If you own your own business, how do you set boundaries between work and personal life?

[YoungOnTheInside]

I’ve had my own business for a number of years. I WFH and it is very small. I’ve always been rather poor at setting boundaries – so responding to emails at any time of day that suited me. That’s been my choice and it hasn’t particularly bothered me. But for the first time I am having to chase a bad debt and, for my sanity, I need to compartmentalise and try to switch off from this, as I realise it’s not going to be resolved in a trice.

My partner has his own more substantial business away from home and is pretty good at compartmentalising, but then again he has that kind of mindset. Does anyone with their own small business have any suggestions for this please?

DH and I run a business together and I'm very firm about keeping the two separate. I don't answer emails or "just catch up" with things in the evenings/weekends otherwise it can really take over. And I shush DH if he starts suddenly remembering things or saying "did X get done". I think Covid really helped us, because we were closed for months yet everything survived and carried on... I think it gave us more confidence to be able to switch off more.

For bad debts, the small claims process is very simple to do and very effective on the rare occasions we've needed to use it. We used to take a small deposit on all orders but now take at least 50% if not 75% and it takes a lot of the stress away.