If you are an entrepreneur no matter what size business you own you know the word workcation. The vacation where you are actually working and relaxing all at the same time. It’s part of being an entrepreneur because although you stop to take a break, many other businesses and individuals rely on your business to continue while your scheduled to be off.

We are visiting the beautiful (currently smokey but still beautiful) mountainous province of Alberta for two weeks and meeting up with some of our incredible clients which we usually interact with virtually rather then face to face. It has been great so far, the girls have adjusted well, and we have had lots of laughs and great nights with our clients both celebrating business and personal events.

One thing that not only us but other entrepreneurs struggle with is separating work and life, because we have a passion to help our clients when they are in need, and a drive to increase them because we believe in what we do, but we also as humans and parents strive to provide for our families just the same. It’s a balance that is not always fair to both sides, and usually leaves us torn about these two questions. Do we work? Or do we create memories with our families, loved ones and friends?

Just like in business, we need to plan, organize our life and keep things moving smoothly between business and personal, without neglecting one or the other. We must accept that business is demanding, but family will be there even if the business is not.

But we can’t forget our clients, responsibilities and commitments to our business growth.

We would love to share with you some tips that we have found to work with our business and make our workcation have good balance.

Prioritize your current projects:
Although it can be tough, you need to make a list of current projects, or upcoming projects and set priorities to them. Not doing this can cause you to forget tasks, and commitments leaving you and your business in a bad place. We use an online tool called Asana to help prioritize client projects. You can set due dates, assign sub tasks to each person responsible to complete and share information your team (or yourself) to keep everyone in the loop with what is going on.
We have heard countless times from clients that it is hard to keep everything organized and laid out and keep communication strong with their teams, Asana is one tool we have found for scheduling and collaboration to be great in keeping us and our team in the know how.

Communicate and collaborate, your team is there to help you succeed.
Our team is not just local but also out in Alberta, in fact we are meeting with them before we leave, this is an excellent opportunity to really connect and plan out what move to make next. But at such a distance it can be hard to keep everyone together and in the loop of what it is happening.
With our team we use a few tools outside of Asana to keep in the loop and share files and updates with our team:

Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups are great because you can share links, files and just quick updates with everyone and it will appear on their news feed, keeping the group secret allows you to only invite your team to collaborate with you. You can also post videos and communicate through live video with your team, all of this being accessible at anytime to any member when they are able to view.

Zoom
Zoom is a tool we use heavily not just with clients but our team as well, you can have single person meetings or have multiple people attend a video conference with you to share and collaborate on up coming project and launches within your business. Zoom also allows you to screen share your computers display and even others to view different ideas and concepts, you also have the ability to record the meeting to share with other members that could not attend, in places such as your secret team Facebook Group.

Evernote
For sharing content and written ideas, we use is Evernote to collaborate with our team and share documents and written ideas that may change frequently or need edits from different members. Evernote is great because changes propagate to each member automatically so they get the most current version of the document. You can also separate ideas into notebooks which contain multiple notes to better organize your content as well as tag specific notes so they can easily be search or found quickly by searching a specific tag.

Life as an entrepreneur can be tough, especially balancing work and life, no matter where you are at in your business or the size of your enterprise you will always face the issue of scheduling and prioritizing.

We have complied this list to hopefully help other entrepreneurs to better balance business and make sure everything is in order before leaving for a vacation or in most cases a workcation; utilizing these tools and others can help you to prioritize, organize and be in the know about what is happening with your business, even without being on top of it 24 hours a day, and getting more time with your family and friends and taking some much needed downtime from your busy schedule.

We would love to hear the tools you use to schedule and prioritize even if they are the same, let us know on our Facebook page!

Team DrakeCo