Structured work hours

Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who work from their homes face a special challenge around time management. In this series of posts I’m sharing my favorite tips for keeping your sanity while working from home.

Do you honor your business by keeping regular work hours?

We know that a typical day in the life of someone who works at home is anything but typical. That may even be WHY you work at home — because you want a more flexible schedule. That’s valid. Flexible work hours are a major benefit to owning your business.

But that puts the responsibility squarely on you to ensure that you’re working enough hours, at the right times, to grow your business and take care of your customers. You can do this by implementing structured work hours.

A structured schedule can be as simple as dividing the day into two parts – before lunch and after lunch – similar to what 9-to-5ers do. You can choose to handle one type of work in the morning, and another type in the afternoon. Or schedule all client interaction for the morning, and use the afternoon for paperwork and brain time.

Or your schedule can be more detailed: Monday mornings are for reviewing projects, Tuesdays and Thursdays are for client meetings, and Wednesdays are errand days.

Then schedule off-work times for handling household chores and family needs. You wouldn’t do laundry at a 9-to-5 job; you’d wait until you got home. Honor your business day in the same way now that you work at home. Plan to do laundry at a time when it won’t pull your focus away from your work. Schedule household repairs, errands and cleaning for off-hours.

Everyone’s schedule will look different based on the needs of your business. The key is to review those needs and develop a schedule that puts work first during your work time.

One of my work-at-home clients initially faced daily distractions from refrigerator repairmen, talkative neighbors, laundry cycles and kids’ carpools. Now, she has worked hard to implement a schedule in which all family-based commitments are handled on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. During the rest of the week, her time is devoted to her business. If something family-related comes up, she knows she has time on Tuesday or Thursday to handle it, and can put it aside until that day. It’s a big stress-reliever for her, and her business is growing because she’s more focused.

Try it for yourself. Look at your calendar for the next week. What patterns do you see? Where can you devote blocks of time to key tasks for your business? Which days look like “away from desk” days and which can be focused on major progress? Where can you schedule your household and family tasks? Try outlining your calendar for the next week into two-hour blocks of time. Then, as new opportunities come up, schedule them within those blocks as appropriate.

Honor your new schedule for a week. See how it feels. Are you more productive? More focused? What tweaks can you make to improve it?

Let me know how it goes! Or if you’ve found other scheduling tips that work for you, share them with us.

Next: Your bring-up file