Work At Home Experts

You are bombarded with a host of things you are supposed to get accomplished each day.  But, with the demands of life, kids, home chores and your business, how are you to determine what is worth spending time on and what is not?

Priorities
We all agree that your family gets top priority, but do you watch Blues Clues with your preschooler all day at the expense of a client?  Probably not…  You should be spending a large chunk of your time with your family, but there has to be a point where you allow yourself the leeway to tell your children no long enough to complete your assigned duties.

One way I have found is by prioritizing my jobs. 

Each item that I have to complete goes into a note in my Outlook.  Right before I head to bed, I sync my PDA with my computer, and the To Do list for the next day travels to my PDA.  I take my PDA with me to bed and consider the coming day. 

When I have an item to add, I don’t put it in any order at first, just write down all my To Dos as they are brought to my attention.  Then, once they are all in the PDA is a list, I go through and number them, starting with the most important and working my way down the list.

Then, I open my calendar and put the items on the calendar.  In other words, I block out time to complete the tasks.  Now, if I have appointments or regular tasks that won’t move, I work around those.

It helps me to do it right before bed because:

I won’t skip it if I can do it in bed.  When I was trying to do it at my desk I was always too tired to stay up and do it.  I skipped it more times than I did it, so I decided to go with my body clock and bring the process to bed with me.

It gives me a sense of peace.
Sounds silly, but it makes me feel so much better to get it out of my head and down on the PDA.  It’s like I just stop worrying about it when I do it that way.

I won’t have to get up to write something down I remember right before I go to bed.  That happens, usually right as I am nodding off. 

While this is my method, it certainly doesn’t have to be yours.  The main thing to realize here is that you must prioritize your goals or you will do nothing but run in place.  Decide what you want to get done each day and tackle the work systematically.