Time Management When Working from Home
When you start out in a from-home business, time management is an area of business management that is usually overlooked or ignored.
Surely we all know someone in small business who races at it like a mad dog all day, never enough hours in a day, all they do is rush and get overloaded - maybe this person is you! To the end of the week, when the rush settles, what have you taken from it? Do you replay the day and ponder “what happened to the time, I didn’t get so much accomplished as I thought I should. If this feels familiar, then you may simply have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people seldom seem to rush, they are composed and unflustered. The difference between them and others is they have great time management.
What is time management? It is simply planning minutes in your day in an organised and efficient method. Before we can really go ahead on how to time manage our day, we first must decide for ourselves what we are planning to achieve today, this week, this year and as far as ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top way in my opinion to take on goals is to write them down. You may review all your goals at points to make sure that they are purposeful and realisable but not so easy that you don’t need to work hard to achieve them otherwise what is the meaning of any goals in the first place?
At the start of every working year you can sit down and reflect on what you hope to accomplish this year. It can be that you plan to enlarge your profits by 20%, you perhaps decide to move into different premises, you can hope to reduce your debt substantially. At the beginning of a new working week you can write down on a note pad or in your diary the large jobs that must to be finished this week, and review them at the end of each day to be sure you’re making progress and hopefully tick some of your projects from your list.
You should keep the list on your desk or on a point where you can be persistently reminded of what must be accomplished throughout the week. This list may be in order of necessity so that the most important work at the top of the list get finished first. All jobs not checked off this week need to be carried through to next week on a higher importance, this will require it gets completed.
The next thing you could be doing is having a daily list of projects to accomplish. This might help keep you organised during the day. Again, this list may be displayed where you are able to persistently look back to it and check off the chores finalised. Checking off the chores is a way to give you a touch of achievement and remind you how you are going over the day. Always adhere to this list if possible and try to keep working from the highest priority to low priority. I know problems do appear through the day that might throw the whole day off track, but you must either take care of the crisis and get back to your list or if the sudden situation isn’t as important as some of the work on the list then list it later on the list and continue with what you were doing.
Every item you plan to finish must be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you have your day outlined and you realise your daily goals. Be alert to initiating tasks and not completing them. This could turn tomorrow in a plethora of not completed jobs and can cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with your list reading a mile long and you will back out in despair and go back to those habits of getting in rush all day and finishing nothing.
Remember for every day you set your goals and polish off every project on your list, you will get a day closer to reaching your weekly and soon your yearly and long term goals.
A few essentials on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s pointless coming back to the project and having to redo it.
- Learn to simply communicate to people when you’re working and that you will return to them at a later time.
- Learn to pass out chores that truly don’t demand your direct work.
- Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
- Don’t waste time during phone calls that won’t do something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Check back on your list of things to do often throughout your day.
- “Map out your day” in the morning and write out your daily list the second you start work. Complete what you begin.
- Prioritise as a matter of habit, always take care of things in their order of necessity to you and your business.
Avoid time wasters, people that would simply start to chat all day, and if they are your workers, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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