Time Management When Working from Home

May 18th, 2010

When you start out in a home business, time management is an element of business management often overlooked or left out of the equation.

Sure enough, everybody knows someone in small business who races about like a mad dog all day, seldom enough hours in the day, all they do is hurry and get overloaded - is it that this person is you! Come the end of the day, when the dust settles, what have you done? Do you think about the day and realise “what happened to the day, I didn’t get so much finished as I planned I could. If this feels familiar, then you may have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people don’t ever seem to rush, they stay composed and unflustered. The difference from them and the others is they have great time management.

What is time management? It is just scheduling hours in your day in an organised and efficient process. Before we can actually understand how to time manage our day, we need to figure for ourselves what we are aiming to achieve today, this week, this year and perhaps even ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The most effective method in my opinion to achieve goals is to write them down. You should reflect on your goals at times to know that they are appropriate and achievable but not so achievable that you don’t have to work hard to accomplish them otherwise what is the purpose of those goals in the first place?

From the start of each working year you could take time and reflect on what you wish to end up with this year. It can be that you want to gross up your profits by 20%, you could would like to move into larger premises, you may want to take away from your debt as much as possible. From the beginning of each working week you can write down on a note pad or in your diary the signifcant jobs that must to be finished this week, and check up them at the end of each day to make sure you’re making progress and hopefully check some of those chores from your list.

You might hold the list on your desk or at a point where you should be constantly reminded of what has to be undertaken this week. The list can be in order of priority so that the impending projects at the top of your list get taken care of earlier. Any of the projects not ticked off this week will be carried through to next week at a higher urgency, this will demand it gets checked off.

The next thing you may not be doing is creating a daily list of projects to take care of. This can help keep you organised in the day. Again, this list should be placed where you are able to repeatedly see it and check off the tasks accomplished. Wiping off the chores can allow you a pride of completion and let you review how you are working across the day. Always stay to this list unless not possible and continue working from higher priority to the lower priority. I know things do come up over the day that sometimes throw the whole day out, but you must either take on the crisis and then return to the list or if the newly arisen dilemma isn’t as time sensitive as some of the projects on the list then target it for later on your list and continue on with the project you were doing.

Each piece of work you hope to accomplish should be written down for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t forget to do it and secondly, so you keep each day scheduled and you finish your daily goals. Be sensitive to beginning jobs and not completing them. This might show up tomorrow in a mess of not completed tasks and can cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with a list at a mile long and you will throw it out in despair and revert back to old habits of running around in confusion each day and achieving nothing.

Remember that each day you set your goals and write off every chore on your list, you get a bit closer to achieving 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 wasteful reverting to the chore and needing to redo it.
  • Learn to simply tell people when you’re working and that you will get back to them some time later.
  • Learn to issue tasks that actually don’t demand your involvement.
  • Don’t take on wild goose chases.
  • Don’t use up time with phone calls that won’t assist with something.
  • Don’t procrastinate.
  • Refer to your list of things to do continually through your day.
  • “Map out your day” in the car and list out your daily list the second you begin work. Don’t stop what you start.
  • Prioritise everything, always take things in their order of necessity to you and your work.

Be evasive with time wasters, people who would just go off to chat all day, and if they are your employees, set them straight, or get rid of them.

 

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