It’s December 14th. Christmas is 11 days away. You just told your family “I’ll only work a few hours on Christmas Day, just to check on a few things.” You said the same thing last year. And the year before. They don’t even argue anymore. They just nod and plan Christmas around the fact that you’ll be on your laptop while they open presents.
Every December, you promise yourself this will be the last Christmas you work through. You’ll have better work life balance next year. You’ll set boundaries. You’ll hire help. You’ll finally take time off. But here you are. Eleven days from Christmas. Already planning which client emails you’ll answer on December 25th. Already thinking about that project deadline on the 27th. Already accepting that you’re going to miss another Christmas.
Maybe that’s why you searched for “work life balance tips” or “how to stop working on holidays.” You’re looking for a solution that doesn’t involve closing your business or losing clients. Something that lets you actually be present with your family without your business falling apart. The problem? Most work life balance tips are written for employees, not business owners who work significantly longer hours. Studies show that business owners work an average of 52 hours per week, significantly more than employees. They don’t understand that when you own the business, you can’t just “leave work at work” or “set office hours.”
You’re not reading generic work life balance advice. You need something that actually works when you’re the one responsible for everything. When clients expect you to be available. When your team needs direction. When revenue stops if you stop. You need a system that creates space for Christmas without destroying what you’ve built.
Two Versions of Christmas Day 2025
Version 1 (What’s About to Happen): It’s 7 AM Christmas morning. Your kids are opening presents. You’re sitting on the couch with your laptop, half-watching, half-answering a client email that “can’t wait.” Your spouse gives you that look. Not angry. Disappointed. Your daughter asks you to help build her new toy. You say “In a minute, honey.” An hour later, you’re still on a call. By noon, you’ve checked email 47 times. Your family ate Christmas breakfast without you. This is the fourth year in a row.
Version 2 (What’s Possible): It’s 7 AM Christmas morning. Your phone is in a drawer, turned off. You’re on the floor with your kids, actually present. Actually laughing. Actually building the toys. A client emails. Your documented system handles it. Your team knows what to do. You check in at 2 PM for 10 minutes. Everything’s fine. You go back to your family. This is what work life balance actually looks like.
Which version of Christmas 2025 do you want? You have 11 days to decide.
Why Work-Life Balance Tips Fail Business Owners
I’m Ryan Herrst with Media Ace Advisors. I’m a Certified Profit Advisor and author of “Profit Foundation.” I help service business owners earning $250,000 to $5 million annually create businesses that don’t consume their lives. December is when I see the pattern most clearly. Business owners Googling “work life balance tips” on December 14th, desperately looking for something that will save Christmas.
It’s not because you don’t value family. It’s not because you’re a workaholic. It’s because you built a business that depends on you for everything. Every decision. Every client issue. Every sale. Every quality check. You tried setting boundaries. Clients called anyway. You tried taking time off. Something broke and you had to fix it. You tried delegating. The work came back wrong and you had to redo it.
Google “work life balance tips” and you’ll find articles telling you to “set boundaries” and “prioritize self-care” and “learn to say no.” That’s great advice for someone with a boss and a defined role. It’s useless advice for someone who owns the business. You can’t set boundaries when you’re responsible for revenue. You can’t prioritize self-care when clients need you. You can’t say no when saying no means losing income.
You don’t have a work-life balance problem. You have a business design problem. You built a business where you’re the technician, not the owner. Where everything runs through you. Where taking two days off for Christmas feels impossible because the business can’t function without you.
Last week I wrote about the entrepreneur mindset shift and making strategic year-end decisions. But mindset shifts and strategic decisions don’t work if your business is structurally designed to need you for everything. You can’t “decide” to have work-life balance when your business can’t run without you. You have to BUILD the system first. That’s what this is about. Not tips. Not mindset. The actual system that makes you unnecessary.
My father taught me “All because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” Just because you CAN handle everything yourself doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Just because you CAN work on Christmas doesn’t mean you SHOULD. The business owners who actually achieve work life balance aren’t the ones following generic tips. They’re the ones who built ONE system that makes them unnecessary.
