So, you want to be an entrepreneur. You want to own your own business, work your hours,  and make your own rules. You’ve likely found yourself here, in a quest to escape the nine-to-five,  cubicle grind. Oh, the irony! As an entrepreneur, you’ll soon find yourself working grueling 18-hour days. Finding the balance between work-time and chasing your dream, is the ultimate goal for most entrepreneurs. It’s true that if you ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’, but successful business owners also know when to turn off the phone and close the laptop.  Here are two sure-fire ways to stay the course and enjoy everything entrepreneurship has to offer.  

Successful people do things in an orderly and organized fashion For example, waking at the same time every day, setting aside time for meals, and only checking correspondence at scheduled times.  Do you check your email, every two minutes? You’re not alone. Schedule communication time into your schedule and devote 30 to 50 minutes to answering all correspondence rather than answering every ping while you’re in the middle of a creative streak. Don’t fall for the multi-tasking myth,  schedule your day and stick to the plan. End your day with a recap and an arrow. In other words,  carry over unfinished tasks to the next day. At some point, you need to loosen your proverbial tie,  kick off your shoes, and end your day. You wouldn’t be happy burning the midnight oil for an employer, don’t do it for yourself. 

Trust your gut. Your workload and your past experiences are your best indicators that if it doesn’t feel right, just say ‘no’. It’s so much easier to revisit the issue in a few days and renegotiate to a  ‘yes’ than explain why you can’t complete the task or keep up your end of the agreement. When you say ‘no’, you respect yourself and your time as well as the person you are saying it to. In the end, a definitive ‘no’ is better than a fake ‘yes’.