18 Work-Life Balance Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs

The best advice I can give is this: stop chasing balance and start designing boundaries.

For a long time, I thought balance meant giving everything equal time — but that’s impossible as a founder. What works for me is getting really clear on my priorities in each season. Some seasons are about growth, others are about rest or family. Knowing which one I’m in helps me make choices without guilt.

I also protect my calendar like it’s my most valuable asset — because it is. I batch meetings, block off focus time, and set “hard stops” in my day. My team knows that when I log off, I’m fully off. I’ve learned that if I don’t model boundaries, no one else in the company will either.

The biggest mindset shift was realizing that work-life balance isn’t something you find — it’s something you build. And it starts with giving yourself permission to be a person first, and a CEO second.

As a performance coach, I tell entrepreneurs work-life balance isn’t something you find — it’s something you design and protect ruthlessly.

The biggest shift is realizing constant work doesn’t equal progress. Your best strategic thinking, creative problem solving, and decision making all require a rested brain. When you’re burnt out, you’re not building a business efficiently — you’re just busy.

Start with non-negotiable recovery blocks. Not “I’ll try to finish early” or “I’ll take time off when things calm down” — because they never do. I mean hard boundaries in your calendar that you treat like your most important client meeting. For most entrepreneurs I work with, this looks like one completely offline day per week and a hard stop time three evenings weekly.

The key is to reframe these boundaries. You’re not taking time away from your business — you’re investing in your most important asset: you. When you show up rested, you make better decisions, spot opportunities faster, and have the energy to execute at a higher level.

Here’s the practical bit: communicate these boundaries clearly to your team and clients upfront. Set expectations around response times. Most “urgent” matters can wait 12 hours, and the ones that can’t will reveal themselves quickly.

The entrepreneurs who sustain long-term success aren’t the ones who work the most hours — they’re the ones who’ve learned to work at their cognitive peak and recover properly. Your business needs you healthy and sharp for years, not burnt out in months.

What’s your biggest challenge right now with boundaries — is it external pressure or your own difficulty switching off?

The best advice I can give to entrepreneurs struggling with work-life balance is to treat your time the same way you treat your money, like something valuable, limited, and worth budgeting intentionally. It’s easy to let work expand into every corner of your day, especially when you love what you do, but balance doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through boundaries that protect your energy as much as your calendar.

One strategy that’s worked for me is time-blocking my week around energy, not just tasks. I know when I’m most focused, when I hit a wall, and when I need recovery time, so I build my schedule to reflect that. My workday has clear “open” and “closed” hours, and I do tasks that require more high-power brain cells, like client work, during the times of day that I can focus better and tasks that require less high-power brain cells, like networking events, during hours when I know I need to be a little more chill. Also, I use visual cues to end my workday, like shutting down my laptop, dimming the lights, and turning on music or a TV show, to signal that I’m off duty. Those small rituals reinforce the boundary.

As a neurodivergent entrepreneur, I also know how easy it is to slip into hyperfocus, so I use structure as a safety net rather than a restriction. I set up automated reminders, recurring breaks, and digital prompts that gently nudge me to step away. Those systems keep me grounded and allow me to rest without guilt.

Ultimately, balance isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing what matters most without burning out in the process. When you design your work around how your brain and body function best, you create space for both productivity and peace.

If there’s one piece of advice I’d give entrepreneurs struggling with work-life balance, it’s this: build systems that don’t depend on you, and unlearn micromanagement.

In the early days of my business, I was involved in everything: reviewing reports, approving every small decision, answering client emails late at night. I told myself it was leadership, but really, it was control disguised as commitment. Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t just burning myself out; I was holding the team back.

Turns out, I had to fix this on my part: Instead of telling people how to do things, I made sure they understood why it mattered and trusted them to figure out the rest. We also automated repetitive workflows so no one, including me, became a bottleneck.

Eventually, the team grew more confident, decisions got faster, and I finally got breathing room to focus on strategy instead of firefighting.

