Tip #2 – Have Office Hours
If you haven’t worked out already the key to working from home is being organised and disciplined. Now discipline is not a dirty or negative word. Discipline actually leads to freedom because if you know when you are working, then when you are not working you are free not to work!
Setting yourself up to have office hours means that not only you know when you need to be working, but it also lets all those people that can potentially distract you to not call, drop in or simply message you.
If they wouldn’t call or drop in on you if you were in an office, then they shouldn’t do that when you are working from home. The problem is, you haven’t got a routine of office hours so that people know when it is ok and not ok to call or drop in.
A great time management strategy is to set up a schedule of what you need to do and when. Think like when you were at school and you knew that you had math at 10am Monday and then followed by English at 11am and so on. The same thing can work in your business….. just don’t schedule every minutes of every day as things often ‘pop up’ in business so allow for the unexpected.
So you might set up office hours from 9am to 2.30pm whilst the kids are at school. You might do more work outside of those hours but this is the routine that you do every day in a consistent manner.
Mondays might be for administration, Tuesdays might be for marketing, Wednesdays might be your creative day, Thursdays could be finance and Fridays are for future growth.
See you don’t even have to have schedule times, you could also have ‘theme days’.
The big thing is to set the hours you work. You know you need to be in ‘work mode’ by 9am every day and you can tell that to your friends and family and that until 2.30pm when you go to pick up the kids, only call me or drop in if you would do that if I was at an office.
Believe it or not, your friends and family will appreciate knowing this. They don’t want to interrupt or distract you, but unless you let them know the times you are working, how do they know?
It will also hold you accountable to doing the work you need to do each and every day. Sure, if you get done early, then that’s all good. You are the boss, you can knock off early, but if you are new to working from home, stay really strict to your times and build up the discipline.
