Time Management When Working from Home
When you start up a home business, time management is an element of business management that can be overlooked or ignored.
Surely everybody knows someone in small business who races around like a madman all day, without enough hours in their day, all they do is hurry and get overloaded - is it that this person is you! By the day’s end, when the dust settles, what have you accomplished? Do you review the day and realise “what happened to the time, I didn’t get as much accomplished as I hoped to do. If this sounds familiar, then you may have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t seem to rush, they are always composed and unflustered. The difference between them and others is they have mastered time management.
What is time management? It is just arranging time in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can truly get how to time manage our day, we need to ask ourselves what we are trying to accomplish today, this week, this year and possibly ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The best process in my preference to complete goals is to write them down. You can think about the goals sometimes to feel that they are appropriate and workable but not so simple to do that you don’t have to try hard to succeed at them otherwise what is the meaning of those goals in the first place?
From the start of every new working year you could takethe time and plan what you plan to end up with this year. It could be that you need to increase your profits by 20%, you perhaps decide to move into bigger premises, you perhaps wish to reduce your debt finally. At the beginning of each working week you could write down on a note pad or in your diary the large tasks that have to be taken care of this week, and reflect them at every day to be sure that you’re making progress and hopefully tick some of the jobs from the list.
You might have the list on your desk or in a place where you can be constantly reminded of what needs to be achieved throughout the week. The list should be in order of importance so that the most important projects at the top of this list get taken care of early. Any jobs not accomplished this week need to be put up to next week at a higher urgency, this should require it gets taken care of.
The next thing you might not be doing is having a daily list of projects to achieve. This should help keep you on track during the day. Again, this list will be displayed where you can constantly check on it and mark off the tasks completed. Marking off the items will give you a sense of completion and let you reflect on how you are moving through the day. Always adhere to the list unless not possible and try to continue working from the top priority to the lower priority. I know issues will show up during the day that could throw the whole day out, but you need to either take on the situation and then return to your list or if the sudden job isn’t as serious as some of the chores on the list then place it later on your list and continue on doing the item you were doing.
Each piece of work you hope to do can be written down for a numerous reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you have your day organised and you complete your daily goals. Beware initiating jobs and not completing them. This could become tomorrow in a disaster of half baked jobs and could cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with a list reading a mile long and you will back out in despair and change back to old habits of working in rush during the day and achieving nothing.
Remember every day you write out your goals and check off all the items on your list, you get a little bit closer to accomplishing your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.
A few pointers on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s wasteful going back to the chore and needing to redo it.
- Learn to civilly communicate to people when you’re busy with work and that you would get back to them some time later.
- Learn to pass out work that truly don’t demand your involvement.
- Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
- Don’t spend time with phone calls that are not going to assist with something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look back to your list of things to do regularly throughout the day.
- “Map out your day” in the morning and plan out your daily list right when you arrive at work. Complete what you initiate.
- Prioritise every day, always take care of jobs in their order of importance to you and the clients.
Stay away from time wasters, people that just like to chat all day, and if they are your employees, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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