Time Management When Working from Home
When you are starting a home business, time management is an element of business management that can be overlooked or neglected.
We all know a friend in small business who races about like a madman all day, rarely enough hours in a day, all they do is panic and get overtaken - maybe this person is you! By the end of the week, when the panic settles, what have you accomplished? Do you replay the day and realise “what happened to the day, I didn’t get as much completed as I hoped. If this feels familiar, then you might simply have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t ever appear to rush, they always stay composed and unflustered. The difference with them and other people is they have exceptional time management.
What is time management? It is simply scheduling minutes in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can fully go ahead on how to time manage our day, we need to decide for ourselves what we are planning to complete today, this week, this year and possibly even ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The most effective process in my preference to complete goals is to write them down. You can reflect on these goals from time to time to ensure that they are appropriate and achievable but not so easy to do that you don’t have to put in the hard work to succeed at them otherwise what is the purpose of any goals in the first place?
At the start of each working year you should pause and ponder what you wish to accomplish this year. It might be that you want to gross up your profits by 20%, you can plan to move into bigger premises, you may plan to take down your debt as much as possible. By the beginning of each working week you could write down on a note pad or in your diary the important tasks that have to be finalised this week, and check up them on each day to make sure that you’re making progress and hopefully mark some of those jobs from your list.
You can have your list on your desk or in a place where you should be constantly reminded of what has to be done each week. Your list should be in order of priority so that the impending chores at the top of the list get done earlier. Any jobs not finished this week will be taken forward next week at a higher priority, this will demand it gets accomplished.
The next thing you might not be doing is having a daily list of projects to accomplish. This might help keep you on schedule on each day. Again, this list can be displayed where you are able to repeatedly look at it and mark off the chores completed. Writing off the jobs helps give you a sense of achievement and let you review how you are progressing over the day. Always stay to this list when possible and try to keep working from higher priority to the lower priority. I know issues can come up during the day that might throw the whole day up, but you have to either take care of the crisis and get back on to your list or if the newly arisen job isn’t as important as some of the chores on your list then put it at the bottom on your list and continue doing the project you were doing.
Every job you have to accomplish should be written down for a number of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you keep every day planned and you accomplish your daily goals. Be alert to initiating tasks and not completing them. This will turn tomorrow in a cloud of half finished work and will cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with your list being a mile long and you will give it up in despair and reverse back to bad habits of being in rush all day and realizing nothing.
Remember that each day you accomplish your goals and tick off every item on your list, you will be a bit closer to completing 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 fruitless reverting to the task and having to redo it.
- Learn to civilly inform people when you’re working and that you can return to them some time later.
- Learn to delegate tasks that truly don’t need your direct work.
- Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
- Don’t use up time on phone calls that are not going to take care of something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look back on your list of chores to do continually at points through your day.
- “Map out your day” in the car and write out your daily list when you start work. Don’t stop what you start.
- Prioritise habitually, always take care of chores in their order of urgency to you and the work.
Get away from time wasters, people who will merely decide 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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