Time Management When Working from Home

When starting up a home business, time management is an element of business management often overlooked or left out of the equation.

Surely we all know a friend in small business who races about like a madman all day, never enough hours in each day, all they do is rush and get overtaken - maybe this person is you! Come the end of the week, when the panic settles, what have you done? Do you review the day and ponder “what happened to the time, I didn’t get so much finished as I intended to do. If this feels familiar, then you might have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people seldom appear to rush, they always stay composed and unflustered. The difference between them and the other people is they have accomplished time management.

What is time management? It is just arranging hours in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can fully go ahead on how to time manage our day, we first need to ask ourselves what we are trying to master today, this week, this year and even up to ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The simplest way in my perspective to take on goals is to write them down. You might go back to the goals sometimes to ensure that they are meaningful and workable but not so achievable that you don’t have to put in the hard work to achieve them otherwise what is the reason of the goals in the first place?

At the beginning of each working year you can takethe time and plan what you hope to achieve this year. It might be that you wish to enlarge your profits by 20%, you may would like to move into better premises, you perhaps wish to take away from your debt once and for all. At the beginning of each working week you might write down on a note pad or in your diary the major jobs that must to be completed this week, and look back on them at every day to check you’re making progress and hopefully mark some of the projects off the list.

You should have your list on your desk or at a point where you can be persistently reminded of what will be accomplished each week. The list can be in order of urgency so that the impending tasks at the top of the list get completed first up. Any of the chores not ticked off this week will be put through to next week on a higher urgency, this should require it gets finished.

The next thing you can be doing is creating a daily list of projects to do. This should help keep you focused each day. Again, this list could be placed where you can continually check on it and tick off the items accomplished. Checking off the projects helps give you a sense of accomplishment and let you review how you are going throughout the day. Always adhere to the list if possible and try to keep working from the highest priority to the lesser priority. I know wormholes do come up through the day that might throw the whole day up, but you must either take on the dilemma and then return to the list or if the sudden issue isn’t as urgent as some of the issues on the list then place it later on your list and continue on doing the job you were doing.

Each issue you have to accomplish must be written down for a number of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you have the day outlined and you finish your daily goals. Be wary of initiating items and not completing them. This can become tomorrow in a mushroom cloud of half baked tasks and can cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with your list being a mile long and you will back out in despair and reverse back to old habits of running around in confusion during your day and accomplishing nothing.

Remember that each day you plan your goals and polish off all the projects on your list, you will be a day closer to completing 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 fruitless coming back to the chore and needing to redo it.
• Learn to politely inform people when you’re too busy and that you would speak to them at a later time.
• Learn to delegate tasks that really don’t need your direct work.
• Don’t make off on wild goose chases.
• Don’t use up time during phone calls that cannot accomplish something.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Look back on your list of jobs to do often at times through your day.
• “Map out your day” in the morning and list out your daily list as soon as you get to work. Achieve what you begin.
• Prioritise as a matter of habit, always take care of tasks in their order of priority to you and the work.

Stay away from time wasters, people that just decide to chat all day, and if they are your workers, set them straight, or get rid of them.

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