Balance especially important for part-time entrepreneurs

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on May 22, 2007

Personal and professional coach David B. Bohl challenged fellow bloggers to participate in a Workplace Survival Dialog earlier this month, and realizing today is the deadline, I wanted to get my contribution in.

But as I read through David's recommendations for dealing with a difficult boss or co-worker (I'm sure we've all had experience with one or more of these) I realized the post also has great relevance to the part-time entrepreneur.

I've written before as has Romanian entrepreneur Cristian Dorobantescu in his great post "Entrepreneur lifestyle-can you handle it?" (I feel as if he's talking directly to me!) about the impossibility yet necessity of this lifestyle.

Yet tellingly, even as Cristian insists that any free time and recreation are out of the question for the 17 hour a day impossible work schedule of the part-time entrepreneur, when I first interviewed him by phone in late July 2006 for a profile here at BootStrapMe he had gotten away for the weekend.

He said it was something he found to be absolutely essential to keep from burning out.

I realized that David's advice to set goals for every aspect of your life-family, friends, solitude, developmental, financial, leisure, health, spiritual-was even more imperative for the part-time entrepreneur who otherwise could be thoroughly absorbed by work.

The harder it is the more imperative and I have set a goal to try to develop more balance in my own life as a part-time entrepreneur in the next few months.