Effective Time Management When Working from Home
Posted by Rhiannon Louise on June 04, 2007
Filed Under Working from Home
I hope the headline for this article doesn’t put too many people off reading it! After all the concept of ‘time management’ does sound a bit too much like corporate speak, and if you’re working from home then chances are you’ve managed to escape the creative shackles of a ‘job’ and the last thing you want to be reminded of is the days when you worked for an unrelenting boss in a faceless corporate environment!
Yes - this article is about effective time management when working from home but no - it isn’t all about deadlines and meeting targets and deliverables! Rather it’s all about how to know when your time is best used on the washing up, when it’s time to enjoy your new found freedom and how to achieve as much work related/income producing ‘stuff’ in as little time as possible!
When you first begin working from home you will probably go through a period of excitement almost like you felt as a child experiencing something exhilarating for the very first time.
After a while this fantastic life affirming feeling might give way to a guilty one as you struggle to accept that you really are free and you really can set your own rules instead of being caged by an employer into a 9 – 5 existence.
Now it’s usually around about this time that the concept of time management ceases even to be a fleeting consideration in your psyche!
As soon as you start thinking that your new online business is a ‘job’ your productivity levels will naturally drop and your enthusiasm for your fantastic new opportunity will begin to wane – I’ve experienced this and I’ve seen it happen time and time again!
Consider this - if you’re working from home, for yourself, you are one of the luckiest people alive today…you are not chained to your desk by fear of your next performance review, you are not answerable to anyone other than yourself (well, unless you have a wife/husband/children/bank manager/mortgage commitment of course) and everything you achieve in a day you achieve for yourself!
So, start working out how best to use your time to achieve the most so that you can feel great about yourself, your business and your life choices on a daily basis.
You’re going to be surrounded by a million distractions when working from home – a pile of smelly washing up, a garden that needs weeding, a broken tap that needs fixing, dinner that needs cooking, a neighbour who ‘needs’ to pop round for a coffee all the time and so on and so forth…some of these tasks are valuable, most of these tasks will actually play on your mind and even if you don’t do them, their very nagging presence in your conscience will detract from your performance - so here’s what you need to do…
1) For one week carry with you a notepad and pen and write down the tasks you are doing and the time you start and finish the task at hand.
2) Spend one whole day reviewing the resultant document…look at each task in turn, determine whether it was worth doing, determine whether it was worth doing at the time you did it at and whether it needed to take as long as it did.
3) Ruthlessly weed out the tasks you do to waste time (that’s your time you’re wasting rearranging the pens on your desk), weed out the tasks you’re doing to distract yourself from other less interesting or tricky tasks (did you really need to rewrite that article so many times instead of getting on with your invoices?) and stop allocating your time to trivial activities…if you have time to spare it should be time you spend enjoying yourself not sitting at your desk worrying!
4) If you find that you’re spending a lot of time on non-business related tasks consider whether it makes more sense to employ someone to take these jobs on or delegate some of the responsibilities to other members of your family.
For example, if you employed a housekeeper for one day a week that would save you the time it takes to clean your house, iron your clothes and keep everything in order. Far more than the money you spend on a housekeeper could well be earned by you in the time it takes them to get your household chores in order.
5) Consider outsourcing simple but time consuming business related tasks or parts of your job that you really struggle with – seriously look at the time versus cost issues at stake here.
For example, I cannot write a line of code unless you count basic SQL queries so there is no sense in me trying to teach myself how to when I have no interest and no natural ability – it makes more sense for me to outsource all technical tasks (to my husband!).
6) Stop doing the work of others – this can mean you refuse to tidy your kids’ bedrooms anymore even though you know you can get it done in half the time and with none of the whining for example. Or it may mean you refuse to rewrite that article you commissioned into something legible or with the actual emphasis you asked for even though you’d get it done quicker than if you sent it back.
Your kids need to learn to pick up after themselves and they need to learn today – and anyone you commission work from needs to be clear about your requirements and be able to deliver.
To cut out other people’s tasks you may actually have to spend some time handing them over properly. Using the above examples – teach your children how to hang up clothes, why to look after personal possessions and to take pride in their appearance and that of their ‘property’…or take time writing out or explaining your expectations and requirements for an external employee so that they are 100% clear on their project and deliver what you require on time the next time
7) Finally, get a diary and fill it up! Write down every single job you have to do, meeting you have to attend (although most meetings are 95% a waste of time), project you have to complete and appointment you have to keep. Look at whether you can lump like tasks together to cut out travel time or the time it takes to swap from one thing to the next – for example visit your business bank account manager about that loan on the same morning you have to take those documents to be bound and then drop your books at your accountant on the way home.
Having a really well kept diary will help you so much – you won’t have to worry you’ve forgotten anything, you can ensure deadlines and commitments don’t clash, you can build up a picture of how long certain tasks take or how often certain commitments crop up and maybe find a way to manage them more effectively and with a diary you are far less likely to ‘lose’ time.
In conclusion, never lose sight of the fact that you are lucky to be working for yourself from home and that the whole experience should largely be enjoyable! Time management relates directly to using your common sense, getting rid of any guilt associated with tasks you ‘should be doing,’ and remembering that if you’re wasting time it is your precious time you’re wasting – so stop it! Be efficient, work effectively and make your business run seemingly effortlessly!
