As an entrepreneur, you can work anytime from anywhere.
This seems to be one of the most attractive propositions of going solo or ‘starting something of your own’.
Haha!
Initially when I went solo, I was so conditioned to 9-5 timings that I actually felt guilty if I took time out for a pedicure in the afternoon or a no agenda coffee with a friend during ‘work hours’.
It took me a long time to break through the conditioning that certain hours are meant ONLY for work.
I soon realized that work has to be outcome based and not time based. However, it is not easy to inculcate that discipline into yourself.
There are 2 things that finally helped me to break through
- The first is to break work into short outcome based tasks with a stipulated deliverable time.
This could mean
- I have to script, shoot, edit and upload 4 videos by end of the month.
- I have to make 30 sales calls in 15 days.
And so on…
- Find my ‘work clock’. There are some tasks for which I am super productive at night – like writing content for social media. Hence I needed to marry my productive clock with my actual clock.
I guess this is pretty much what you call work life integration.
Both of these required a fair bit of work and I still sometimes feel extremely guilty about taking off in the middle of the day for a non – work task, but I’ve realized that as long as there is nothing pending on my table from a client I feel freer.
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