Time Management When Working from Home
When starting out in a home based business, time management is an area of business management that can be often overlooked or ignored.
Surely everybody knows a person in small business who races at it like a mad dog all day, without enough hours in a day, all they do is push and get overtaken - is it that this person is you! By the week’s end, when the panic settles, what have you taken from it? Do you replay the day and ponder “what happened to the time, I didn’t get as much completed as I intended. If this feels familiar, then you might have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people seldom seem to rush, they always stay composed and unflustered. The difference from them and the others is they have great time management.
What is time management? It is just arranging hours in your day in an organised and efficient method. Before we can really go ahead on how to time manage our day, we need to ask ourselves what we are attempting to accomplish today, this week, this year and possibly ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top way in my opinion to take on goals is to write them down. You can think about all your goals at points to feel that they are relevant and realisable but not so simple that you don’t need to work hard to accomplish them otherwise what is the purpose of any goals in the first place?
At the start of each new working year you should sit down and plan what you wish to take away from this year. It can be that you hope to gross up your profits by 20%, you may decide to move into other premises, you could wish to reduce your debt in a significant way. At the start of each working week you could write down on a note pad or in your diary the major chores that must to be done this week, and check back them at the end of every day to know you’re making progress and hopefully check some of the jobs off your list.
You can place this list on your desk or in a location where you could be constantly reminded of what has to be undertaken each week. The list might be in order of importance so that the impending tasks at the top of your list get finalised early. All the jobs not ticked off this week should be carried forward next week at a higher ranking, this should ensure it gets checked off.
The next thing you may not be doing is giving yourself a daily list of jobs to accomplish. This may assist keep you on track during the day. Again, this list will be displayed where you can continually look at it and mark off the tasks accomplished. Marking off the jobs helps allow you a touch of success and let you review how you are working across the day. Always hold to this list when possible and try to continue working from higher priority to low priority. I know things could come up over the day that may throw the whole day out, but you have to either take on the problem and return to the list or if the unplanned issue isn’t as important as some of the jobs on the list then list it for later on your list and continue doing what you were doing.
Each piece of work you plan to accomplish can be written down for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t forget to do it and secondly, so you keep every day scheduled and you complete your daily goals. Be careful of starting jobs and not finishing them. This will come back tomorrow in a disaster of not completed projects and will cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with the list a mile long and you will throw it out in despair and change back to bad habits of working in a hurry each day and accomplishing nothing.
Remember that every day you plan your goals and mark off every project on your list, you become a little bit closer to finalising your weekly and soon your yearly and long term goals.
A few tips on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s pointless returning to the work and needing to redo it.
- Learn to civilly say to people when you’re busy and that you will return to them at a later time.
- Learn to give out tasks that really don’t require your direct participation.
- Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
- Don’t use up time by phone calls that aren’t going to assist with something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look back to your list of things to do repeatedly at points through the day.
- “Map out your day” in the car and plan out your daily list when you get to work. Finish what you initiate.
- Prioritise all your tasks, always take jobs in their order of urgency to you and your business.
Stay away from time wasters, people that will only start to chat all day, and if they are employed by you, 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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