Time Management When Working from Home
When you start up a home based business, time management is an aspect of business management that is overlooked or neglected.
Surely everybody knows a friend in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, rarely enough hours in every day, all they do is hurry and get worked up - maybe this person is you! At the day’s end, when the dust settles, what have you done? Do you replay the day and think “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much completed as I intended to do. If this sounds familiar, then you may have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people never appear to rush, they are always composed and unflustered. The difference between them and other people is they possess time management.
What is time management? It is just arranging minutes in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can really go ahead on how to time manage our day, we must figure for ourselves what we are hoping to achieve today, this week, this year and perhaps ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top method in my perspective to achieve goals is to write them down. You could think about all your goals at times to make sure that they are purposeful and possible but not so simple to do that you don’t have to put in the hard work to achieve them otherwise what is the point of your goals in the first place?
At the beginning of every new working year you could sit and plan what you plan to end up with this year. It could be that you hope to increase your profits by 20%, you could would like to move into bigger premises, you may plan to take away from your debt once and for all. By the start of a new working week you can write down on a note pad or in your diary the signifcant tasks that must to be finished this week, and look back to them on every day to make sure you’re making progress and hopefully wipe some of your tasks off your list.
You can place your list on your desk or on a location where you can be persistently reminded of what will be accomplished each week. This list could be in order of necessity so that the most important tasks at the top of your list get completed early. Any of the work not checked off this week need to be carried through to next week at a higher priority, this will ensure it gets completed.
The next thing you will be doing is creating a daily list of jobs to accomplish. This should help keep you focused throughout the day. Again, this list may be placed where you are able to repeatedly see it and write off the items done. Polishing off the jobs is a way to give you a sense of completion and let you review how you are moving throughout the day. Always stay to this list where possible and try to keep working from higher priority to low priority. I know problems sometimes appear throughout the day that can throw the whole day out, but you need to either take on the dilemma and get back to the list or if the new task isn’t as serious as some of the issues on the list then put it at the bottom on your list and continue on with the work you were doing.
Each aspect of work you plan to achieve could be written down for a couple of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you keep every day scheduled and you complete your daily goals. Be sensitive to starting jobs and not finishing them. This will come back tomorrow in a cloud of not completed chores and can cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with the list at a mile long and you will throw the towel in in despair and revert back to bad habits of being in a fuss every day and completing nothing.
Remember for every day you write out your goals and write off every project on your list, you will be a bit closer to completing your weekly and ultimately your yearly and long term goals.
A few pointers on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s fruitless going back to the project and having to redo it.
- Learn to simply communicate to people when you’re busy working and that you can return to them at a later point.
- Learn to give other people work that truly don’t demand your direct participation.
- Don’t take on wild goose chases.
- Don’t use up time during phone calls that are not going to take care of something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look back to your list of tasks to do repeatedly at times through the day.
- “Map out your day” in the morning and write out your daily list the minute you arrive at work. Complete what you begin.
- Prioritise as a matter of habit, always take chores in their order of urgency to you and your customers.
Don’t get in with time wasters, people that would only go off to chat all day, and if they are your workers, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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