One thing I have to do periodically is revise my work at home schedule. My daily schedule changes often enough that I can’t stick with one for too long. Something happens and the old one quits working, and suddenly I’m scrambling to get anything at all done.

Such as right now. It’s a real push for me to get even half the work done I used to each day. A big part of that is having a very active 9 month old. It’s just not possible to care properly for her and get everything done in a day that I used to.

Add in that my husband now regularly has weekends off, when in all his old jobs he had to work most weekends. Complete change of routine there!

How Do I Change My Schedule?

Changing my schedule isn’t easy. It means changing habits too. I’m used to thinking of things in a particular way, and even when it’s not working I’m likely to keep thinking that way.

Fortunately, I have the previous schedule listing my various work activities already. Things such as blogging, blog commenting, article writing and so forth. If you want to work up a schedule, you need to figure these things out too, as well as about how much time you want to commit to each.

My goal has always been to get a lot of my blog posts written ahead of time. Something comes up I can still change the schedule, but I like to have posts done in advance. This hasn’t been happening of late because I used to do a lot of my blog post writing on weekends. That doesn’t work at all now. Too often we’re all but obligated to visit family or have some visiting us. It’s all not conducive to productivity.

This means I’m often scrambling to get something written. That’s not the way I like to write. So it’s time to rethink things.

Think About Productive Hours

I’ve always been a night owl. Mornings are not my friend. But at this particular point, nights haven’t been working so hot either. Something about a baby who doesn’t always sleep well, especially those nights when she decides to be bright eyed and bushy tailed and needy for four hours in the middle of the night.

Makes working at night a little less practical when I have to also get up in the morning to take my oldest to school.

So I also have to consider my next most productive hours. In this case, it’s defined as when can I get the baby to take a nap. Please? And then hope that it wasn’t one of the really tough nights where I’m considering a nap too.

Writing It Out

My schedule is one of the few things I do write or type out for my work. I keep going between typing it on a spreadsheet set up as a weekly calendar and writing it on paper. They both can work when I’m paying attention.

Writing it out helps by giving me something to focus on. I know exactly what I mean to be doing that day.

If I’m really getting going on a spreadsheet version, I can also add in the little things that aren’t regular enough for my regular schedule, but need doing on a particular day. That’s one thing I like pretty well.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3…

Any schedule I write is nothing more than a best guess until I’ve tried it out, of course. There’s no way to be sure what will work until I try to work that schedule. Often enough I have to refine things as I realize one day has too much or too little going on.

The good part about scheduling is that it keeps me from neglecting various aspects of the work I need to be doing. It’s easy to just write and write and write and forget to do any marketing. Writing’s more fun for me. But it won’t get me anywhere, or at least not very quickly if I don’t market also.

What about you? Do you schedule your work or just wing it as best you can?

The post Working on My Work at Home Schedule appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Great time management skills are vital to running a successful home business. If you aren’t paying attention to how you use your time, you are probably wasting a lot of it.

But if you overdo it you can make things worse.

There are some basic things you should do to manage your time well when working on your home business. You should have a time to check your email, then leave it alone as much as possible. You should know how much time you can spend on forums and blogs. You should know how much time you need in order to get everything that you need to get done, done.

But sometimes you can overdo it. When you forget that flexibility is one of the key benefits of running your own business it is very easy to do this.

If you say you’ll check email from 9-10, participate in forums from 10-11 and so forth, you’re probably overdoing the schedule. You may not need all that time for each activity every day, and if you find scheduling that carefully hampers your ability to change tasks when you finish early, it’s probably a problem.

If you’re finding it takes a lot of time to manage your time management, you’ve probably overcomplicated it. The goal of time management is to make your life easier. Some people love using a Day Planner, while for others it’s a complication that will make it harder for them to plan their day well. Use the tools that work for you, not the ones that only work for others.

You may also find that some things need to just be finished more quickly than your regular schedule would allow. A good schedule is flexible enough that you can get such things out of your way rather than wishing you could. You control your schedule; do not let your schedule control you more than is reasonable.

If you’re always feeling pressured by your time management goals, perhaps you are not scheduling things correctly. Perhaps you are putting too much into one day or not being realistic about the time needed. Analyze why you feel pressured, and you will probably come up with a solution.

Managing your time well often does not come easy first. It is easy to let distractions get the best of you. But dedication to your plan and to your business will help you to reach your goals and still have time for the things that matter most to you.

The post Are You Overcomplicating Your Home Business Schedule? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.