Manage Your Time to Get That Job Done
Why Do You Need to Manage Your Time?
No kidding. Working from home has a whole range of perks from being able to show up in your jammies to choosing your own hours. Unfortunately, it also comes with a lot of distractions that hinder you from doing what you should be doing.
Instead of increasing productivity, you find yourself running out of time, beating deadlines and at the same time rushing to get dinner done. There is no simple way to say it – you are losing control and you need to manage your time efficiently now or never.
Set Up Your Workspace to Manage Your Time
Whether you are completing questions on survey sites or writing an article for a paper, there are many jobs that you can easily do at home and get decent money for your time. However, compared to working in a formal environment, the home setting is more comfortable and even more distracting. Consider the flexibility alone in hours making it difficult to get stuff done in time. You could do much more too if it weren’t for these distractions. Designating a workspace with everything you need to execute your work is extremely important to treat your telecommuting job as being separate from your domestic chores.
Enforce Work Hours
Knowing how to manage your time is crucial if you were to deliver outputs on schedule and improve productivity. Many telecommuters find it hard to cope with deadlines because their time management is poor. There are several tricks to remedy this problem. One is to enforce strict work hours, say, 9-12, 4-6 or whatever shifts suit you the best considering your home/family life. When you do this, make sure to stick to the schedule. If possible, lock yourself in your workstation and do not do anything else apart from the job you are supposed to do. Several apps can also help you manage your time like TrackingTime where you allot time to tasks. If you are hooked to social media and other websites, get a laptop that is solely dedicated to your work where no entertainment apps are installed to minimize temptations.
Sometimes, all you need to do is to show no mercy to yourself when it comes to time management and getting the job done. But don’t forget one thing, you do deserve a break because there is also life outside of a job at home. Without downtime, productivity will surely decline because the brain requires silence and needs to relax.
About the author:
Lucy Wyndham spent over a decade in HR before taking a step back to spend more time with her growing family. She now works as a freelance writer and editor specialising in helping more people take control of their careers and manage that work-life balance as a parent.
