How to manage time, Money and Health
In the modern world, people tend to lead a very busy life. While leading a busy life as a self-employed person, it is very difficult to find time to manage your resources. In this post, we will discuss conserving your resources. This post is solely meant to guide you to make a balance in your work and personal life when you are starting with your home business. Balancing out life and work might sometimes feel like a tedious task to do for a self-employed person.
As a self-employed person, you will have to constantly keep balancing tasks in life. On some days you might have loads of work to do, whereas on other days you will have nothing to do. You will have flexible time schedules, this means you can work anytime you feel like. So, you will have to make sure that you make an equal amount of time for yourself and your personal life as you do for your work.
Managing your time
Amongst all the resources you have to manage, time can be the most difficult one. You might sometimes feel consumed by trying to manage your time schedule and meet your goals. As an employee, you have to work for fixed hours and after that, you have all the spare time for yourself. While on the contrary as a self-employed person, you have to work for different time periods of the day.
As a self-employed person, calibrating your own time schedule might be a difficult task. But it is much of an important task to be done. Having a proper time schedule will help you to know what needs to be done at what amount of urgency. After setting a time schedule, you should also know how to manage your schedule and prevent time clashes in your schedule, so you get the most out of your workdays.
Managing work hours and hours of availability
Cast rough estimates of work hours and hours of availability. No matter what, sometimes you will tend to mix up work, life, and fun when you feel like, but there should be rough hours for work and availability as you get started with your home-based business. Remember:
· Your work hours are the hours that you spend working. This might depend on your needs, you can also shape your work hours according to your productivity and concentration. In this time period, you should be totally focused on your work.
Your estimated hours of availability are the hours when you are working and your clients can get in touch with you.
First things first
First things first - I suggest you get your priorities right. If you are working with deadlines, you should know from the deadlines, what job is the most important for you to do at a particular time. Something that is due tomorrow is not that much of a priority as something that is due today.
While on the other hand knowing how much time you will take to complete a task is of the same importance. Knowing this will help you to tick off your tasks from the to-do list on time. If you start working on a task according to the time it is going to take, you will be able to have them completed on time. This will, in turn, help you have time for other tasks.
All of your tasks will be bound to at least any one of the following categories:
· · Deadlines: When you have to get the work done by a fixed time.
Important, but no deadline: In this category comes the tasks that you can delay, but the more you delay, you might lose the job, or suffer in your business.
Timely, but no deadline: These tasks are best done on time, but it is not always mandatory to do so. You can delay these tasks but as a result, your job will suffer from it.
Least priority but makes your life easier: These are the tasks that are not important enough to be bothered about, but it makes your life much easier once done.
· · Emergencies: Emergencies can come up any time; you don't have a schedule for it. When emergencies come, everything else becomes less important. You should know how to manage emergencies, by rescheduling your time schedule according to the emergency.
Analyzing time
Setting priorities might be a much easier task than analyzing the time you will take to complete a task. You are not experienced in estimating the time required for a task to be done, while you are also on an abruptly increasing “efficiency curve”.
You might be wondering what an efficiency curve is. An efficiency curve is a curve that represents your efficiency of doing a particular job repeatedly over a period of time. In other words, the efficiency curve depicts your efficiency for your job as you take lesser time every time you repeat the task.
At present, a lot of tasks will appear to be very time consuming, but as time passes by, you will become more efficient at it and it will gradually become less time-consuming. Sometimes you might even wonder if you can run your business profitably, while it takes more than forever for you to complete a task.
Mellow down. Pay attention to the thing you are doing and do it as well as you can. With time passing by, you will become even quicker on your own.
Organizing your schedule
Casting a practical and workable time schedule might be complex, as you are inexperienced in your business and on a steep efficiency curve. Despite you starting off the week assuming it to be manageable, it can turn into clashing times by the middle of the week.
Here are a few tips you should keep in mind as you start your home business and tackle time issues:
· Keep a calendar
Keeping a calendar and regularly looking at it might help you remind what tasks need to be done, started, or planned about. You know it very well what is coming up, and therefore you prepare yourself for the task accordingly.
· Making a time schedule
In the starting few days of your business, it will be hard for you to schedule things. You must have a clear picture in your mind knowing what you are going to do for the whole day. This way you will have all your tasks organized and completed in time. In addition to all this, maintaining a schedule will help you not to waste time on the simple and not that important stuff. Do not ignore the common (usual) tasks that need to be done, schedule them too.
By being so careful, you give yourself the power to change your schedule as per the needs. You can always cancel or reschedule a job when something more important comes up. You can always figure out the priority among the clashing tasks. It also provides you with a fair decision about what you should do with your time and when.
Common time management problems
· No specific wake time
While launching a home business and running it most of the people tend to have no fixed time of waking up. You might also think that as you are your own boss, you might enjoy that extra hour of sleep in the morning and it would not be a problem. But on the contrary, it will not only hamper your daily schedule and lifestyle but also makes you less productive.
