Making Time for Yourself as a Woman Entrepreneur

Self-care for women entrepreneurs is a puzzle.

You're juggling life and your online business. The path is rewarding and challenging. It also makes it difficult to dedicate time to essential self-care. In fact, it can feel impossible. The busier, more exhausted, or more overwhelmed you feel, the more you need time for stress management and resetting. But like fog on a distant horizon, the more you need it, the farther away it feels. 

My answer to this problem is pretty simple. Since your time is a resource, use it to your advantage. You can’t control the passing of time, but you can exercise some control over how you spend it. Most of us know that, right? So, why is it so hard to do?

I think it’s because we neglect or lose sight of our mindset.

A grounded mindset is a realistic, self-loving one that sees the potential to fulfill our dreams in tasks that we may be tempted to see as administrative chores. 

Here’s another: Creating efficient business systems and self-care routines doesn’t take time away from more important things - they create more time for the things that matter most. 

Let’s explore these ideas in more detail. I’ll also include three practical tips for how to make time for yourself and your self-care.

Synergies

Self-care, self-love, stress management, and time management are related and mutually reinforcing, especially for women entrepreneurs.

Let me explain.

When we dedicate time to ourselves, we send a powerful internal signal that our well-being matters. When we have time and space, it means we value ourselves, and we are valued. Through some mysterious alchemy, this counters and rewrites messages we’ve gotten from others that contradict this truth. 

While these self-loving messages may be conscious (for example, an affirmation), it’s definitely the case that they’re also unconscious. Their unconscious action seeps into our hearts, minds, and souls over time, germinating seeds and nurturing a visceral sense of self-love and self-compassion. Becoming a self-loving person is, of course, a life-long process. But it’s equally true that the more self-love we have, the more we benefit from sharing it abundantly - with others and our online businesses.

Let’s pan in on the nitty-gritty: stress and time management. Taken on their own, these terms may not be inspirational until you realize that, when used strategically, they help actualize your aspirations of self-love and self-care. Strategies and tasks like these are the bread and butter of self-care because they are forms of self-love in action. 

When women entrepreneurs ask me how they can cultivate more self-care for flourishing, my answer isn’t expensive retreats, face masks, or bubble baths.

It’s to start reverse-engineering stress and pain points, to break things down into concrete, solvable problems, and to design practical systems to meet those problems. With things like bubble baths along the way, if you like them, of course :)

3 Practical Ways You Can Make Time for Yourself

Making time for yourself creates a vacuum into which self-care activities can flow. 

With that in mind, here are three practical ways to carve time out for yourself. 

Prioritize Self-Care by Scheduling It

• Treat time for self-care as a non-negotiable appointment. Just as you would block out time for work meetings or medical appointments, allocate specific time in your calendar for quality self-care. 
• This is one of those things that can be like a New Year's Resolution. Setting an intention and creating a shiny new routine on your calendar is easy. But it’s harder to honor it over time. If this resonates, start small. Try ten or fifteen minutes. Make the goal about showing up, not about how much you think you should show up. Building a foundation of sustainable successes over time will inspire you to create a habit and show up more often.

Delegate. Outsource. 

• It can be hard to acknowledge our human limitations because we want to be the best women entrepreneurs we can. Of course, as much as we may try, we can't do everything alone. But we always have the power to identify chores, tasks, and responsibilities to delegate to others whenever possible. 
• If you feel resistance around this, start small. Find one thing that feels easy to delegate. After you’ve delegated it and feel comfortable, look for three more things to delegate. Keep going. Get things off your plate and funnel that time into self-care appointments.   

Time Block

• When you have a schedule that feels complicated, or you have a lot of competing demands on your time, figuring out how to make time for yourself can feel impossible! Try experimenting with time-blocking techniques. Time blocking is a more aggressive form of scheduling. It’s when you schedule all parts of your day so you can see exactly how you spend all of your time. This will allow you to see where you can carve out time - or what you can revise to make that time available.
• During your self-care “block,” focus solely on self-care activities like journaling, getting fresh air, taking a siesta, or pursuing a beloved creative hobby. These are examples of restorative stress-relief activities that you really need. If you’re tempted by external distractions (who isn’t?), remove them. Unplug, shut the door, reduce stimulation, or go somewhere you won’t be disturbed. Use eye masks or earbuds. This is your time, and you’re entitled to it.  

TLDR: Time is Precious and So Are You

When you run an online business, self-care isn't just a luxury or a “nice-to-have.” It’s vital. 

By practicing self-love through self-care and stress-relief activities, you can unlock the door to more flourishing. You’ll grow as you build a reservoir of strategies, tools, and resources. You’ll become more resilient, confident, and self-led. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll learn to see thriving as a skill just as much as an experience. And you’ll be a woman entrepreneur dedicated to the things that matter most to you.

My free stress-relief toolkit for women entrepreneurs just like you is a short, inspiring primer that helps you understand and practice these ideas. You can use simple worksheets to build a robust and practical foundation for self-love.