5 Ways to Maximize Your Time Working At Home
Jun 30th, 2010 | By Darlene MacAuley | Category: Creating Structure, Getting Organized, Home Office, Inspiring New Tip, Time ManagementBalancing your home life while building your birth business takes practice and experimentation. Many birth professionals are also mothers of young children, and much of the work we do managing our businesses is at home while we’re also mothering and running the household. As business owners, how do we make time for it all? Here are 5 tips that may help:
- Set goals. You don’t necessarily need to create a 10 page business plan with financial projections and detailed market research for your birth business. It does help, however, to create goals spanning out 6-12 months, and maybe as far out as 3-5 years. What is the ideal number of clients you will have each month? How much money do you want to be making in a year? And what steps do you need to take to get there?
- Identify the important roles you play in real life. For example, I am a childbirth educator, birth doula, a business coach, a mother, a wife, and the shuttle bus driver for my kids between home and school and all their activities. Within each role, I have a number of responsibilities and need to make time for them all.
- Create a schedule and start with the “big rocks” first. Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” has written and presented a demonstration he has big container with pebbles in it. He has an audience member try to put in several large rocks, and it’s impossible to fit them all in. He has another container of the same size with big rocks in it. When the audience member pours in the pebbles, they easily fill in all the cracks and all the rocks and pebbles fit. This is a metaphor for scheduling the “big rocks” first, or the activities that mean the most to you for the roles in your life. The rest of your responsibilities can then be fit in the spaces of your schedule.
- Schedule in regular time for personal renewal. Self-care is critical for maintaining energy and emotional and physical health. Be sure to schedule time for yoga, lunch with a friend, or those music or art lessons you’ve been wanting to take on a regular basis. Define what your self-care “big rocks” are going to be so you can be sure to nurture yourself and the important relationships in your life. You will find that the time you invest in your self-care will give you huge returns in your energy level and business and household productivity.
- Create structures in your life to support your family and your business. A structure is a system or routine that you follow to ensure certain areas in your life run more smoothly. This will help you to sustain your energy and create more time for the things you enjoy. An example is a structure for getting your house clean. Will you do it? Will your kids help? Will you hire a housekeeper? Another structure would be for your business and how you track your paperwork. Will you keep paperwork in a binder or manila folder? What information will you include for each client, and where will it be stored? Will you print out several sets of paperwork at one time or on a per client basis? Yet another structure can be created so you can find care for the kids when you get called to a birth. Is there a list of people to call? Do you have backs packed and meals made while you’re at a birth? What does each child need if going to a friend or relative’s home?
The initial time investment that it takes to do these tasks may seem large, but by creating supportive structures, understanding your roles and responsibilities, scheduling time for self renewal, organizing your responsibilities by priority, and identifying goals to move towards, you will find that you are more focused and productive when you work, and your time outside of work is more rewarding and less stressful.
I’d love to hear how these tips help you in your life. As always, feel free to add a comment or send me a note!
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Great post, Darlene.
I’ve always found that “time” works differently when you work at home. Eight hours spent at an office with a bunch of colleagues means a mix of work, conversation, interaction, walking around, meetings, client work, etc, etc. Working at home for 8 hours can often mean sitting at a desk looking at a screen for hours.
Because of that, I think sometimes you have to change your expectations for how many hours you put in from home. When they’re not interspersed with the variety of working in a “regular” office, eight hours at home can really take it out of you sometimes. You need to take more breaks, or maybe work a shorter day.
Or maybe that’s just me.
That’s a really great point, Dan. Working at home could mean hours on end of sitting in front of a computer, and no delineation of “office” and “home” sometimes means we can work too much! Another scenario, especially when one has small children at home, is that of multiple interruptions and having a difficult time getting in a good stretch of work. Working in boundaries around having a home office could be considered an art. I don’t know many solo home business owners who have worked out the balance between the two.