If you’re always the fallback for everything, you don’t have a business, but have a full-time job wearing a CEO title. Trust your people, build reliable systems, and let go of control. That’s where balance actually begins.

One of the most important things I ever did to save both my time and sanity was to completely shut off non-essential notifications, especially email. Early in my startup career, I realized that hearing or seeing the constant notifications of new mail ripped time out of my head. It also elevated my anxiety, pushing me further down the slippery slope of always being on, which is so hard to reverse. So instead of merely checking email less often, I use the Boomerang Inbox Pause add-on for Gmail to literally pause all new mail after I check in the morning and afternoon. Now the only exceptions are phone calls and real emergencies sent by text message. There isn’t really any middle ground. Calls happen so rarely that you can treat them as a special case.

Within months of doing this, I saw the number of hours of fully focused work increase by almost 40%. And I also improved proportionally in creative (as opposed to merely executive) work; the pings of new mail were stealing time from this too. For people who think they can’t afford to disconnect like this, I never lost any key partnership, deal, or deadline as a result. But I did start to get better at solving problems at a high level, and for the first time in years I started to be able to be offline in the evenings.

It is not an exaggeration to say that if you want to save your work-life balance, you need to fix your notifications as if your life depended on it.

Here, I mean fire the handful of clients who create the most stress and least revenue. In the early stages of a startup, I used to think (and most do) that you couldn’t afford to lose any clients. But in retrospect, it became clear that 20% of the clients created more than 80% of the administrative overhead and emotional fatigue. And when I stopped taking work from the repeat customers who were chronically late with payment, chronically demanding scope creeps, and generally chronically energy vampires, even at the cost of a short-term revenue dip, the results were surprisingly dramatic. My employees stopped burning out, and they suddenly seemed a lot more engaged and interested in working.

Firing these clients also created more room for better new ones and deeper investment in service, which accelerated growth over the next quarter.

I typically work 12+ hours a day. I enjoy it but acknowledge it has some health drawbacks.

One strategy that worked really well for me is that I blocked off one Friday a month in the calendar and made that my own “Rostered Day Off”. I would take that long weekend to not work at all.

After 3 months, I extended that to 2 Fridays a month. It forces you on Thursday night to close everything off and prepare for the following Monday. This was the only strategy that worked because I was working towards something that was rewarding me. I would always plan a trip or an event on that long weekend and was rewarding myself for commitment.

Another tip is to completely focus on a healthy lifestyle. Cutting out alcohol and doing early morning gym sessions worked really well for me. Living a healthy lifestyle will help prevent the effects of overworking rather than having a cocktail or a beer after work.

I strongly recommend establishing a non-negotiable personal routine that serves as your anchor amid the constant demands of entrepreneurship. For me, creating consistent time for meditation each morning has been transformative in maintaining boundaries and gaining the clarity needed to make sound business decisions. This practice doesn’t need to be time-consuming — even 15 minutes of intentional focus can help you regain control over your schedule rather than letting your schedule control you. Building this boundary has allowed me to be fully present whether I’m in the boardroom or at home with family.

I’ll be candid: I’ve learned about work-life balance by getting it wrong twice. While everyone recommends “setting boundaries” and “taking time for yourself,” that advice rarely survives contact with startup reality. Your competitors don’t have boundaries. Customers need help on weekends. Opportunities don’t follow a 9-5 schedule.

But here’s what burnout taught me: No human can sustain 80-hour weeks indefinitely. Your body will eventually rebel. Mine did — I got sick, my thinking clouded, and I lost two weeks recovering because I’d ignored months of warning signs.

The breakthrough for me wasn’t finding “balance” but becoming ruthlessly honest about what truly matters. I tracked which actions actually drove revenue, retained customers, or improved our product. Surprisingly, only about 20% of my work had real impact. The rest was just motion masquerading as progress.

Now I filter decisions through one question: “Will this matter three months from now?” Not whether it’s urgent or if someone might be disappointed — just whether it actually matters.

