Casual Friday: Three steps to work/life balance

Putting some parameters on this “crazy life” is key to ensuring your business doesn’t lead you to neglect your health, your family or your own interests.

Some successful advisors have found ways to balance their personal and professional lives. Three such advisors share their top strategies for work/life balance:

> Be productive out of the office
You may think spending the entire day in front of your computer is the best way to stay focused on the day’s tasks. However, everyone needs a break from that computer glare and a great time to accomplish that is at lunch.

Cheng schedules one to two lunch appointments outside of her office each week to meet with colleagues. These lunches allow her to get some fresh air, eat a proper meal and catch up with her peers.

Cheng encourages her team to use this strategy as well.

“It makes [team members] much more efficient if they can just get out and walk around,” Cheng says. It also makes them more productive, she says.

> Schedule your top priorities
The most important element of maintaining work/life balance is knowing what your top priority is and making sure that priority is in your calendar, according to Mildred Davis, an advisor and principal of Mildred Davis Capital in Toronto.

Davis’s top priority is her son, now 20, who was involved in many extracurricular activities as a child and as a teenager. When Davis’s son was in school, Davis would receive her son’s academic and extracurricular calendars every August. She would then record the dates of his various activities into her calendar so she could ensure she would be available for those events. This saved her the headache of “double booking” herself when she was scheduling business-related appointments over the coming year.

> Assign a purpose to each day
Michael Newton, a portfolio manager with ScotiaMcLeod Inc. in Toronto, used to find it difficult to relax on weekends. Instead of enjoying his time with family or friends, Newton would feel guilty about not working.

“I was always wrestling internally with what was the right thing to do,” he says.

Newton began reading the work of Dan Sullivan, Toronto-based founder of the Strategic Coach. Sullivan’s “entrepreneurial time system,” which divides the seven-day week into “free days,” “buffer days,” and “focus days,” appealed to Newton. He incorporated elements of that system into his daily routine.

Newton’s free days are Saturday and Sunday, which are devoted to his kids and their activities. Monday is a buffer day, to ease into the week — a day on which Newton reviews the previous week’s business activities, organizes tasks for the upcoming week and takes stock of his goals. Newton rarely makes appointments on Monday.

He devotes the rest of the week to focus days, which are dedicated solely to growing his business. Focus days involve meeting with clients and working to bring in new business.

“Now, I just follow my timeline,” Newton says. “And that totally puts me at ease.”