Time Management When Working from Home
When you start a home business, time management is an aspect of business management usually overlooked or left out of the equation.
Surely we all know a friend in small business who races at it like a chicken with its head cut off all day, never enough hours in the day, all they do is rush and get overloaded - maybe this person is you! Come the end of the day, when the pace settles, what have you completed? Do you think about the day and wonder “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much accomplished as I planned. If this seems familiar, then you might have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people do not appear to rush, they are always composed and unflustered. The difference with them and everybody else is they achieve time management.
What is time management? It is merely arranging hours in your day in an organised and efficient scheme. Before we can actually go ahead with how to time manage our day, we must decide for ourselves what we are planning to do today, this week, this year and up to ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top way in my perspective to achieve goals is to write them down. You should think about your goals sometimes to make sure that they are appropriate and realisable but not so simple that you don’t need to try to complete them otherwise what is the reason of the goals in the first place?
At the start of each new working year you can pause and think about what you want to accomplish this year. It might be that you desire to gross up your profits by 20%, you can want to move into larger premises, you can wish to reduce your debt substantially. From the beginning of every working week you may write down on a note pad or in your diary the major jobs that need to be finished this week, and check on them each day to check that you’re making progress and hopefully check some of those jobs from the list.
You may have the list on your desk or on a place where you could be constantly reminded of what must be undertaken each week. The list may be in order of priority so that the impending jobs at the top of this list get done first up. Any work not ticked off this week should be brought forward next week on a higher priority, this should ensure it gets ticked off.
The next thing you should be doing is creating a daily list of tasks to take care of. This may help keep you organised during each day. Again, this list might be placed where you are able to repeatedly look at it and wipe off the items finalised. Wiping off the chores will give you a pride of accomplishment and let you check on how you are going across the day. Always hold to the list unless not possible and keep working from top priority to the lesser priority. I know wormholes could appear over the day that may throw the whole day topsyturvy, but you need to either deal with the problem and get back to your list or if the newly arisen project isn’t as urgent as some of the jobs on your list then list it for later on your list and continue on doing the project you were doing.
Every item you hope to finish could be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you have each day scheduled and you get your daily goals. Be sensitive to initiating chores and not completing them. This can come back tomorrow in a mess of half baked projects and could cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with your list a mile long and you will back out in despair and change back to bad habits of working in confusion each day and achieving nothing.
Remember each day you accomplish your goals and check off every task on your list, you will be a little bit closer to accomplishing your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.
A few essentials on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s wasteful reverting to the task and having to redo it.
- Learn to civilly tell people when you’re working and that you can speak to them some time later.
- Learn to give out jobs that actually don’t need your participation.
- Don’t take on wild goose chases.
- Don’t fizzle away time by phone calls that won’t assist with something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look at your list of chores to do often at times through the day.
- “Map out your day” in the shower and write out your daily list as soon as you start work. Finish what you begin.
- Prioritise all your chores, always take care of issues in their order of urgency to you and your business.
Get away from time wasters, people that merely go off to chat all day, and if they work for you, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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