The Pattern I’ve Observed
Here’s what happens when business owners document their first system. A business owner stuck working 65 hours per week, always on call, couldn’t take weekends off. Documented their client onboarding process over two weeks. Trained their team to run it. First client after documentation: team handled 90 percent of it, owner reviewed for 30 minutes instead of managing for 5 hours. Second client: team handled it completely, owner just did final quality check. Third client: owner wasn’t even involved until the welcome call.
Six weeks after documenting that ONE process, this owner took their first actual weekend off in two years. Phone stayed off Saturday and Sunday. No emergencies. Business ran fine. That’s not because they found better work life balance tips. That’s because they removed themselves from the dependency by building a system.
The business owners who actually enjoy Christmas are the ones who fixed the business model first. They’re not superhuman. They’re not lucky. They just built the ONE system that matters. Using the 7-Step Pathway to Profit framework, they identified which system to build first.
How Do You Know If Your Work-Life Balance Is Unhealthy?
Here are the warning signs that you’re about to work through Christmas again. These aren’t generic work-related stress symptoms. These are specific red flags for business owners.
You’ve already told your family you’ll “check in” on Christmas Day. Not because you want to. Because you genuinely believe something will break if you don’t. Your phone will buzz with a client emergency. An employee will have a question only you can answer. A project will hit a snag that only you can fix. So you’re pre-apologizing to your family. “I’ll only be on my laptop for an hour.” It’s never just an hour.
Your kids stopped asking if you’ll be at their events. The school play. The Christmas concert. The family dinner. They used to ask “Are you coming?” Now they just assume you won’t. Or you’ll show up late. Or you’ll be there physically but mentally you’re thinking about work. That’s not poor work life balance. That’s a business that’s consuming your life.
You can’t remember the last time you took two consecutive days completely off. Not “mostly off with some emails.” Actually off. Phone in a drawer. Laptop closed. Mind present. If you can’t remember the last time, that’s the biggest red flag of all. You don’t have an unhealthy work life balance. You don’t have a work-life balance at all.
The Christmas Work-Life Balance Test
Score yourself honestly:
- Can you turn your phone completely off for 24 hours without checking it? (Yes = 10 points, No = 0)
- Does your family assume you’ll be working on holidays? (No = 10 points, Yes = 0)
- Can someone on your team handle client onboarding without you? (Yes = 10 points, No = 0)
Total Score:
- 30 points: You have work-life balance (rare for business owners)
- 20 points: You’re close but not there yet
- 10 points: You have one system, need more
- 0 points: You’re working Christmas Day again
If you scored 0 to 10, the ONE system below is your starting point.
Why “Work Life Balance Tips” Don’t Fix This
Most work life balance tips assume you have control over your schedule. Set office hours. Create boundaries. Prioritize tasks. Delegate. These tips work for employees. They fail for business owners.
The “Set Boundaries” Tip: Great idea. Except when a $50,000 client calls on Christmas Eve with an urgent issue, are you really going to send it to voicemail? When that client represents 15 percent of your annual revenue? The tip assumes you can afford to set boundaries. Most business owners can’t.
The “Learn to Delegate” Tip: You tried. You hired someone. Trained them. Gave them the task. They did it wrong. Or halfway. Or they had questions that took longer to answer than doing it yourself. So now you’re doing the work AND managing people. Delegation made it worse, not better.
The “Take Vacation” Tip: You did. Once. Three years ago. Spent the whole vacation checking email. Putting out fires. By day three, your family stopped pretending you were actually there. You came back more stressed than when you left.
The tips don’t work because they’re treating symptoms, not the disease. The disease is that your business is designed to need you for everything.
The ONE System That Actually Creates Work-Life Balance
There’s only one system that creates actual work life balance for business owners. It’s not sexy. It’s not a life hack. It’s not a boundary-setting exercise. It’s client onboarding and delivery documentation.
When you document exactly how a client gets onboarded, exactly what happens in week one, exactly who does what by when, exactly what quality assurance looks like, you create a system that runs without you. Not perfectly. Not the way you’d do it. But well enough that clients are happy and you’re not needed.
A business owner who documents their client onboarding process goes from spending 5 hours per new client handling setup to spending 30 minutes reviewing what their team did. That’s 4.5 hours back per client. At 10 new clients per month, that’s 45 hours back in their calendar. That’s the difference between working Christmas Day and actually being present with family.
