I live in a home that has two business owners. My partner just started his business, whereas I just celebrated twelve years of working for myself. It’s been eye opening to go through this with him, due to the different ages of our businesses and the different kinds of businesses we do (he is a large scale printer tech). But both of use have a problem that plagues most business owners: overworking.

If it weren’t for our daughter, we’d both work from sun up to sun down happily. But alas, the pitter patter of two year old feet getting into trouble are forever calling us back to earth.

Don’t have a two year old demanding your attention? Don’t worry. There are loads of ways to prevent yourself from overworking.

Laptop is only open during set hours

There were days that I would get up at five in the morning and work until ten at night, and that was a regular occurrence. I was exhausted.

Now, I limit my work from nine to five. My laptop does not open until nine and it immediately closes at five. If I have to work, I make sure it’s all doable on my phone. I hate working on my phone, so that’s enough to make sure I don’t do much off-hours other than monitoring what I have already done on my laptop.

Is this a hard rule? Absolutely not. If a client asks that I be online during my off-hours, I absolutely am. This just makes me more mindful about when I do that. Is it really necessary? Can I schedule on my laptop during my on-hours and monitor from my phone later? It’s a good check to make sure I only do what I absolutely have to do during my off-hours.

There is a set place to work in your home

Having different places to work and live when you’re working from home is vital if your goal is to not overwork. Bonus points if it has a door that you can open and shut.

Why? It’s a mindset. If you don’t have a set place, you can work anywhere in your home and it starts infiltrating your life in the same ways it is infiltrating your home. You lose all boundaries an begin overworking.

If you have a set place, on the other hand, you can more clearly draw those boundaries. You have to be in that place to work, and therefore you’re training your mind that you only work there. And then you leave it behind when you leave it. The door shutting or opening can add an even firmer boundary.

Yes, you could just go to that place and still overwork. But having to walk to that place will give you time to think about whether you really need to work and make you more intentional about when you are working.

You set manageable goals

This has always been my biggest weakness. I like to set big goals and accomplish them now. That is a recipe for always overworking on something.

If you also have that problem, the best thing you can do is get feedback. When I was deep in the throes of constantly making impossible goals, I started talking to friends who worked in similar fields. I talked to the brutal ones, not the nice ones. Always keep the brutal ones in your network for things like this. They started telling me when something was reasonable or unreasonable, until I learned to tell the difference on my own.

It took some time to get there. I even tried not to listen many times and fell on my butt most of those times. But slowly, I learned to spot when I was making unreasonable goals and started making more manageable goals on my own.

Did I ask for this advice from my brutal friends for free? Nope, I helped them with one of their weaknesses, and we made running a business easier on each other. In the end, having good, brutal friends is the key to getting your business into a good place and to making sure you don’t overwork yourself.

Are you trying to overwork? How are you avoiding it?