Working from your own home office is great! You have more control of your time, and more flexibility in choosing how you will allocate your time to different activities. Given all the things you need to accomplish, keeping focused is sometime difficult even for veterans of the home business scene.Here are four techniques you can use for squeezing more productivity out of each hour. Note that this is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of personal time management, but rather a few good tips for making your day flow better.
Find Your Mental and Physical Peaks
Just about everyone has a time during the day when they feel most alert and alive. Some people truly enjoy getting up early and doing much of their work in the wee hours of the morning. Others don’t begin to function until after 10:00 AM and a Starbucks. My personal preference is to start working early in the morning, take a long break during mid-day, and resume my routine in mid-afternoon.
If your business allows this flexibility, planning your work for your peak times can increase your efficiency tremendously. Think outside the box – it doesn’t always have to be 9-5.
Make Time to Prioritize and Organize
Figure out what you need to get done and what it will take to get it done. Schedule your time putting the most important activities first. It is so much easier to focus while in your home office if you know exactly what you should be doing at a given time. Some people use a basic “to do” list for this, with each item assigned a priority. While this method works well, the key is to truly understand what is most important. Be alert to the tendency to schedule the most pleasant activities as priorities. Sometime it’s the most unpleasant tasks that should be top of the list.
As obvious as this seems, I still know many people who basically “wing it” each day. They always seem to expend a lot of energy for what they achieve. It’s better to plan ahead and be prepared. Lots less stress this way, too.
Make Your Schedule Flexible
Allow some extra time in your plan for distractions and situations where a task takes longer than expected to complete. Simply allow about 25% more time than you think you’ll need. If you expect to finish the task in one hour, schedule it for 1 hour and 15 minutes. If you finish ahead of the schedule, you’ll be in that much better shape for the rest of your day.
Use a Timer for Important Tasks
This is the tip that helps me the most. When I am working on something that requires a lot of focus, I use a small timer to keep track of how long I’ve been on it. If I want to get up and take a stretch, I stop the timer and turn it back on when I resume. If I decide to check my email, I stop the timer until I resume. This way, I know how much time I really spend on the activity. This helps me stay on track because I feel encouraged to avoid wasting time on non-productive things. Try it, it might help you too.
Keeping things organized and on track is one of the biggest challenges in any home office. Take time to plan and organize – it reduces stress and makes everything much better.
