We’ve touched on this subject already. We’ve considered:Now’s the time to really focus on what this balance means to you, and the others who may be sharing this new adventure with you.There’s a lot of talk about getting the work/life balance right within business. Much of the focus tends towards the time spent at work, with employees in the UK apparently voluntarily working longer hours than most of their continental colleagues, and some even omitting to take their full holiday complement each year.

Are they willing volunteers? Is there not a slight culture of fear bred from job insecurity which discourages people from being away from their desks for too long, in case their role is seen as superfluous? In our view, the work/life balance stretches much wider than merely judging the relative hours spent at work and home. It is certainly a strong motivational force in moving towards your downshifting and relocation decisions.Let’s focus on your work/life balance priorities for a moment.There’s certainly food for thought there. Some of the latter questions are perhaps areas you might continue to address in the years to come, as your downshifting views evolve.

Cutting to what perhaps is the key issue for work/life balance where you are considering downshifting and relocation, let’s review the working time implications of downshifting to self-employment.

The 24/7 World Of Self-Employment

People, whether employed or self-employed, seem to be very proud of being on the go, supposedly, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Apart from the evident fact that this is an unreal boast, as they would have collapsed in an exhausted heap from lack of sleep a long time ago, is it really a target which people should be striving to achieve?

One of the dangers in self-employment – especially in the early, work-hungry years when you are building up the business, and even more especially if you are working from a home base – is the fact that you never quite ‘lock up the shop’ and go home. There is always the temptation to pop back to the office after the evening meal to write those letters or e-mails, get the financial books in order or tackle all those other administrative tasks that you will find yourself doing in your spare time.

So, you have the potential trap in which, giving up conventional work to achieve a better work/life balance, you finish up effectively spending more of your ‘24/7’ existence involved with work. This is especially true for public-facing situations such as hotels.

But is this broader flexibility necessarily a disadvantage? Although we are not encouraging an ‘all work and no play’ approach (which after all made Jack a dull boy, as the saying has it), there are several positive considerations to justify this wider self-employed involvement:

• You get the direct benefits (financial and developmental) of all your efforts.
• You can view your time more flexibly – work an evening to meet a deadline but have a morning off some other time, when work is quieter.
• Weekends are no longer weekends – have your day of rest on a Thursday (or whenever) some weeks if it suits your interests or hobbies better.
• Flexible hours and more control over what you do and when you do it will allow you to choose the best times of the day to do different tasks.
• The flexibility gives you the opportunity to have more time with your partner and family.

Making Best Use Of Your Time

This last one has quite important implications in managing your work/life balance. Take writing, for example. You may have heard of authors who go down to their den in the garden and stay there until they’ve produced their 1,000 words for the day, at which point they switch off and watch TV. I’ve never managed to do it that way. Some days, I’m really productive, with words hitting the screen as quickly as my little fingers can move. At other times, I stare at the screen, my head threatening to slump forward and hit the delete button. Evidently time to do something less creative!