The 9 to 5 Home
Business Tug o'War by Elena
Fawkner
Perhaps the
scarcest commodity the new home-business owner just starting out has is
time. This is particularly so if you are also working a traditional,
full-time job and building up your business "on the side" in
your spare time.
This is a situation I am all too familiar with. I still work a full-time
8:30 - 5:00 job while building my own internet-based business in my spare
time. So how do you go about burning the candle at both ends without
burning yourself out in the process?
First off, let's think about priorities. Working a full-time job while
developing a business requires stamina and endurance if other areas of
your life are not to be neglected. This means being fit and healthy. Make
time to exercise at least three times a week. Four or five is better. I
know how hard it can be to commit an hour to working out when you've got
an endless (and I mean ENDLESS!) list of things you need to be doing NOW
for your business. But make the time. It pays BIG dividends in terms of
stamina and endurance. For me, this means getting up at 4:00 am on workout
days. If that's what it takes for you, do it!
Second, eat right. Don't just grab a McBurger on the way home from work
and scoff it down as you're driving. Take the time to cook a proper meal
and relax for a half hour or an hour before getting down to business. This
gives you a break and time to unwind from the pressures of the day, making
you much more productive when you do get down to work. Eating proper meals
will keep you in good health and, coupled with a regular exercise routine,
will help keep your energy levels high.
OK, so you're physically in shape and taking care of yourself. The next
major thing to think about is time management. Every weekend, before the
working week starts, prepare a business plan for the coming week. This is
nothing more complicated that writing down the various business-related
activities you must do over the course of the coming week and then
scheduling them according to how much time you know you are going to have
on a particular day. By planning out your time this way, you can schedule
your business activities alongside your other activities. Take care of as
many of them as you can through the course of the day. Whether you are
able to do this depends on the nature of your 9 to 5 job but if you have
even a little autonomy you should be able to squeeze out a little time
here and there. Not huge chunks, just 10 minutes here and there.
The nature of your job may mean you don't have the luxury of that sort of
autonomy. If this is you, then there's nothing for it but to free up time
before and after work. This may mean getting up an hour earlier every day,
for example. Whatever your personal situation, by planning ahead you will
at least have the peace of mind of knowing that time has been allocated to
all important business-related tasks.
By eliminating the "scatter gun" approach you will find that the
limited time you do have will be much more productive.
There are going to be some activities that you have to do day in, day out.
Decide what time of the day is best for you to attend to these routine
tasks. The more you can integrate business activities into your daily
routine the more efficient will be your use of time. Let's take email, for
example. Anyone running an online business has to deal with email on a
daily basis. I use the time between when I get up in the morning and when
I start my workout for this. It gives me time to wake up before I launch
into physical activity and it is a relatively undemanding task that does
not require precision concentration.
Make use of autoresponders for as much of your email processing as
possible. This will further reduce the amount of time you have to spend on
this aspect of your business.
Other routine activities include things like site promotion and search
engine position monitoring. Now there are a lot of great tools to help
webmasters with this part of their business. For example, WebPosition Gold
will automatically review your position in all the major search engines
and report back to you with the results. It can also be programmed to
auto-submit at appropriate intervals. Be sure to use quality automated
tools wherever possible. They can save you literally hours of work every
week and as we all know, time is money in this business.
Keep a journal for a week. Record in it everything you do during the day
from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to bed.
What activities can you eliminate in favour of freeing up some time for
your business? Maybe it means getting up an hour earlier. Maybe it's
forgoing the sleep-in on the weekend. Maybe it means giving up those two
hours of TV every night. You will find even 15-20 minutes blocks here and
there can add up to a sizeable chunk of time over a week or a month.
If you travel, keep a copy of your website on your laptop and work on it
while you're in the air or waiting for a flight. Or answer your email
ready to send it when you get plugged in again.
As you can see, the trick is to practice the "nibble" technique.
If you wait until you have a great chunk of time in one block, such as the
weekend, you'll only waste all of those little bits of time you could have
put to good use during the week and fritter away your "quality"
time on routine tasks rather than business
development.
One final piece of advice. Take time every week to just relax and do
something you want to do. Although the pressures of a new business are
demanding, failing to take time out will only lead to burn out.
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