Organize Your Way to a Better Work-Life Balance

When organization is lacking in a small business, it can lead to late nights at the office and an almost nonexistent personal life. In this SlideShare, we bring you simple but effective ways to step up your work-life balance from

professional organizers Joni Weiss and Kitt Fife of Practically Perfect.These tips are centered around three main themes:

Ultimately, these tips will help you find a better balance between your work life and home life.

Combine SeparateOwnYourTime

COMBINE A central place for certain aspects of your professional and personal life will make everything a little easier. Weiss and Fife recommend combining the following aspects of these two worlds: calendars andyour daily to-do list.

COMBINE CALENDARS Take advantage of shared calendars to store both personal and business reminders and events in one place. With this bird's-eye view of all of your commitments you won’t have to look in multiple places to know what you need to do or where you need to be.

“Personally and professionally, we utilize Google Calendar,” Weiss and Fife say. “It allows us to share calendars with family members and colleagues. We also color-code events within the calendar so that everyone is accountable and on the same page.”

COMBINE YOUR DAILY TO-DO LIST Keep organization tight with a single, dynamic tool to serve as a central hub for your work and home to-do lists. Weiss and Fife suggest a program such as Asana.

While digital tools can lend a much needed hand, if you find a program or app that works for you, stick to it. Don’t be tempted by the endless stream of new products. “We live in this era of ‘there should be an app for this,’” Weiss and Fife say. “But sometimes too many tools can actually scatter, rather than effectively organize, key information.”

SEPARATE

While work-life balance will never be 50/50, knowing when to draw the line or having a bit of separation is key to maintaining success across the board. According to Weiss and Fife, separating the following things can make a world of difference: inboxes and snail mail.

SEPARATE INBOXES Creating separate email accounts for personal and professional use is key to greater organization, focus and balance. If everything is combined, you run the risk of being distracted by personal matters when you’re on a tight deadline, or tackling work on a weekend that you’ve set aside to decompress.

SEPARATE SNAIL MAIL While this is similar to your inbox, having work mail and personal mail combined will likely result in a cluttered physical space. This is a recipe for chaos (or at the very least feeling chaotic).

If you work from home, consider a separate P.O. box for your business. This will help you control the flow of incoming business mail so that it only enters your home when you’re ready to organize or address it.

OWN YOUR TIME

Whether you feel like it’s on your side or not, the clock will keep ticking. Weiss and Fife offer the following tips to help you get control of time so that you and your team can step away at the end of each workday: Embrace self-imposed deadlines and know how your team spends time.

OWN YOUR TIME EMBRACE SELF-IMPOSED DEADLINES Time is a small business owner’s greatest adversary when it comes to maintaining work-life balance. To avoid spending too much time on any one task during your workday, Weiss and Fife recommend setting a timer. This will help you avoid going down a rabbit hole and ensure when the end of the day rolls around, you’re able to head home.

“Knowing that we’re working against the clock to accomplish a task helps us focus in a very thoughtful way,” Fife says.

OWN YOUR TIME KNOW HOW YOUR TEAM SPENDS TIME Weiss and Fife recommend using a tool, such as Harvest, to better understand, in a hyper visual way, how time is spent across your team. Use this data to develop a smartly organized schedule and priorities that allocate time more effectively.

For more smart and creative ways tohelp your business succeed, visit the

QuickWins small business hub.