If you haven’t already revisited your work schedule for the new year, it’s time. Particularly for those colleagues and clients of mine who work from home, keeping a realistic schedule is an absolutely essential habit.

One of the big benefits of being your own boss is the ability to set your own calendar. But there is a downside. My friend mentioned the other day, “I’m spending about twice as much time working now as I did when I was working for someone else! I still love what I’m doing, but I have less time to spend with friends or family or work on my non-business, just-for-fun projects”.

Setting a more rational schedule that will allow you to put more balance into your life and work will mean taking advantage of existing habits you have.

For instance, if you are a night owl who does their best work in the evening, then try to schedule at least some of your business efforts for that time, even after others have gone to bed. Obviously, this won’t work for cold-calls and other business functions that often work better early in the morning, but a lot of technical services, planning, communications, accounting or administrative functions can be done at night – just as long as you’ve got the energy then.

Of course, if you’re an early riser, consider getting into your work before everyone else is up. The rule is basically that you want to be arranging your schedule around the times when you are most productive according to your own unique body clock.

For home-based businesses, this will necessitate instituting some hard rules and boundaries around entering your “office”. If this is unrealistic for your living arrangement (eg. your home office is the well-trafficked living room), you might consider investing in some shared office space, or even working from the local coffee shop with your laptop and Blackberry as your means of production.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 12:53 am and is filed under Blog, Linda Chu-Organization & Productivity, New Year, New Rules, Productivity & Organization, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.