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When you start up a home based business, time management is an area of business management usually overlooked or left out of the equation.

Sure enough, everybody knows someone in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, without enough hours in every day, all they do is rush and get overtaken - is it that this person is you! To the end of the week, when the rush settles, what have you completed? Do you reflect on the day and ponder “what happened to the hours, I didn’t get so much completed as I planned I would. If this feels familiar, then you may just have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people do not appear to rush, they always seem composed and unflustered. The difference from them and others is they achieve time management.

What is time management? It is simply allocating hours in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can truly go ahead with how to time manage our day, we need to figure for ourselves what we are attempting to complete today, this week, this year and perhaps ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The top key in my preference to achieve goals is to write them down. You may think about your goals at times to ensure that they are appropriate and achievable but not so achievable that you don’t need to try hard to achieve them otherwise what is the purpose of those goals in the first place?

From the beginning of a working year you can sit and reflect on what you desire to complete this year. It could be that you hope to raise your profits by 20%, you perhaps would like to move into other premises, you could wish to get rid of your debt in a significant way. From the first day of each working week you may write down on a note pad or in your diary the important jobs that must to be finalised this week, and check on them at each day to know that you’re making progress and hopefully polish some of those projects off your list.

You could have the list on your desk or at a place where you could be persistently reminded of what must be completed each week. The list could be in order of importance so that the major jobs at the top of the list get finished first up. Any of the projects not checked off this week should be carried through to next week at a higher priority, this should ensure it gets accomplished.

The next thing you may not be doing is writing a daily list of projects to take care of. This may assist keep you focused during the day. Again, this list can be placed where you are able to repeatedly look back to it and wipe off the projects accomplished. Marking off the projects helps allow you a touch of achievement and let you know how you are going through the day. Always stay to the list where possible and keep working from the highest priority to less priority. I know changes do appear through the day that sometimes throw the whole day out of whack, but you need to either take on the problem and then return to the list or if the sudden situation isn’t as serious as some of the tasks on the list then place it at the bottom on the list and continue on doing the work you were doing.

Every chore you plan to complete should be written down for a number of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t forget to do it and secondly, so you keep every day outlined and you accomplish your daily goals. Be sensitive to starting items and not finishing them. This could turn tomorrow in a plethora of half baked chores and can cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with your list a mile long and you will give up in despair and go back to bad habits of working in panic during your day and finishing nothing.

Remember that each day you achieve your goals and polish off all the tasks on your list, you get a day closer to reaching your weekly and soon your yearly and long term goals.

A few tips on Time Management:

• Do it once and do it well, it’s fruitless going back to the chore and needing to redo it.
• Learn to nicely inform people when you’re too busy and that you would speak to them some time later.
• Learn to give out jobs that actually don’t need your participation.
• Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
• Don’t use up time during phone calls that cannot achieve something.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Check back on your list of things to do continually at times through your day.
• “Map out your day” in the car and make out your daily list the minute you start work. Achieve what you list.
• Prioritise all your work, always keep tasks in their order of necessity to you and your customers.

Stay away from time wasters, people that would merely go off to chat all day, and if they are your employees, set them straight, or get rid of them.

For more information about self employment Brisbane, home business Brisbane, or work from home Brisbane, contact Lifestyle Switch. Make the switch to your own business today.