Don’t Let Your Business Negatively Affect Your Personal Life

Running a successful business requires pouring in a lot of time and energy. It’s also important that you’re passionate about your business and that you enjoy your work.

However, at the same time, you should be careful of prioritizing your business over your personal life—your family, your friends and your health shouldn’t be sacrificed just to make sure that your business is a success.

Creating harmony between your business and personal life often involves creating clear boundaries.

Not only do you need to keep the two separate, but you need to protect the parts that marry together.

Speaking of protection, you need to ensure that you keep the business that is getting in the way of your personal life as safe as possible, and cloud based door access control can help you to do that.

So can smart locks and other security measures. The more you do, the better you can protect it.

While there are times when the two can overlap, too much blurring between your business and personal life could stop you from being able to pay as much attention to either one.

Below are just a few tips on how you can stop your business from negatively affecting your personal life.

Create boundaries when it comes to working hours

It’s important that you’re spending enough time with family and friends each week. Make sure that you’re not constantly working late or working every day.

Ideally, you should have some evenings off to have dinner with your family and socialize with friends, as well as two days off per week to focus solely on your personal life (this could be Saturday and Sunday, or two other days—the advantage of running your own business is that you have the flexibility to choose). 

Try to set specific no-work hours each week so that you can more easily plan out your personal life around work.

Make sure that you stick to strict cut-off points—if you say that you’re going to stop work at 6 in order to enjoy the evening with your partner and kids, make sure that you stick by this. 

It’s also important that you’re getting enough sleep per week and that you’re not skipping meals. Only work late if you don’t have to get up early in the morning (and vice versa) and schedule out your meals. 

Consider buying a separate work phone

Using a personal phone for business can make it more difficult to separate your personal life and business life.

Clients and work contacts may try to ring you or text you out of working hours, and you may find yourself getting involved in work matters when you should be focusing on your family, friends or simply relaxing. 

When you have a separate work phone, you have the option to turn it off or put it on silent during periods when you need to focus on your personal life. Consider looking into business phone contracts today.

Don’t use your personal email address for business

On top of disconnecting from work phone calls during personal time, you should be able to disconnect from work emails.

This is harder to do if you’re using the same email address for personal and business use—you could find yourself checking your inbox for personal emails and ending up replying to business enquiries. 

A separate business email can not only allow you to log off from your personal life, but can also help to keep your business email more professional (using a personal email handle for business may put off some clients). Consider setting up a separate email address if you haven’t already. 

Be careful of advertising your home address as a business address

If you work from home, it can become much more difficult to separate your home and business life. One thing you should be very careful of is advertising your home address as your business address.

While you may need to receive business mail, there could be security risks to revealing your home address to the world. This is why it’s worth using a virtual address if possible.

A virtual address is a physical address owned by a mailing company which you outsource. All of your mail can be sent to this address and then redirected to your home address.

You can display this address as your own on your website and in your marketing, preventing you from having to use your home address while also giving you an address for people to send mail if necessary.

Create a separate bank account for your business

It’s also worth separating your business and personal finances. This allows you to more easily budget money for business expenses and money for personal expenses so that you’re not spending too much in either area. 

A separate business bank account is a great way to do this. All your business revenue can go into here and you can then pay yourself out of this account.

It can make bookkeeping easier as you can more easily separate tax-deductible business expenses. You can also develop a separate credit score for your business.

Legally separate your business from yourself

On top of creating separate bank accounts, it’s worth legally separating your business and personal life. Switching from a sole trader to a limited company allows you to legally separate your business.

This means that you are not personally liable to pay for any debts related to your business using personal funds or assets—if a debt collector needs to seize goods to pay for business debts, they can only use goods or money owned by your business and not personal assets. 

You can form a limited company online. It’s cheap and easy and it could protect your personal finances if your business does get into financial trouble. 

Take care working with family and friends

Many people run family businesses or businesses with friends. Having these bonds can often result in a tighter team.

However, you need to make sure that your family and friends want to work with you and that they are not being dragged into business matters against their will.

Many business owners want to pass on businesses to their kids, but you should understand that not every child wants to take on their parents’ business—make sure that you have a backup plan if they want to pursue a different career goal.

Working with friends and family can also negatively affect your business in some cases.

For example, you need to be careful of hiring friends or family members to work for you who may not be reliable or skilled enough. Only work with friends and family members who you know will make productive and motivated workers.