Working from home

Yesterday I talked about the importance of having a diary and setting your core business hours to ensure your home business has the time and attention it deserves.

But what if something comes up and you need to do something personal in your business hours? That’s easy. This is benefit of working for yourself. Being flexible is one of the biggest perks.

Mark yourself as “busy” in your diary

Any person in business will tell you that when you run a diary it’s as easy as marking yourself out as “busy” in your diary when you have either business or personal things to attend to. Nobody will know that you are not just busy on the business. Think about it. If you were a real estate agent. Most people would expect you to be available when they want to go an inspect a house but you can’t be available if you are already with a client can you. So why is it any different if you are unavailable for any other reason? It shouldn’t be.

Altering your work/life balance

In saying all this. If you do too much personal stuff in your core work hours your business will suffer and you will feel you are not achieving much. So, it is important not to schedule lots of personal things during your core work hours. Make it a rule you don’t do it often. You may have to do some extra hours on another day to make up for these hours but you don’t need to let any else know about it. It will be more efficient if you don’t. If the time you allocate to do the “make-up” hours is when others normally expect you to catch up with them, you just use the same tact with them. You are doing something else and make a different time to see them. If you have too many “make up “hours to do you will find your work/life balance suffers. You will be stressed with the kids for interrupting you and you are likely to mistakes.

In summary:

If you were working for a boss, you would have set hours but you would negotiate with your boss for time off and either take paid/unpaid time or make up the hours. Treat your core business hours the same in a home business.

• One of the perks of working from home is that you can be flexible and fit in personal things
• The problem with doing personal things during business hours is you alter the work/life balance you have created when you set up your ideal work hours

In my next blog: the importance of a clearly defined workspace.

Kerri Bainbridge

Anywhere Team New Zealand

Working from home

In my second blog I talked about the kinds of distractions you might experience when working from home. These are the things that will prevent you from achieving your goals. So, how do you manage these distractions? It is going to take more than one blog post to cover all this so I aim to do a few of these to help you out.

Make sure you have a diary in which you set up some core hours you will dedicate to your business.

Get a diary. It will be up to you to decide if this is an electronic diary or physical one. If you don’t have a diary you will always feel torn when you are asked by friends to join them for coffee, exercise, lunches etc.  An electronic diary is more portable and lighter. You can set up your to-do-lists in there too.  Check out our website for ideas for diaries and to-do-lists.

Set your core business hours. The distractions -Groceries still need to be bought, cleaning, washing, school drop offs, after school activities and lunches and dinners need to be made. All this needs to be considered when you are planning your working week from home.

Consider working longer some days so you have days available for the odd lunch or coffee date. Or start later so you can start the day doing exercise or catching up with friends. Working for yourself often means we can fit in work after hours when the kids are in bed or on the weekends when your partner is home or you know the kids will play happily for an hour.

When you look at the core hours you have to work with, ask yourself if that is enough time to get all you need to get done, done. If not, you may have to change some of your social time hours. We think it will be easy to fit all our friends in for coffees but in reality it’s still often better to leave our social time to after school or the weekends. Until you do this exercise you won’t know what is possible. Your week might look like this:

Let family, friends and clients know your core hours. It is useful for your clients too to know when they can easily get hold of you. The sooner people who know you know your “work hours” the less they will ask you to join them during those times. Less distractions.

In summary:

• Have a diary
• Decide on your core hours each day
• Let family, friends and clients know what your core hours are

What if something comes up and you need to do something personal in your business hours? I will discuss that in my next blog post. The following blog will be on setting up a dedicated space for your home business.

Kerri Bainbridge

Anywhere Business Team