Can you find work-life balance as a creative entrepreneur?
Have you started a creative business or have a dream of doing so one day, and are wondering if you’ll ever manage to get evenings and weekends off? Are you struggling to find time to just relax and not think about your business 24/7? Then read on as a share my personal thoughts..
Is there even a thing such as work-life balance when you’re an entrepreneur? Do you need to work 24/7 or can you actually take some time off without your business falling apart?
I believe that it’s a common thing amongst creatives to be totally passionate about their art, projects and everything that has something to do with their business. I mean we work with our passion, we make a living out of creating and not at least - our whole business is dependent on one thing, our selfs.
With passion comes the longing of spending time at it. That’s not strange at all. In fact I would say that it’s a privilege to be able to work and spend time at your passion.
What happens if you never take time off?
But what happens if you never make time for anything else? If you spend more and more time at working, always stressed to move forward, to earn more money, make more impact.
Well eventually you probably will crash somehow. No one can go on in high speed forever. Both our body and brain need time to rest and recover.
I’ve found that my creativity and productivity works best if I don’t work all the time. If I take evenings and weekends off to prioritise other things in my life. Sure, sometimes I might need to work an evening here and there, but most of the time I don’t.
Work less - do more
If you’ve ever felt that you are working all the time but don’t get that much done, then try to work less hours. If you think about it you probably believe that you work all of the hours that you sit in front of your screen. But if you would look at it you might see that you spend time scrolling through the web, checking your Instagram once every 15 minutes or doing something else that isn’t productive, that isn’t getting you closer to achieve your goals.
Drop your perfectionism
Another tips that I have to achieve a better work-life balance is to create multiple streams of income. I don’t really believe in passive income, as you need to work for everything to keep up to track. But if you create a business with multiple income streams that CAN make you money while you sleep, you’ll have a better starting point to plan in spare time, to not work 24/7 and to make sure you prioritise other important things in your life.
To read more about multiple income streams and how to make a living as a surface designer, check out this blog post of mine: https://majafaber.com/blog/how-to-make-a-living-as-a-surface-pattern-designer
One last tips that I definitely will talk more about in the future is to drop your perfectionism. If you try to make everything perfect (hint hint, there are no such thing as perfect) and spend so much of your time at this, you actually steal time from your time off. Why? Well, we all need to work with things that brings us income. So if you spend time at making every little thing you create perfect you are actually wasting time that you could spend earning more money - which in the long run can give you more spare time and a better work-life balance.
Perfectionism seems so common amongst creatives. I’m not a perfectionist myself and I actually believe that this is one of the key factors of why I’ve come so far in my business in only one year since I’ve started. It’s a really interesting topic and I’ll try to write more about perfectionism as a creative in the future.