Tips assume you can change your behavior. This system changes your business structure. You’re not trying to set boundaries while everything still depends on you. You’re removing yourself from the dependency. When the client onboarding system is documented and your team can run it, clients don’t need you on Christmas Day. The system handles it.
How to Document Your First Process This Week (Before Christmas)
You have 11 days. Here’s exactly what to do:
Step 1 (Monday): Pick your most repetitive process. Not your most complex. Your most repetitive. The thing you do every week that takes 2 to 4 hours. For most service businesses, this is client onboarding (what happens from “they signed the contract” to “they’re up and running”).
Step 2 (Tuesday through Wednesday): Write down every single step. Open a Google Doc. Title it “Client Onboarding Process.” Walk through the last three clients you onboarded. What did you do first? What happened next? What did the client receive? When did they receive it? Who was responsible for what? Write it ALL down. Every email template. Every checklist. Every quality check. This takes 3 to 4 hours. Do it in two sessions.
Step 3 (Thursday): Turn your brain dump into a checklist. Number the steps. Put them in order. Add “responsible party” next to each step. Add “deadline” next to each step. Add “what good looks like” for quality checks. Now you have a system, not just notes.
Step 4 (Friday): Train one person to run it. Don’t just send them the document. Walk them through it. Have them do the next client onboarding WITH you watching. Let them make mistakes. Correct them. Now they can run it without you.
Step 5 (Next week): Let them run the next one alone. Review their work. Fix the checklist where it’s unclear. By the third client, they’ve got it. You just went from 5 hours per client onboarding to 30 minutes reviewing their work. That’s the system.
The Christmas Test: Can you turn your phone off for 48 hours (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) without anything breaking? If the answer is no, you don’t have a work life balance problem. You have a systems problem. Document your client onboarding and delivery process, train your team to run it, and you pass the Christmas Test.
What Happens If You Do Nothing
Here’s what December 2026 looks like if you don’t document that first system. You’re reading the same work life balance tips again. Googling “how to stop working on holidays” again. Your family has Christmas planned around the fact that you’ll be on your laptop again. Your oldest kid is one year older, one year closer to leaving for college, one more Christmas you missed. You hit your revenue goal. You worked harder than ever. Your profit margin stayed flat. And you’re wondering why nothing changed.
The business owners who document their first system this week won’t be Googling work life balance tips next December. They’ll be present for Christmas.
You Have 11 Days
You can’t document your entire business in 11 days. But you can do this. Pick ONE process you do every week. Client onboarding. Sales calls. Project kickoff. Whatever you do repeatedly. Spend two hours this week writing down every step. Every decision point. Every quality check. Build the checklist. Train one person to follow it.
That won’t solve everything. But it’s the start. It’s the first process that can run without you. It’s the first step toward a Christmas where your phone stays off. Where you’re actually present. Where your kids don’t assume you’ll be working.
This is how it starts. Not with work life balance tips. With one documented system.
Start Building Your System (Free Session)
I’m currently interviewing service business owners for the second edition of “Profit Foundation,” my book on building businesses that don’t consume your life. During these 45-minute conversations, I walk through your business and identify which ONE process to document first so you can start having real time off.
It’s a research conversation for the book, not a sales pitch. I share what I’m learning about creating work life balance that actually works for business owners. Most people walk away with a specific process to document and a plan for the first 30 days.
If you’d like to participate and receive a free copy of the book when it’s published, you can schedule here: https://mediaaceadvisors.com/contact/
There’s no cost and no sales pitch. These are real research conversations. I’ll show you which system to build first, you’ll get a roadmap for the next 90 days, and I’ll get insights for the book. You can also use the Pathway to Profit Calculator to see all seven areas where your business needs systems.
Christmas is 11 days away. If you don’t want to miss another one, this is where it starts.
Stop Googling work life balance tips. Start building the system.
About the Author:
I’m Ryan Herrst with Media Ace Advisors. I help service business owners (annual revenue $250K-$5M, 10 or fewer employees) build businesses that don’t consume their lives. My approach focuses on the ONE system that creates freedom: documented client delivery processes that run without the owner.