I still work intensely, but I’ve stopped confusing responsiveness with productivity or equating exhaustion with commitment. I’ve learned that saying, “I can’t do this now, but I can on Thursday,” rarely creates problems. Most people weren’t expecting immediate action anyway.

Some weeks will always be overwhelming in entrepreneurship. The key is ensuring you choose which weeks those are. If every week feels like a crisis, you’re not building a business — you’re just reacting to one.

The hustle culture will tell you to work 16-hour days, and we all think that it’s what’s right in order to achieve great heights in our careers. It seems to be what other successful people always say, “WORK HARD.” Over the years, I have tried to figure out what work-life balance really means for me because I absolutely like to work. I love my career! But at the same time, I am not a robot. Rest, exercise, quality time with your loved ones, and personal time for self-care are also important.

Before I found what work-life balance truly meant for me, here’s what it looked like: I tried my best to work 10-12 hours per day, every single day. If I could work on the weekends, I would. I’d tell myself, “Even just 1-2 hours on the weekends! That way, I can finally keep up with work.” But it was never sustainable. In the first few weeks that I did that, I was so pumped and excited. “I’m finally getting things done,” I told myself (a lie, of course). Until it took a toll on me and I got so tired I couldn’t even get my butt on the chair to turn my computer on. I just wanted to sleep. All day. It was my body’s way of telling me that it was enough.

As I started to recover from burnout, I decided to track my usual working hours (you can do this with any app: Toggl, Clockify, etc.) and the reason is, I wanted to see how many hours in a day I could work sustainably, and then give myself an additional 1-2 hours on top of that if I felt like working more, but that’s about it. Turns out, my average working day is no more than 5 hours and 30 minutes given the amount of mental workload I do on a day-to-day basis, and then I will give myself 6-7 hours max if I’m feeling a little more pumped than the usual work day.

I also FORCE myself to rest on the weekends: do date or movie nights with my husband, go see our families, or play video games so that I stop thinking about work. After applying all those changes, I realize: I like being flexible. This is in no way avoiding discipline, because I still have deadlines to meet. But understanding that flexibility is where I could create the most impact for my clients and myself is how I decided to define my “work-life balance.” (Advice more applicable for self-employed or entrepreneurial folks.)

After 30+ years as both a healthcare entrepreneur and business owner, here’s my counterintuitive advice: Stop chasing “balance” and start building alignment.

Traditional work-life balance is a myth that sets entrepreneurs up for failure. You can’t perfectly split time when you’re building something meaningful. Instead, focus on alignment — ensuring your energy flows toward what matters most.

My 6 Strategies That Actually Work:

1. Treat Recovery Like Revenue – Schedule workouts, family time, and rest as non-negotiable appointments. Your body and mind are your business assets — protect them like you would your bank account.

2. Build Systems, Not Chaos – Structure creates freedom. I plan my week intentionally, delegate ruthlessly, and focus only on what requires my unique expertise. Clear systems prevent the “everything’s urgent” trap.

3. Master the Energy Audit – Track when you’re most productive vs. when you’re just busy. I discovered I make better decisions in the morning, so I handle critical tasks then and delegate routine work to my team.

4. Set Digital Boundaries That Stick – No emails after 8 PM or before 8 AM. This isn’t about being unavailable — it’s about protecting the mental space needed for creativity and strategic thinking.

5. Embrace “Good Enough” Leadership – Perfectionism kills balance. Empower your team to make 80% decisions without you. Trust me — your business won’t collapse if every detail isn’t perfect.

6. Model What You Preach – In chiropractic, we teach that the body needs recovery to perform. The same applies to entrepreneurs. Your team watches how you treat yourself — show them that sustainable success requires intentional rest.

Work-life balance isn’t about working less; it’s about working smarter and living with intention. When you align your energy with your priorities, you don’t just survive entrepreneurship — you thrive in it.

Your business needs the best version of you, not the most exhausted version.