· Improper interruptions
No matter how well you are keeping up with your time schedule, you will have to work for a fixed amount of time every day. While you try to maintain your time schedule, there will always be some kind of interruptions to distract you. Maybe, you will have some guests at your place, or some friend trying to call you or a neighbor trying to drop in. There are quite a few distractions that we might face from time to time during our work hours. Make sure that you don’t end up wasting a lot of time on these petty distractions. It might seem no big deal, but in the long run of time it might end up consuming most of your time and making your work pile up. This will also lead you to be unable to complete your tasks on time, which might even upset your clients and end up hampering your own reputation and business.
To prevent this from happening, you should always try to keep these distractions at bay, so that it does not affect your home-based business in a negative manner.
Mixing your personal life with work
As a home-based business owner, you might observe that most of the time you cross the limit between work and life. You might not always realize it but it happens with everyone, and it is not bad if done to a certain extent.
There will be times when you will find yourself spending more time in the kitchen or drawing room than you are spending on your workspace. Being more focused on your household chores than you are on your business might be destructive for your business. You might think of it as no big deal but if you continue doing this you will end up ruining your professional life as well as your business. To overcome this, whenever you find yourself being more focused on the household chores, you will have to remind yourself of the most important thing that you have to do right at that particular moment and then drift towards it.
While on the other hand, you might also have times when you have to work even in the non-working hours. Working and being ahead of time might be a good thing to do. But missing out on your personal life to achieve that might be a cruel thing to do to yourself. You might end up stressing yourself with the workload on your head.
Working for an extra hour on weekends might not be very problematic, if you are in an urgency to complete the task, and if the deadline is nearby. But it might be intimidating to tirelessly work without giving yourself the time to relax and ease out. There should be a lot of time when you will have to work during the non-work hours, but you should not burden yourself with work all the time.
Don’t be so strict on yourself that even if you need a break every now and then you would not be able to make time, to relax and boost your productivity, so that you become even more efficient at your work.
Wasting time
We tend to waste our time in a lot of different ways. In this modern era of the internet, social media is a very common thing these days. We waste hours and hours on a screen scrolling through useless content or watching that extra episode of your favorite web series. These small acts of carelessness, sum up to consume a lot of our time. And you will realize that you don’t have enough time for completing your work or domestic chores.
You should observe the things on which you waste your time and try to keep them in control. These time-wasters come in a lot of different ways to us, we should learn to figure them out and don’t waste our time on unnecessary things.
Retain your health
As a solo worker of your home-based business, you need to maintain good health, so that you can face anything that life throws at you without letting your business shatter with your health.
Having regular visits to the doctor and the dentist might not seem an important task to be done, but it pays off in the long run of time. No matter how healthy you feel, you should never miss a regular visit to the doctor or the dentist.
Ignoring your health might end up dismantling you and your business at the same time. If you are unable to handle your business, it might experience a downfall very quickly. Though your business can survive some of the sick time every now and then but experiencing a severe sickness might be catastrophic for your business.
Maintaining a healthy diet
As a home-based entrepreneur, you will be in your chair working most of the time. As an employee, you tend to burn more calories than you do as a home-based entrepreneur. At times you might even overeat and end up putting on some weight. With this being said, I would advise you to burn those extra calories off and be in shape. You can set up a workout session at a gym, a half an hour session of jogging, yoga, or meditation, this will not only help you be in shape but will also de-clutter your mind and lower the stress levels.
You should also stay miles away from junk food. As it is evident that people tend to nibble on anything they find when under high-stress levels.
Stress Management
Being self-employed might bring with itself a lot of stress. It can be challenging for your mental health. Self-employment can itself be a very rewarding career, but with it, you have to deal with a lot of pressure, unreliability, refusal, and a flexible time schedule every now and then. It can also make you feel lousy and gloomy.
People with regular desk jobs have a regular schedule, the distinction between work and life, and a better social life. But people who are self-employed have totally different work experience, and this might even have some mental health consequences on them, such as depression and anxiety.
Thus, self-care for self-employed people is a must for people in this career industry. There are a lot of measures that a person can take to keep these problems at bay and have a good mental equilibrium. No matter if you have just started with self-employment or you have been doing it for a very long time, you bring the extra flexibility of your schedule. You might find it challenging, but a majority of people in self-employment undergo both highs and lows, and that is a part of the process. But you need to maintain good working habits so that it will help you stay healthy and nurture a good connection between you and your business.
Managing your money
While choosing self-employment, people tend to look into the creative side of running a business, such as freedom, independence, creativity, flexible schedule, etc. and we tend to ignore the money part of running a business. It is one of the most important facets of being your own boss. You should have a strong financial base in order to make your business run and prosper with time passing by.
Individualized spending
People often think that if they want to manage their expenses, they will have to give up on spending on themselves and their wishes. But that is not how it works you can always spend on yourself, you just need to keep in mind about the present state of your business, and the amount of money you can spend on yourself without worrying.
Business spending
Spending money on your business is a critical thing to do. You hardly know what will be the best thing for your business. You need to choose wisely where you want to invest your money, and where investing money isn’t worth it.
Business spending does not mean that you can spend money recklessly wherever you feel like. Spending money anywhere and everywhere in the name of the business isn’t a good idea. No matter what there is a sufficient amount of money for you to spend, so you need to be wise enough to spend it in a profitable manner.
At last, observe where your money is going and spend accordingly. Make wise decisions so that your business should not experience a pitfall.
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