Work-life balance
One thing I’ve been considering lately is whether I should increase my work hours or not. The concept of work-life balance is popular among employees, but it’s quite a different thing when you are self-employed and have to choose how much and what kind of work to take - as it’s easy to do too much and then end up burnt-out.
In my case, as a small-group and personal trainer, I am currently working every late afternoon from Monday to Friday, 3 evenings and 1 morning. I enjoy working in the evening more than working in the morning, especially because my partner has the same schedule, but also because it means I have the first half of the day free to do whatever activity I want - even hiking or bike riding, which would not be possible to do in the evening; however, I also do not enjoy working every evening, as it means I eat and go to bed very late every weekday. I work one morning per week as I found it to be an acceptable deal to earn a bit more money without feeling trapped in the ‘double shift’ that this kind of service job necessitates - which can make you feel like those hours in between classes are never enough to actually do your things.
So after some experimenting in the previous years I settled for the schedule I mentioned above, which is working well in terms of a income : hours worked ratio. However, with increasing demands for my services, I do get to wonder whether I could work a bit more while maintaining the same quality of life and relatively low stress level. The thing is - no business guru for personal trainers that you can find online will tell you ‘nah man, don’t take on too much, enjoy your life a bit’ - the message is overwhelmingly to work as much as you can to earn as much as you can - the usual skewed and extremely polarized view given by a certain pattern..as, realistically, this is not necessarily the best idea for the long term, since it doesn’t take into consideration your enjoyment of a job whose outcome is very heavily dependent on how you’re feeling, and can thus easily sequels into a burnout