The Secret To Spend More Time With Your Family
If you own a small business, I can be sure that you are juggling schedules, hobbies and family commitments, running the business, and trying to catch up with friends all at once.
That’s a demanding workload. Did you expect it to be this busy though? Unfortunately, the reality is that you would have more time for your families if you worked for someone else.
To avoid this situation yourself, here are three important actions you can take today.
Realise how much your time is worth
You need to understand that not all uses of your time are equal.
Are you doing things that you don’t need to do or could pay someone else to do? Are you doing things you should be or want to do?
For example, why mow your lawn for 2 hours when you could pay someone $40 while you work and charge a client $100 for 1 hour of your time?
So, I’ll say it again, is your workload made up of tasks you need or want to do? Is it more effective to pay someone else?
The way I realised this was when my dad spent a whole week chopping wood on our hobby farm to fuel a wood fire for one Winter. If his time was worth just $30 per hour and he spent 40 hours on the wood chopping then his week cost him $1200 in labour. If we add on the expense of fuel, food, and your time resting because of exhaustion, we are looking at well over $2000. In comparison, my Winter bill for my heat pump was $300. For me, the $1700 difference is huge because I still had a whole week that I could use as I pleased and I stayed just as warm as him over the Winter.
What is your time worth? Assume you are charging hourly for your time and work out if it is cheaper to choose an alternative.
Delegate - Don’t try and do everything yourself
A manager that doesn’t delegate tasks is a manager with a huge workload and chronic stress.
The signs of a manager that doesn’t delegate is a manager working long hours, on the brink of burnout and maintaining a team with low morale that sticks to (suspiciously) very specific hours.
To avoid becoming the bottleneck of your business, you need to do the following:
Realise why you aren’t delegating
Identify the tasks that need delegating
Choose the right people to delegate tasks to
Hold yourself and your team accountable
Let your employees lead the way.
The benefit of delegating is that you are doing significantly less work than what you were originally doing. You are also allowing your team to do the jobs you employed them to do.
If this all sounds too daunting, just think about this; “What’s the worst that can happen?”. Maybe the job only gets done to 80% of your standard, or somebody makes a mistake. But at the end of the day, a business isn’t one person, and it will become a learning opportunity.
Set boundaries and expectations
If you are doing the jobs that you have employees for, I can almost guarantee that you are not doing them well. While you might have some strengths in that area, you have employees that you pay, to do a better job than you. You need to identify where you are needed and where you aren’t and then stick to that.
If you keep compromising your performance expectations, you will never have more time for your family. To fix this, you need to set clear expectations and stick to them. Don’t alter them just because Barry from next door decided that his idea was better for your business.
If you aren’t doing these three things then you are on a one way trip to burnout. Your family time is extremely important so I urge you to consider where you are needed and what your boundaries are. If you stick to this, even though the initial few weeks will be tedious, you will come out far better. Your employees, clients and (most importantly) your family will thank you.
