Time Management When Working from Home
When you start up a from-home business, time management is an aspect of business management that is frequently overlooked or left out of the equation.
Surely we all know a friend in small business who races about like a mad dog all day, seldom enough hours in their day, all they do is panic and get overloaded – maybe this person is you! To the end of the week, when the panic settles, what have you accomplished? Do you review the day and ponder “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much finished as I planned I should. If this seems familiar, then you may simply have an organisational and time management problem.
Successful people don’t appear to rush, they always seem composed and unflustered. The difference between them and the other people is they have mastered time management.
What is time management? It is just planning minutes in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can truly get how to time manage our day, we first must ask ourselves what we are hoping to achieve today, this week, this year and perhaps even ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.
The best key in my view to complete goals is to write them down. You might review the goals from time to time to know that they are appropriate and workable but not so simple to do that you don’t have to make the effort to complete them otherwise what is the purpose of the goals in the first place?
From the beginning of every working year you could pause and think about what you wish to end up with this year. It may be that you hope to raise your profits by 20%, you might want to move into different premises, you could desire to reduce your debt in a susbstantial way. From the beginning of every working week you can write down on a note pad or in your diary the large projects that must to be done this week, and check up them on each day to know you’re making progress and hopefully polish some of those tasks off the list.
You can place the list on your desk or on a point where you can be constantly reminded of what has to be achieved each week. Your list can be in order of importance so that the major jobs at the top of the list get finished early. Any work not ticked off this week need to be put onto next week at a higher importance, this will require it gets done.
The next thing you may not be doing is giving yourself a daily list of chores to do. This might help keep you organised throughout each day. Again, this list can be put up where you are able to persistently check on it and wipe off the jobs accomplished. Writing off the jobs helps to allow you a pride of success and let you review how you are progressing throughout the day. Always stick to your list if possible and try to continue working from higher priority to less priority. I know loopholes sometimes come up through the day that can throw the whole day out, but you have to either take care of the situation and get back to the list or if the newly arisen chore isn’t as serious as some of the jobs on the list then put it at the bottom on your list and continue on doing the item you were doing.
Each job you hope to complete must be written down for a numerous reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you keep each day outlined and you finish your daily goals. Be wary of starting items and not completing them. This would become tomorrow in a plethora of incomplete tasks and can cause “list blowout”.
You will end up with a list being a mile long and you will throw it up in despair and go back to bad habits of being in rush all day and realizing nothing.
Remember each day you accomplish your goals and check off all the items on your list, you will get a day closer to reaching 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 returning to the issue and needing to redo it.
Learn to civilly inform people when you’re busy and that you will get back to them some time later.
Learn to give other employees items that truly don’t need your direct work.
Don’t take on wild goose chases.
Don’t spend time on phone calls that aren’t going to assist with something.
Don’t procrastinate.
Review your list of chores to do often at times through the day.
“Map out your day” in the car and schedule out your daily list as soon as you begin work. Complete what you begin.
Prioritise all your tasks, always take items in their order of priority to you and your customers.
Stay away from time wasters, people that simply start to chat all day, and if they work for you, set them straight, or get rid of them.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 3:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.