Time Management When Working from Home
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When you start out in a home business, time management is an area of business management that can be overlooked or left out of the equation.
Sure enough, we all know a friend in small business who races about like a bull all day, rarely enough hours in the day, all they do is hurry and get worked up - maybe this person is you! At the end of the day, when the rush settles, what have you gotten out of it? Do you replay the day and realise “what happened to the day, I didn’t get so much done as I hoped I would. If this seems familiar, then you may simply have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t appear to rush, they always stay composed and unflustered. The difference from them and the others is they command time management.
What is time management? It is simply scheduling the clock in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can fully go ahead with how to time manage our day, we need to ask ourselves what we are planning to accomplish today, this week, this year and as far as ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The top method in my view to achieve goals is to write them down. You can reflect on your goals sometimes to make sure that they are relevant and achievable but not so easy that you don’t have to put in the work to accomplish them otherwise what is the purpose of those goals in the first place?
At the start of each working year you could sit down and reflect on what you hope to accomplish this year. It could be that you desire to raise your profits by 20%, you may hope to move into better premises, you might wish to take away from your debt in a susbstantial way. At the beginning of each working week you may write down on a note pad or in your diary the important tasks that must to be done this week, and check back them each day to check you’re making progress and hopefully wipe some of your tasks from your list.
You may have the list on your desk or at a point where you could be constantly reminded of what needs to be accomplished this week. The list could be in order of priority so that the major work at the top of the list get completed first. Any jobs not completed this week must be put forward next week at a higher importance, this should make sure it gets ticked off.
The next thing you could be doing is having yourself a daily list of tasks to accomplish. This will help keep you on track during each day. Again, this list should be put where you are able to constantly see it and tick off the projects accomplished. Marking off the projects can allow you a pride of achievement and let you check on how you are progressing throughout the day. Always stick to the list unless not possible and continue working from high priority to lower priority. I know changes sometimes turn up during the day that may throw the whole day topsyturvy, but you have to either take care of the crisis and then return to your list or if the newly arisen problem isn’t as time sensitive as some of the projects on your list then target it at the bottom on the list and continue on doing what you were doing.
Every job you have to finish must be written down for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you have your day planned and you achieve your daily goals. Beware beginning jobs and not completing them. This might become tomorrow in a disaster of not completed jobs and could cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with your list reading a mile long and you will throw it up in despair and go back to those habits of being in a fuss during your day and completing nothing.
Remember for every day you achieve your goals and check off every project on your list, you will be a little bit closer to completing your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.
A few basics on Time Management:
- Do it once and do it well, it’s frustrating returning to the issue and having to redo it.
- Learn to civilly tell people when you’re too busy and that you would speak to them later.
- Learn to give out work that actually don’t require your hand.
- Don’t take on wild goose chases.
- Don’t spend time with phone calls that aren’t going to achieve something.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Review your list of tasks to do continually throughout the day.
- “Map out your day” in the morning and plan out your daily list right when you begin work. Accomplish what you initiate.
- Prioritise all your tasks, always keep chores in their order of necessity to you and the business.
Be evasive with time wasters, people that would just like to chat all day, and if they work for you, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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