According to a study a few years back by the Families and Work Institute,

• the average worker spends forty-four hours per week on the job
• thirty-six percent of workers say they often feel completely used up at the end of the workday
• Eighty five percent of workers have daily family responsibilities to go home to
• Seventy-eight percent of married workers have spouses who are also employed
• Weekends are consumed by errands and housekeeping
• Seventy percent of all parents feel that they don’t spend enough time with their children

Wow! How many of you have kids?

Do you relate to this?

How many of you run your own business?

Besides work, what takes up your time?

Ok, so I’m pretty sure errands are among the items taking up time. What kind of errands?

My goal here is not to stress you out more by hearing these statistics. Nor is it to make you feel bad about your current situation. What I’m here to tell you is that I have been there and there are very easy (and inexpensive) solutions to this – if you are willing to act and make some changes. I hope this blog will be a resource for you and your friends to learn how to have more time in your day. I am especially happy to tell you that this can be done without sacrificing the quality or quantity of things that get done!

YuDu was launched to bring life balance to clients and to our team members. You should know that before YuDu I was an executive with a local start up firm that I was incredibly passionate about for most of the time I worked there. I dedicated much of my life to that company, working 12 and sometimes 14 hour days, working from home on the weekends, working while on vacations, the same I am sure that some of you have done or still do today. Despite the fact that the dry cleaners was down the street from my office, I could not fathom taking the five minutes to do the drop off/pick up. It was too stressful and those minutes were precious to me. And the grocery store? Forget it! My cell phone had poor reception there – what if I missed a call? Plus the thought of spending 30-40 minutes searching for food was overwhelming. Bottom line, I had zero life balance! If it were not for my husband, friends, and the gym, I probably would have headed for self-destruction. At that time, I would have paid A LOT of money for someone to pick up my alterations, bring me lunch (a healthy one!), buy those birthday presents, make reservations for girls night, plan my anniversary trip – etc. As far as I knew, no one else was doing it and if they were, they were not making it known to ME – their prime target.

So – I left what I was doing. Now, the truth is that a good friend of mine and I decided to launch YuDu years before we actually did it. We planned and researched and put off the business until I was inspired while on a work trip and reading “Ladies who Launch” and decided it was “now or never”. I hadn’t anticipated working full time with this company but once we launched, it was a no-brainer. I am so passionate about our Life Balance core value, I had to get out there and find more people like us to share it!