Time Management When Working from Home

When starting out in a home business, time management is an area of business management that can be frequently overlooked or neglected.

Surely we all know a friend in small business who races around like a bull all day, seldom enough hours in their day, all they do is panic and get overwhelmed – maybe this person is you! Come the day’s end, when the pace settles, what have you completed? Do you reflect on the day and wonder “what happened to the day, I didn’t get so much completed as I hoped to do. If this feels familiar, then you might simply have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people seldom appear to rush, they are always composed and unflustered. The difference from them and the others is they have great time management.

What is time management? It is just planning minutes in your day in an organised and efficient scheme. Before we can actually get how to time manage our day, we first must decide for ourselves what we are hoping to achieve today, this week, this year and perhaps even ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The simplest key in my perspective to take on goals is to write them down. You can reflect on the goals from time to time to make sure that they are meaningful and achievable but not so easy to do that you don’t need to try to complete them otherwise what is the purpose of your goals in the first place?

At the beginning of each working year you can take time and think about what you wish to achieve this year. It may be that you need to raise your profits by 20%, you can would like to move into better premises, you may hope to reduce your debt in a significant way. At the beginning of each new working week you could write down on a note pad or in your diary the signifcant projects that have to be done this week, and reflect them on every day to make sure that you’re making progress and hopefully polish some of those jobs from your list.

You can have this list on your desk or on a location where you can be constantly reminded of what has to be undertaken each week. Your list might be in order of urgency so that the major chores at the top of this list get achieved first. All the jobs not done this week will be brought up to next week at a higher urgency, this will make sure it gets finalised.

The next thing you can be doing is writing a daily list of projects to accomplish. This will assist keep you on track throughout the day. Again, this list can be placed where you can persistently look at it and mark off the tasks finalised. Finishing off the chores could allow you a touch of success and let you review how you are progressing throughout the day. Always stay to this list when possible and try to continue working from the highest priority to the lower priority. I know problems will appear through the day that could throw the whole day out, but you need to either take on the dilemma and return to your list or if the sudden problem isn’t as time sensitive as some of the items on the list then target it later on your list and continue doing the item you were doing.

Each piece of work you plan to do should be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you keep each day outlined and you achieve your daily goals. Be wary of starting items and not finishing them. This would become tomorrow in a disaster of incomplete chores and will cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with the list reading a mile long and you will throw it out in despair and change back to old habits of getting yourself in a hurry all day and completing nothing.

Remember for every day you accomplish your goals and tick off every project on your list, you get a day closer to polishing off your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.

A few tips on Time Management:

Do it once and do it well, it’s wasteful reverting to the issue and needing to redo it.

Learn to nicely inform people when you’re busy working and that you will speak to them later.

Learn to give out tasks that really don’t demand your participation.

Don’t take on wild goose chases.

Don’t use up time during phone calls that can’t achieve something.

Don’t procrastinate.

Review your list of jobs to do regularly throughout your day.

“Map out your day” in the morning and write out your daily list as soon as you begin work. Accomplish what you begin.

Prioritise everything, always do jobs in their order of importance to you and the customers.

Stay away from time wasters, people who will only decide to chat all day, and if they work for you, set them straight, or get rid of them.

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