When you’re spending time with your loved ones, what do you think about?  Are you still thinking about work?  Can’t relax or get your mind off the job when you’re worried about things left undone? Improving your work-life balance is usually a question of improving your productivity.

Most people just try to do more.  Constantly running, multitasking, never taking breaks (most North Americans don’t even take all their allotted vacation!) they rush through everything.  And if something goes wrong?  They still work more hours!

There will always be more to do, and things do go wrong occasionally.  Since you only have a finite number of hours, you need a better strategy if you hope to achieve work-life balance.

One of the biggest drains on your productivity is time spent transitioning between tasks.  You must stop thinking about one thing, put your things away (if you remember to do that instead of letting your desk slowly disappear under mounds of debris!), get out what you need, and start thinking about the next task.

The entrepreneurs I work with struggle with productivity, though you can be amazingly productive when you stick with an activity long enough to achieve a state of hyperfocus.  Switching between tasks wastes time because you can’t pay full attention to any task.  There’s no productivity without action, but action without attention is worthless.

While most people focus on the time they spend on something, you must learn to value attention.  Concentrate only on how much time you spend doing things and your productivity goes into freefall. Instead, use strategies that increase your ability to pay attention to what you’re doing and your productivity will skyrocket:

• leave your office to work uninterrupted,
• never multitask, and
• tackle mentally demanding tasks only during your most productive periods.

You’ve heard it’s better to work smarter than to work harder.  People who choose to work smarter rather than harder squeeze a better return out of each hour.  With practice, you can even accomplish more while working less.  If working smarter sounds like the right thing to do, you’ll be happy to learn it’s the only thing that works for entrepreneurs like you.

To learn how to apply this and other strategies to double (or more!) your productivity, improve your work-life balance (your wife will fall in love with you all over again!) get Grow With the Flow for Entrepreneurs©.