Time Management When Working from Home
When you are starting a home based business, time management is an aspect of business management that is overlooked or left out of the equation.
Everybody knows a friend in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, seldom enough hours in each day, all they do is panic and get overwhelmed - maybe this person is you! Come the end of the day, when the dust settles, what have you taken from it? Do you reflect on the day and realise “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much completed as I planned I could. If this reads familiar, then you might have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t seem to rush, they seem composed and unflustered. The difference between them and the others is they have great time management.
What is time management? It is simply scheduling time in your day in an organised and efficient process. Before we can really go ahead on how to time manage our day, we first need to ask ourselves what we are trying to achieve today, this week, this year and perhaps ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The best key in my preference to complete goals is to write them down. You may reflect on the goals at times to make sure that they are meaningful and workable but not so simple to do that you don’t have to put in the hard work to complete them otherwise what is the point of any goals in the first place?
At the start of every new working year you can pause and think about what you hope to complete this year. It may be that you hope to gross up your profits by 20%, you can decide to move into other premises, you can plan to take away from your debt once and for all. From the first day of every new working week you can write down on a note pad or in your diary the important tasks that must to be finished this week, and check up them at every day to check you’re making progress and hopefully wipe some of the projects from your list.
You should keep the list on your desk or in a location where you can be persistently reminded of what must be done this week. The list could be in order of urgency so that the major jobs at the top of the list get accomplished first up. Any chores not ticked off this week need to be brought onto next week at a higher priority, this should ensure it gets completed.
The next thing you should be doing is giving yourself a daily list of chores to accomplish. This should assist keep you focused each day. Again, this list might be put up where you are able to continually look back to it and check off the tasks finalised. Polishing off the items should allow you a sense of accomplishment and let you reflect on how you are working during the day. Always hold to the list where possible and continue working from high priority to the lower priority. I know things will turn up throughout the day that sometimes throw the whole day off schedule, but you have to either take care of the dilemma and get back on to your list or if the sudden dilemma isn’t as time sensitive as some of the items on your list then put it at the bottom on the list and continue doing the project you were doing.
Each piece of work you hope to get done could be written down for a numerous reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you have the day organised and you complete your daily goals. Be wary of beginning tasks and not completing them. This might become tomorrow in a cloud of half baked projects and can cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with a list being a mile long and you will give it up in despair and revert back to bad habits of being in a fuss during the day and accomplishing nothing.
Remember that every day you plan your goals and polish off every chore on your list, you get a little bit closer to achieving your weekly and soon your yearly and long term goals.
A few pointers on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s fruitless coming back to the work and having to redo it.
- Learn to nicely communicate to people when you’re too busy and that you can return to them at a later time.
- Learn to give other employees chores that actually don’t need your participation.
- Don’t go on wild goose chases.
- Don’t use up time on phone calls that won’t do something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Check back to your list of items to do regularly throughout your day.
- “Map out your day” in the car and write out your daily list right when you start work. Achieve what you begin.
- Prioritise every day, always begin tasks in their order of importance to you and the business.
Don’t get in with time wasters, people that merely choose to chat all day, and if they are your workers, set them straight, or get rid of them.
For more information about self employment Brisbane, home business Brisbane, or work from home Brisbane, contact Lifestyle Switch. Make the switch to your own business today.
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