Hey everyone, and welcome to the first day of our four week tutorial on how to run a home business without killing yourself or losing your mind or your friends. Later on, when my computer doesn’t have a virus and I’m not running around madly trying to save all of my professional relationships, I’ll put a link in here showing how to get to the other posts.

For now, though, let’s talk about time.

I come from a family of home business owners. As far as I’m aware, my 68-year old father has never actually worked for an employer. He’s run a mustard business, a newspaper, a copywriting business, a publishing house, and given golf lessons, many of them simultaneously. (I’m not linking to any of his websites because I don’t actually like my father very much and he doesn’t deserve the traffic. He is a very good businessman, however, so we’ll take what we can use.) My mother was a freelance graphic designer while working in a day job as a marketing director. My grandfather ran an advertising agency from his home while raising four kids, basically on his own. This list could continue, but it’s already getting boring and you probably don’t care.

The point is, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this many years of combined entrepreneurial experience. I’ve learned one lesson that completely changed the way I approach my time and I’ll share it with you here.

Do the job that’s closest to a bill.

The biggest concern that many freelancers and home business owners have is that they are terrified they won’t make enough money and that they’re going to end up living in the box their neighbor’s big screen TV came in, destitute and starving. Prioritizing what to do and when to do it scares most of us senseless. Should you be networking right now? Responding to emails? Commenting on blogs to get your traffic up? Finally sending that invoice? Actually getting some work done? Applying for new gigs?

There are so many things you could be doing, and you know you have to pick one. If you don’t know how to choose, choose the one that’s closest to getting you paid.

Here’s an example. I’m getting more selective about the freelance writing gigs I choose, but I still have four older clients that I’m finishing up contracts for. One pays me on the first of the month, regardless of when I get the work in, but the sooner I get the work in, the sooner he gives me more work and the more I get paid on the first of the month. The other three pay me as soon as they get their invoice. Two of those need relatively short articles for relatively small amounts of money and the other needs four major pillar pieces for more money.

What to do first? Write the short articles. It’ll take me about two hours to finish them and then I can invoice and get the money in my account. Then work on the pillar stuff because that’s going to get me a large amount of money very soon. Then do the first-of-the-month stuff because that money is going to come much later.

Keep in mind, this system works only if you don’t already know what you should be doing. If you know damn well that the first-of-the-month guy is going to fire you if you don’t get his stuff in soon, then it’s pretty clear what you should be doing right now. In that case, prioritizing is not your problem. Clearing up more time in your schedule is your problem, and we’ll talk about that later in the week.

The beauty of this system is that it clarifies priorities. I don’t have to wonder what’s most important – the system tells me. It gets the largest number of items off my to-do list as quickly as possible, gets me paid as soon as possible and frees me up to get on with my life.

Let me know your thoughts on this, even if you think I’m full of crap. I like comments. Comments mean people are reading my blog and will help me get a seven-figure book deal. Okay, maybe not, but it’d be cool, wouldn’t it?

If you’d like to read more in this series, subscribe to the RSS feed – there are 19 more days of tips, tricks, and hacks to come!

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