Whether your at-home business is geared towards attaining a supplemental income or is your primary income, you can use the control you have over your at-home business to improve your work habits. Use the suggestions below to make yourself a better and more productive worker for your own at-home business.
Keep a diary of several workdays in order to accurately identify how you’re spending your time during your typical at-home workday. If you spend much of your time on the telephone, keep a separate telephone diary to summarize how long you were on the phone and what was discussed or resolved during the phone call.
If you find yourself getting up and walking around or refilling your coffee cup more frequently as the day goes on, schedule your lunch break or workout times to coincide with those times when you’re less efficient.
While casually chatting with clients and prospective clients is part of the job, if you typically run half an hour or 45 minutes over the amount of time you schedule for meetings, you’re spending too much time communicating other than business topics.
Set up a filing system for prospective customers that you can have easily available when you meet or speak with them so that you don’t forget to take down a piece of important information such as a telephone number or email address.
Take days off rather than trying to work around personal situations that require immediate attention or rather than struggling through when you’re not feeling well. Usually trying to cope with a crisis or with not feeling well means that even if you’re working you’re not working as well as you should be.
Prioritize your at-home business tasks putting earning money first. Your business depends on revenue so that earning revenue should be your first priority every day.
Don’t check phone messages and email once you stop working for the day. While every customer is important, the benefits of immediately responding to every business call and email after hours is probably less than preserving your time off.
Determine whether there is a location closer to your home where you can meet customers with whom you have meetings in order to save time and money on going to the client’s office.
Clean up your office at the end of each work day by organizing paperwork, shutting down your computer and getting rid of garbage in your office in order to start fresh each day without having to clean up from the day before.
Use a planner or your smartphone to schedule meetings, including how much time you’re leaving for those meetings and stay within the time allotted. In order to better be able to stay within the time you planned for a specific meeting, get in the habit of generating an agenda for the meeting that you can use.
Your at-home business can earn you more money if you implement some simple time-saving procedures. Use the tips above to incorporate efficiency goals into your at-home business.
