No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.