Overcoming Hurdles in Time Management
August 20, 2007 | Author: Eve Lester | Filed under: Time Management
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If you are thinking of working from home, then one skill that you will really need to master is time management.
We often imagine working from home to be the perfect career choice. However, little do we know that working from home can have quite a few disadvantages. The main one is that if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. This may sound obvious, but you will soon find that there are a number of things that you think that you can get away with when you do start working from home. Extra breaks, surfing the Internet and doing the housework that needs doing are just some of the distractions you face. At least when you actually go out to work, you can have a sneaky chat now and again and know that you are getting paid for it. When you are working for yourself you really have to push yourself and get things done; otherwise you just do not make much money. So time management is a skill that you really do need to master!
Setting Yourself a Schedule
It is often a good idea to set yourself a schedule either the night before or the morning you are due to start work. Make a list of everything that needs doing and place it in order of importance. Do you have e-mails to send? Do you need to spend time advertising your services? Have you got orders to deal with? Check what needs doing and set a time limit for each one.
Checking e-mails generally takes up a lot of time for most people. It is easy to get carried away on e-mails as new ones come through all of the time and it can literally take hours to reply to the mail that you have. So, by setting aside half an hour to answer any important e-mail messages before moving on to something else, will help you to get things done in an order of importance.
One extremely important thing to remember, especially if you are sat at a computer all of the time, is to take regular breaks. If you are forever staring at a screen, your eyes are suffering and it can lead to future problems if you are not careful. Also, without getting up and walking around, your back and your legs will start to ache. Another potential health problem if you do spend almost 24/7 at your computer is that your weight will steadily go up. Generally it is a potential health hazard if you do spend too much time working at the computer and so you need to set aside regular breaks in your schedule.
Overall making a list and ticking it off as you go along is by far the best way to do things. By setting yourself regular breaks, it allows you to do whatever you want so that when you are back on the computer you work instead of messing around.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
Join me on Twitter
- Blogging
- Business Advice
- Design
- Funny
- Money Matters
- SEO and Marketing
- Technology
- Time Management
- Uncategorized
- What I am Doing
- Working at Home
- Get Your Children in Debt to Keep Them Out of It!
- TOP 10 Yay PLURK Nay TWITTER Reasons
- Great Work at home message boards
- Making No Money? This Could Be Why!
- Carnival of Blogging Sucess
- Investment Opportunity - Self Storage
- 5 Reasons why Your Home-Based Business Website Should Not have AdSense
- Only in America
- Twitter Replacing Traditional RSS Feeds?
- Quality First - Quantity Distant Second
5 people have left comments
Many people do not think about all that is invovled with working from home. I do not work from home but my wife does and she homeschools our two kids (I know what people think about calling children “kids” but mine eat like goats!). Many times I EXPECT my wife to get choirs done while I am away for twelve to thirteen hours and come home to find that she was too busy to get somethings done. BigMike
It is good of you to realize that she did’nt have time, instead of assuming she is lazy, too bad all men cant be like you!
As an entrepreneur that works from home, time management is definitely a skill that one must master.
I love your suggestion of working from a to-do list that is marked off once tasks are completed.
Here is something that I’ve learned from my 5 years of working from home:
I’ve learned to consider everything that I do during business hours as “an appointment”. Chores, errands, family interactions, etc. must be allocated to a segment of time, on my schedule, during business hours, just as if I was still working with clients in corporate America.
I have found it beneficial to allocate Mondays and Fridays as my days to handle personal business (i.e. doctor visits, financial planning) during the work week, when necessary.
This helps me to plan a balanced schedule that covers both the personal and professional sides of my life so that I can effectively working from home.
I love it!!!
Cassandra “D.I.V.A. of Dialog” Lee
Author, The Young Woman’s Guide for Personal Success
www.ssanee.com
thanks Cassandra, those are some great tips - thanks!!
[…] 1. Set a working schedule. […]