – both personal and business. If you want Sundays to be devoted entirely to your family, then you need to have the discipline to not answer your work phone or reply to work emails on Sunday. If you decide that the hours of 9-5 are your work hours, then you need to resist the urge to put on one more load of laundry or call to get house painting quotes during those hours. I find that the best way to feel like I’m maintaining a life and maintaining a business is just via self discipline and good planning. Work out the things which are non-negotiable for you, both at home and in your business. As an example, if it’s non-negotiable that you are able to do bridal consultations on Saturdays, then you need to ensure you have a set plan for childcare on Saturday mornings. If an non-negotiable for you is exercising every morning, then you need to make sure clients know they cannot contact you until later in the morning (or you simply allow the phone to go to voice mail.) Once you’ve decided what your non-negotiables are in both spaces of your life, you can start to build some plans around that and set up the systems which allow those things to happen.

The final piece of the balance puzzle is simply accepting that sometimes, you won’t be in balance at all. There are simply times when your real life or your business life will require the bulk of your attention and love – and this is also where the non-negotiable things become really important. If you can’t do better, just do the non-negotiable things so that at the very least you are maintaining minimum standards. Sometimes being in business can be very intense emotionally, too, especially as we are in an emotion-based business. Just like we need to occasionally step back from what we are creating in order to see if the design is working, you need to step back a little from the situation of being overwhelmed and evaluate. If your husband has to fend for himself with dinner one night, the perspective on that is that he will survive (and probably be glad to be eating pizza) and you will, too. So many intensely emotional moments in business are temporary, but when we are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted it can be easy to lose perspective and the little things suddenly seem very big.

In conclusion, it’s chasing the work/life balance which is more exhausting than anything else, so stop trying to chase it! Spend your energy on working out what things are really important to you, and get those done – and accept that occasionally life happens to us and there is not much we can do about it. As the saying goes, life is less about what happens to you and more about how you deal with it.

Written by Michelle Green 2014, Copyright The Business of Baking