Time Management When Working from Home

When starting up a from-home business, time management is an aspect of business management usually overlooked or left out of the equation.

Sure enough, everybody knows a friend in small business who races at it like a madman all day, without enough hours in a day, all they do is hurry and get worked up - perhaps this person is you! Come the week’s end, when the pace settles, what have you completed? Do you replay the day and ponder “what happened to the time, I didn’t get as much accomplished as I hoped. If this sounds familiar, then you might simply have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people do not appear to rush, they are composed and unflustered. The difference from them and everybody else is they have mastered time management.

What is time management? It is simply arranging the clock in your day in an organised and efficient scheme. Before we can actually understand how to time manage our day, we must question 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 most effective way in my preference to accomplish goals is to write them down. You could reflect on the goals sometimes to ensure that they are purposeful and realisable but not so simple to do that you don’t have to try hard to achieve them otherwise what is the meaning of any goals in the first place?

From the start of each new working year you could takethe time and ponder what you desire to achieve this year. It may be that you hope to raise your profits by 20%, you perhaps desire to move into better premises, you might desire to get rid of your debt significantly. From the beginning of each working week you might write down on a note pad or in your diary the major tasks that must to be done this week, and look back to them on every day to know you’re making progress and hopefully check some of those tasks from your list.

You could put your list on your desk or in a place where you can be constantly reminded of what has to be finished each week. Your list might be in order of urgency so that the impending jobs at the top of this list get accomplished earlier. All jobs not achieved this week should be brought onto next week at a higher importance, this should make sure it gets finalised.

The next thing you should be doing is writing a daily list of jobs to do. This can assist keep you focused during the day. Again, this list may be placed where you are able to persistently look at it and check off the items finalised. Wiping off the projects helps to give you a feeling of completion and remind you how you are progressing throughout the day. Always stick to your list if possible and continue working from higher priority to the lower priority. I know loopholes could show up during the day that could throw the whole day in the air, but you must either deal with the dilemma and get back on to your list or if the sudden project isn’t as serious as some of the work on your list then target it at the bottom on the list and continue doing the job you were doing.

Every item you have to achieve can be written down for a number of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t neglect to do it and secondly, so you keep the day outlined and you realise your daily goals. Be careful of starting tasks and not finishing them. This may become tomorrow in a cloud of half baked work and can cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with a list reading a mile long and you will give it up in despair and revert back to bad habits of running around in rush during the day and achieving nothing.

Remember for each day you set your goals and mark off everything on your list, you become a step closer to polishing off your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.

A few essentials on Time Management:

• Do it once and do it well, it’s frustrating coming back to the item and needing to redo it.
• Learn to politely say to people when you’re working and that you can speak to them at a later point.
• Learn to give other employees items that really don’t need your direct involvement.
• Don’t go on wild goose chases.
• Don’t waste time by phone calls that aren’t going to accomplish something.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Look back on your list of things to do frequently at times through the day.
• “Map out your day” in the morning and plan out your daily list the minute you get to work. Achieve what you start.
• Prioritise all your chores, always do chores in their order of necessity to you and your customers.

Avoid time wasters, people who merely like to chat all day, and if they are your employees, set them straight, or get rid of them.

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