Your business is growing and you need to keep the money flowing. In order to handle the marketing, clients, operations business and more you feel that you have to put in more hours of work and more tasks in your academic diary. As you work longer you might actually make less money per hour. Thus longer hours doesn’t mean you are getting better results.
A survey conducted by Schwab Institute longer hours doesn’t mean better pay or results. The surveyed investors and found that those who worked 10-15 hours more a week earned less money per hour. In other words, they earned 33% less per hour than those who worked normal hours.
Since children many of us have been taught that if we work hard and long we will be rewarded with the results. The results in this case are a stronger business, more money and a better of style of living. As entrepreneurs we feel that we have to conquer and solve all the problems of our business. However, at some point we become unproductive.
Productivity requires that we are well rested mentally and physically. After 8-10 hours our minds begin to wonder no matter how much we desire to succeed or how focused we are on the task. In the end we find that we are doing less, making more mistakes and not using our time wisely.
The natural decision to keep working on tasks that are sitting before us sometimes causes us a great deal of harm. As we put in our 12 hour days we may find that we are alienating our friends and our family. As they pull away from us because we no longer spend much time with them we may begin to feel as though our business is more of a prison than an actual blessing.
Likewise physically we are giving ourselves the opportunity to sleep, rest, eat and exercise the way we should. Failure to maintain an appropriate work-life balance can cause of to lose our motivation and health. Once those are gone you won’t have much of a business to speak of. No one wants to go to a place they hate.
The whole goal of having a business is to increase your standard of life. To many of us that may mean more control over our daily lives, more money, more prestige and more time. However, once we actually get into the nitty gritty of running a business we may find that we have less time and energy than we did before. Perhaps we might even worry more than we did before. Balance your life and you will have higher productivity.