Time Management Tips for People Who Work at Home

Time Management Tips for People Who Work at Home

Schedule at least one full day a week in the office. If you spend a majority of your time out of the office, set aside one day to spend in your office catching up on paperwork, making phone calls, and planning the following week. Determine which day of the week is slower for you in terms of phone calls you receive or appointments you make, and make that the day you spend in your office. You may have to make an effort to keep that day clear, but if you do, the rest of your week will go more smoothly.

Make appointments with yourself to work on certain tasks. Treat yourself as you would a client, and put yourself on your calendar. Block out certain time periods when you will work on specific tasks. The task could be a monthly report, a client proposal, or a marketing plansomething that needs to be done and that needs your full attention. Treat this time as an appointment to keep, and make it a productive session. During this time, turn on your answering machine and concentrate only on the project you've scheduled. If you wait for an "opportune moment" to work on projects, it will never come.

Learn to say no. Do you have trouble saying no? When you don't set limits, the quality of your work suffers and your ability to maintain quality service is reduced. You end up disappointing the clients you didn't want to turn away. There's nothing wrong with being busy, until the quality of your service suffers.

Denise, a bank consultant, had so much to do that she started missing deadlines. Her home-based business had grown more quickly than she'd anticipated, but she didn't want to turn down any new clients. Soon, she was losing clients! I persuaded her to stop taking on more projects than she had time to complete and to concentrate on accomplishing her top-priority tasks first. Although it hurts to turn down work, clients are much more understanding about your being busy than they are about your missing deadlines.

Keep like with like. Group similar items so that you'll be able to find what you need immediately. File related paperwork in the same place so that you'll have fewer places to look for it. When things are scattered around your office, you end up spending more time looking for them.

It's also a good idea to group similar tasks. Run all of your calls at once so that you don't keep interrupting your work time with phone calls all day. Write all of your letters during another block of time. You'll find that they get done more quickly if you do several at once because you are able to fully concentrate on that particular type of task. When you're scheduling appointments, group them with other appointments. Schedule appointments in the same area at the same time, and avoid making two trips where one might do. Do all of your errands in one afternoon, instead of taking a little bit of time out of every afternoon. The more you group like tasks and like items together, the more efficiently you'll be using your time.

Have a place for everything. By now you know that your office should have "a place for everything, and everything in its place." Don't put things anywhere "for now," or they may end up there forever. Designate a specific place for the papers and supplies you need on a regular basis and remembef to store the same types of items together. You will spend less time searching for lost items and more time accomplishing important tasks.

Take the extra few seconds to put something away where it belongs, instead of putting it near the place it belongs. Rather than putting it at the top of the basement stairs or by the door leading to the garage, take the extra minute to put it away properly. The greater number of times you handle an item before you put it away, the more time you waste.

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