Time Management When Working from Home
When you are starting a home based business, time management is an area of business management that can be frequently overlooked or ignored.
We all know some person in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, rarely enough hours in the day, all they do is hurry and get overloaded – maybe this person is you! To the end of the day, when the panic settles, what have you accomplished? Do you review the day and think “what happened to the time, I didn’t get as much finished as I intended. If this reads familiar, then you might simply have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people never appear to rush, they are composed and unflustered. The difference with them and the others is they have mastered time management.
What is time management? It is simply planning minutes in your day in an organised and efficient scheme. Before we can fully understand how to time manage our day, we must figure for ourselves what we are trying to master today, this week, this year and perhaps even ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The most effective way in my preference to take on goals is to write them down. You could go back to these goals at points to make sure that they are appropriate and achievable but not so simple that you don’t have to try to achieve them otherwise what is the purpose of those goals in the first place?
At the start of a working year you can takethe time and reflect on what you wish to accomplish this year. It may be that you plan to increase your profits by 20%, you can decide to move into better premises, you might want to reduce your debt significantly. By the first day of each working week you might write down on a note pad or in your diary the major tasks that need to be finished this week, and reflect them at each day to ensure you’re making progress and hopefully tick some of the jobs from your list.
You can have the list on your desk or at a place where you should be constantly reminded of what must be finished throughout the week. Your list could be in order of priority so that the most important work at the top of this list get completed early. Any tasks not completed this week need to be carried onto next week at a higher ranking, this should require it gets finished.
The next thing you will be doing is writing a daily list of tasks to do. This should help keep you on track in the day. Again, this list can be put where you can repeatedly look back to it and mark off the items completed. Polishing off the jobs will give you a sense of accomplishment and let you reflect on how you are progressing through the day. Always stay to your list when possible and try to keep working from the highest priority to the lowest priority. I know loopholes will jump up over the day that could throw the whole day up, but you need to either deal with the crisis and then get back to the list or if the sudden project isn’t as time sensitive as some of the tasks on your list then target it lower on your list and continue on doing the chore you were doing.
Every chore you need to complete must be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you have the day planned and you complete your daily goals. Be careful of beginning jobs and not finishing them. This can turn tomorrow in a disaster of half baked jobs and will cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with a list being a mile long and you will throw it out in despair and go back to those habits of getting in rush during the day and achieving nothing.
Remember each day you achieve your goals and write off all the chores on your list, you will be a bit closer to realizing your weekly and ultimately your yearly and long term goals.
A few basics on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s frustrating reverting to the task and having to redo it.
- Learn to politely say to people when you’re busy with work and that you will speak to them at a later time.
- Learn to delegate items that really don’t need your direct work.
- Don’t go on wild goose chases.
- Don’t spend time on phone calls that will not accomplish something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Look at your list of items to do often at points through the day.
- “Map out your day” in the car and write out your daily list when you begin work. Finish what you list.
- Prioritise everything, always take issues in their order of importance to you and your work.
Be evasive with time wasters, people that merely choose to chat all day, and if they work for you, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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