Have you ever found yourself in front of your computer, taking a look at the watch and not understanding how the time passed by so fast? The internet is so full with information we find ourselves wasting valuable time on unnecessary information. By being our own bosses we also let ourselves slake a little bit, visit Facebook and Twitter, play bobbles and waist valuable time. Moreover, while working from home you can also get distracted by your surrounding – kids, pets, noises and more. It took me some time to find my way to make that separation between my time and my work time, between my personal life and my work, between useful information and wasting time.
Today I will give you a few tips about how to maximize your productivity when you work from home.
First of all, you need to understand that although you work from home and your schedule is flexible it’s still work and if you want to succeed in this you will have to treat it like a real job, where you have to prove yourself.
Secondly, you will have to decide how much time you are willing to put into this work, if you do this part time, think of how much of your free time you are willing to put into this. If you do this full time, you will need to decide if you are going to give more time than you would usually spend on a job. In any case, you will have to understand that in the beginning and until you will be able to get the ‘work from home’ business to work you will need to spend a lot of time working. You will also need to take to consideration the fact that you can’t over work yourself because it will tire you really fast and might make you give up. In the beginning I found myself sitting in front of the computer 14 to 18 hours strait, my mind was raising with ideas, thoughts and new information but after two weeks I woke up and just couldn’t get myself to the computer, I spent two days lying on the couch watching TV and feeling exhausted. I decided that I will work about 10 hours a day, 8 of them on the computer and 2 hours I will work offline doing job related tasks that did not require computer work. So decide how much time you are going to spend working while giving yourself enough free time to tend to your duties and relax.
Thirdly, Decide exactly what you are going to work on, as we recommended in the check list, don’t take on more than three things at the same time. Focus yourself on the things you think you can do best and that you already have knowledge about. If you have a lot of ideas write them down, once one of your projects are established enough and does not require more than half an hour of maintenance you can move on to another idea you had.
Fourthly, take the three tasks and think how much time each one requires, write down a schedule for your basic work-day. For example, if I decided to work for 8 hours and I have a blog, a site and immediate making money gig My work day will be as followed:
1 hour – making money gig
2 hours- writing for my blog and maintaining it.
5 hours – working on my new site.
As you can see the time is divided unevenly because I know that creating my site is the most difficult task- I need to gain more knowledge, create traffic and more.
So now you are focused, you have your time planned right, but you go to the web and you need to learn how to create a website for example. You find yourself after five hours you subscribes to three different newsletter that offered you free stuff for your website, you have a lot of great tips about how to create a successful site but you are not even a step closer to creating it. Why? because instead of learning the basic technical stuff you need to know you got lost in all the irrelevant information. How to avoid it? Before you go online just think about what you really need to know, search for it on the web – choose one source of information and start implementing what you’ve learned, if the source of information wasn’t good just move on to the next one but no matter what don’t let yourself get distracted from the specific task you gave yourself. If you are good under pressure make a check list of tasks and give each one a dead line.
Just follow the rules in this article and each day you will get a little bit better at managing time from home!
Let's make money people!
Yours,
The Beginner
