Time Management When Working from Home
When starting up a home based business, time management is an area of business management that is often overlooked or neglected.
Surely everybody knows some person in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, never enough hours in each day, all they do is push and get overloaded – maybe this person is you! By the end of the day, when the panic settles, what have you taken from it? Do you review the day and wonder “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much done as I thought I could. If this seems familiar, then you might just have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t appear to rush, they are always composed and unflustered. The difference from them and everybody else is they achieve time management.
What is time management? It is simply arranging time in your day in an organised and efficient process. Before we can actually go ahead on how to time manage our day, we need to ask ourselves what we are planning to complete today, this week, this year and possibly ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top method in my view to accomplish goals is to write them down. You might reflect on these goals from time to time to ensure that they are purposeful and possible but not so simple that you don’t have to put in the effort to complete them otherwise what is the meaning of your goals in the first place?
At the beginning of each new working year you can pause and plan what you want to get this year. It may be that you hope to gross up your profits by 20%, you could hope to move into other premises, you may plan to get rid of your debt once and for all. At the beginning of each working week you could write down on a note pad or in your diary the large chores that need to be finished this week, and check up them at each day to be sure that you’re making progress and hopefully tick some of your jobs off your list.
You might hold your list on your desk or at a location where you could be constantly reminded of what will be finalised throughout the week. Your list may be in order of priority so that the major work at the top of the list get finalised first. All the tasks not achieved this week will be brought through to next week on a higher urgency, this should require it gets ticked off.
The next thing you should be doing is writing a daily list of chores to do. This should assist keep you on schedule throughout each day. Again, this list may be placed where you can continually see it and tick off the tasks done. Ticking off the tasks is a way to give you a pride of accomplishment and let you check on how you are moving throughout the day. Always adhere to the list when possible and try to continue working from higher priority to low priority. I know problems can jump up through the day that could throw the whole day topsyturvy, but you must either take care of the situation and then get back to the list or if the newly arisen task isn’t as urgent as some of the items on the list then place it later on the list and continue on with the task you were doing.
Each aspect of work you hope to achieve should be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you have the day planned and you achieve your daily goals. Beware initiating jobs and not finishing them. This might come back tomorrow in a plethora of incomplete chores and could cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with a list being a mile long and you will give up in despair and change back to those habits of getting yourself in rush all day and realizing nothing.
Remember each day you plan your goals and write off every project on your list, you will get a day closer to accomplishing your weekly and finally your yearly and long term goals.
A few tips on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s wasteful going back to the item and having to redo it.
- Learn to civilly tell people when you’re working and that you can return to them some time later.
- Learn to give out work that truly don’t need your direct work.
- Don’t make off on wild goose chases.
- Don’t fizzle away time with phone calls that aren’t going to accomplish something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Review your list of items to do continually during your day.
- “Map out your day” in the car and plan out your daily list as soon as you start work. Finish what you begin.
- Prioritise all your chores, always start issues in their order of importance to you and your business.
Get away from time wasters, people that just decide to chat all day, and if they work for 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.
Sphere: Related Content