Can you imagine this scene in the picture? Or are you like me and it takes no imagination? Yep, I’ve been instant messaged about dinner plans. Time does get away from us when we’re working at home. Time for work-at-home entrepreneurs is their single most valuable asset. Nothing can replace time…valuable, precious time!
No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter how many things are on your ‘to-do’ list, you still just get the regulation twenty-four hours each day. Sometimes I could use another twenty-four but that isn’t going to happen. I’ll bet that you could use more hours in your work day, as well. I would like to share with you ways to increase thew opportunity within that twenty-four hour day to make it seem longer.
The thing about those twenty-four allotted hours per day is that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep some of them. We have to take time to eat and there is the occasional shower, too.
Our families and our friends require some of our time. Relationships must be nurtured. So…
So, we can allow ourselves just so many work hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must make the very most of the hours that we work. We can’t waste time on unimportant details or on tasks that others can do.
When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there, you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this brief and to the point.
- Email account efficiency: We all have various email accounts. We use one account for this and another account for that. Checking each and every email account more than once a day can be a time consuming task that you very easily make less time consuming by having all of the email that comes to all of your various email account to come into one gmail account. One email account takes a lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various email addresses.
Additionally, you don’t need to spend a lot of time reading and answering emails that are not going to add to your bottom line. Email comes in several varieties. There are emails that are business related, emails that are important but not business related and emails that are simply frivolous and time wasting. If an email has been forwarded several times, don’t waste your time. If an email is addressed to a great many people, don’t waste any time on it either. Email can consume a lot of time. You need to filter the important from the irrelevant and only spend time on those emails that are related to your business.
- Utilize your resources. Do you have a crockpot or dinner maker in the home? Put them to work. Plan ahead in the meals for the day and keep it simple unless you have a two hour time block for the evening meal prep. There are several online resources that make the meal planning easier and knowing that morning what you plan to eat that night helps you focus better. Do the same with your laundry and household chores. I have a bulk of my work done before I sit down to work online. Plan one deep cleaning day and maintain the rest of the week. If you aren’t there in the house work take a block of three days and get the house in order. The clutter and the thought that I should be doing will definitely distract you from focusing on your work at home.
- Learn how to make quick but good decisions. Decision making skills are a key component of time management skills. You should make swift decisions without spending inordinate amounts of time undecided. A mark of a successful person is their ability to quickly assess a situation and decide what action to take. It’s a mindset of both confidence in your ability and knowing a “wrong” decision can always be corrected, or at worst on to learn from. Almost all decisions, unless dealing with multi million dollar ones, (don’t we wish) are not going to make or break your businesses. Yes, a multitude of unthoughtful and sloppy decisions may impact your bottom line but each decision doesn’t demand the time expenditure of the heavier ones. Develop a skill which sorts the priority level of the decision and devote time to it according to how much the decision does affect your bottom line. Never over think.
- Set up time tables to help you prioritize your work day: A scheduled work day is an efficient work day. You will get a lot more done in a lot less time if you know in advance and can see at a glance what task is next on your list. I like visual aids. A time table is a visual aid. It can help you allot your time efficiently and productively! I say tables because no one wants to be slave to a schedule as a task master. Routines and flexibility within that routine is key in accomplishing your many tasks for the day.
- Focus on result producing activities: When you make your work day schedule, you need to be certain that the tasks that you schedule are the ones that will in fact make your business grow and thrive. Don’t waste your time, effort and energy on tasks that can be done by others. Take time to investigate outsourcing. You can add hours to your day each and every day when you outsource the mundane business tasks to others.
You can outsource such tasks as research and listing, description writing and submission, product acquisition research and email writing. Others can do these tasks better and more efficiently than you can and your time is better spent on growing your business, making those contacts and closing those deals! Do you have a list of past customers? YOu should and that’s where much time should be spent. The next huge time crunch will be on advertising, but again, the keyword and ad writing can be outsourced, as well.
- Shave time off of counter-productive activities: Like I said, your friends and families do required some of your time but you can also waste a whole ton of time on such unproductive activities as watching TV, perusing Yahoo and online chat groups, telephone conversations, and surfing the web. If it is business hours you need to ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my bottom line?”
You will be really surprised at how much of your day that you waste if you keep a record of your time expenditures over the course of several days’ time. Just take a notebook along side of you and write down each time you start a new activity and what it is.
Now don’t misunderstand me. We all need down time. We all must relax our minds as well as our bodies. We can’t be all business all the time but we can limit our unproductive or counterproductive activities. Time is precious and time is limited. We need to make the very best use of every minute of every day that we possibly can.
Just happens today that I tweeted this message before deciding to write this blog post: Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but moments.– Rose Kennedy When I remember this my days are better. Enjoy your moments today! You can follow me on Twitter here.
Photo credit Jana Christy
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great post Julie! I love the time table tip. If you have a time table you can really get the work you need to get done and you feel good about it when you are done!