As entrepreneurs, many of us started our own businesses to achieve greater freedom in our lives. Perhaps to you, that meant having a greater work-life balance.

After all, when someone else is calling the shots on your schedule and responsibilities, it can be hard to find the time to do the things you truly enjoy.

And yet when we launch our own businesses, that newfound freedom comes with a price. Now, we’re spending countless hours developing our enterprises. Striking a work-life balance seems impossible.

In truth, the concept of work-life balance makes more sense for people who are not entrepreneurs. They already have a separation between their jobs and their personal lives. For entrepreneurs whose passionate ideas have now become their job, the division between work and life doesn’t make much sense.

That’s not to say that balance isn’t important. The question is, what kind of balance do you need?

Rethinking the work-life balance

When most people say they want a better work-life balance, they usually mean they want more time to spend with family, on hobbies, or simply relaxing on the couch. They also mean that they want a proportionate balance of their work to their income. Many entrepreneurs cite money as their primary reason for starting their own business. If you’re working 40(or more) hours a week and not able to reach your financial goals, it’s easy to feel unbalanced.

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Unfortunately, there is simply so much work involved with developing and launching your own business — not to mention running it. There’s just no way around it. And many entrepreneurs find themselves in that exact situation. They’ve doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled their earnings, but they’re also working on their business all hours of day and night. What is the point of earning all that money if it doesn’t also allow you to take vacations, go to concerts, build your own house, or do whatever you’d like to do with that money?

That’s why, for entrepreneurs, the idea of the work-life balance needs to be replaced with a better concept: a seasonal balance.

Finding the seasons of your life

Work-life balance also implies a static existence. You have your work, and you have your life, and that’s how it continues until you retire (if you even want to retire). Entrepreneurs tend to have lots of great ideas and pursuits. At a certain point, you simply can’t juggle all those endeavours at once. We all only have 24 hours in the day. That’s why I love the idea of seasons of life.

Let’s say you’ve successfully developed and started your enterprise. What’s next? Will it also be your day job? At what point can you get your business running like clockwork, so you could take a much-deserved vacation? How many hours per week will you spend on the business? When will you shift your focus from your first business to your second enterprise?

These are all questions to consider when developing your seasons of life. Time is not linear. It is cyclical. And just as the seasons change every year, so can your priorities for your enterprises, hobbies, and major life events. You don’t want to be that entrepreneur who can’t get away for your own honeymoon. You can’t finish your novel if you’re constantly working on your business. Well, maybe you could, but at what cost? Working long days and feeling as though you have no freedom in your life is exactly the opposite of what we desire as entrepreneurs.

So, make a list of all the high-level endeavours you’d like to achieve in your next 25 years. Then, break this down into projects that you could take on in different seasons of your life. Just as the leaves turn brown and the trees eventually get covered by snow, so might you automate your business enough that you can take some time away to finally take those painting classes, or whatever you’d like to do. Let different pursuits take precedence at different stages of your life.

It’s like the long-term balance of the cosmos itself. Rather than merely balancing the hours in a given day, you are balancing all the time you have over the span of your life.

 Setting yourself up for balance

The first step to any sort of freedom is a good system. You need a reliable way to capture your ideas and plan your next project. That looks different for everyone, but it’s crucial to achieve that clarity. As I always say, clarity leads to confidence. It’s challenging to set your priorities for any given day if you’re not sure where you’re going in life.

And of course, your business needs strong systems as well. If you find that your business is constantly keeping you busy, or you feel you can never step away from it, you have a systems problem. Perhaps you need to introduce some automation to handle tedious tasks. Perhaps you need to restructure your workflows so that your team can perform their responsibilities more efficiently. And if you plan on scaling up or selling the business, you absolutely need a system in place for that. Otherwise, it’s just too tempting to cling to that hard work and your sense of ownership. Before you know it, you’ll end up consumed by the enterprise you built.

Systems give us predictability and optimize our resources. And remember, time is your most valuable resource. A strong system frees up some of those valuable 24 hours in a day, so eventually, you can accumulate enough time to truly live the life you desire.

However, a bad system might be worse than no system at all. A bad system is one that perpetuates the same patterns. For example, there’s little point in investing in automation if you’re not willing to delegate tasks. Gaining more hours in the day doesn’t matter if you’re not sure what to do with those hours.

And let’s not forget your health. When we are not feeling well, we will struggle to achieve our pursuits. I think a lot of people use “work-life balance” as a code for wellness. The issue isn’t necessarily that they are working too many hours. It’s that they’re not prioritizing their health. In our society, we tend to glamorize hard work and denigrate self-care as laziness. Trust me when I say that the world’s most successful people take time for their health. Your brilliant ideas come from a brain that exists in a physical body, and you must take care of that if you want to truly be great.

So, I highly recommend that you incorporate health into your overall plan. That will look different for everybody, but it may include a dedicated hour every day for exercise or yoga, a commitment to take an actual lunch break and not eat while you work, or a season of your life in which you focus on rejuvenation and self-care.

Don’t forget to do things for your mental health as well. Make time for those painting classes or whatever hobby you’d like to take on. Unplug from work after the day is over and spend time with loved ones. We only have one lifetime, and although your entrepreneurial endeavours are certainly a major part of that, there is so much more to life to enjoy.

 Wrapping up

Achieving seasonal balance won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to take some time for soul-searching, so you can map out your pursuits and start building a strong system. In my experience, when you break free from the daily hustle, you allow yourself to enjoy the freedom that entrepreneurship truly brings. The secret is to consider your enterprises as one part of a rich and varied life. By treating your life as seasons of creation and relaxation, growth and restoration, and so on, you’ll discover how to best leverage your potential.

I have developed a system called The 1Page Planner that helps align your life and business goals in a structured way in order to have your business work for you instead of you working for the business. If you’d like a copy along with a video explaining how to use it you can download it today and get going! It’s never too late to start planning to reduce your frustrations and turn them into freedoms!