Time Management for Home Business: How To Get 4 More Hours In Your Day
Hi everyone. Welcome to Day Two. Today, we’re still talking about time. Oh, did I say today? I meant tonight. For those of you in my time zone (or those of you who are stalking me) you’ll notice it is almost midnight. What can I say? Even for incredibly witty and intelligent home business gurus such as myself, time management is a bitch.
Up until the birth of The Smallest Business Partner (remember him? The one who needs glasses? I should set up a damn donation box), my method of adding an extra four hours to my workday was to stay up an extra four hours. This is a great idea and I completely recommend it for people who have no more than one commitment in their life.
For the other 99.837% of us, I offer these tips.
1. Identify time suckers.
We all spend hours and hours a week doing useless crap. Figure out what your useless crap is. If you can’t figure this out on your own, keep a time log. Actually write down what you do all day for a few days. Read what you’ve written and try not to vomit from the shame of it. Once you’ve identified the activities that have no value, move on to step two.
2. Be brutal. Then be brutaller.
Yes, I’m totally aware that brutaller is not a word so stop typing that nasty email right now. I know.
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris said that. Who is William Morris? No idea, but he raises a good point that can be related to time management perfectly.
If something is in your life (a frying pan, an email newsletter, a person) and it neither critical nor delightful, slash it mercilessly. Methodically go through the things in your life that are taking your time and hack at them without remorse. I can’t tell you what’s taking up too much time or space in your life (Leo at Zen Habits has a lot of pretty neat stuff to say about this – check out Haiku Productivity) but I trust you’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.
In my case, today I slashed my RSS feeds (yes, of course I kept yours. Yours is totally the best blog I read.) It was really scary but I did it and I have a feeling tomorrow’s post will be published much earlier in the day than this one was.
3. Get it out of your brain.
There have been many wise words spoken on the topic of getting your to-dos out of your head and into something else. Paper. Backpack. An extremely expensive personal organizer. Personally, I like the Getting Things Done style. Getting Things Done is a really good book which I’m going to review in a few weeks, but for now all you need to know is that it’s awesome. (Feel free to purchase it from the lovely sidebar on your left. I might make forty cents.) The thing about GTD, though, is that it’s kind of a cult. It’s a good cult, I grant you, but it’s a cult nonetheless. Sometimes you can spend so much time surfing Getting Things Done websites that you’re not actually, um, getting things done.
The ever-cool and super-organized Susan from VoxFortis says:
“I’m a list maker. It actually helps me visualize and keep in mind my top priorities, because if I have too many things going on, I tend to flit from one thing to another and feel overwhelmed the whole time. But I find by just making a list, it organizes what I actually have going on (which is usually less than I think it is) and helps me figure out what I NEED to get done. Otherwise I feel like it all needs to get done right then.”
(If you ever need copywriting and you don’t want to hire me because I use too many brackets and I swear too much, go hire Susan. She rules.)
Whichever method you choose, pick one and use it. A stack of Post-Its that you use is far better than $400 worth of time management software that you don’t.
4. Batch your stuff.
Everyone has small tasks that they have to do repeatedly. (SEO articles, anyone?) Invoicing qualifies. So do responding to emails, catching up on your blog feeds, and folding socks. When you have tasks like these, put them in a batch and do them all at once. Don’t do them again until it’s batch time again.
I could spend hours at a time checking my RSS feeds. Hours. Days, maybe. Because of that, I’ve decided to designate certain times of the day to catching up on blogs and then I shut down my Bloglines until the next time. I’d like to do the same thing with email. If you know me, you’re laughing right now. Oh well, a girl can dream.
Leo talks a lot about batching, too. He’s pretty good at the whole productivity thing.
5. Rethink your leisure activities.
Trent over at The Simple Dollar has a lot to say about eliminating the unnecessary. He says it better than I do, so here’s a quote:
“Here’s an example from my own life. I used to follow a ton of hobbies: video games, baseball card collecting, golf, bowling, writing, reading, and on and on and on. I spent some serious time asking myself which hobbies were really valuable to me – or which aspects of each are most valuable. Now I have a few framed baseball cards in my office that I admire, I basically abandoned many of my hobbies, and now I mostly focus on reading, writing, and some video games. Those are the hobbies I focus on because those fulfill me.”
This is insanely valuable advice and you should listen to it.
6. Choose a time and make it distraction free.
Do not negotiate on this. Do not bend. Find a chunk of time and eliminate all of the things that distract you. Shut down your email or lock up your kids or get out of Instant Messenger or turn the TV off – whatever it is that’s stopping you from getting your crap done, junk it for a period of time. If you take nothing else from this article, take this tip.
So that’s it, folks. That’s what I’ve got for today. If you have tips (and I’m sure you do – YOU’RE not the one posting at practically midnight), don’t be stingy. Leave a comment for the whole world to read. (Jamie’s suggestion is to move to the 28-hour day format. He’s a very linear thinker.)
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