Essential Time Management Skills for the Self Employed

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How To Develop Good Time Management Skills

Developing time management skills is essential when you are new to working from home or doing online freelance work.

Luckily, you don't have to go it alone. There are plenty of self-employment guides that will help you with time management and there are also several handy tips in this article.

Track Your Time...

To get started with time management, it is essential to know how you spend your time. That may seem obvious, but how many times have you sat down at your computer only to get up two hours later without having done what you set out to do? E-mail and web browsing can be real-time sinks.

A good way to get a handle on how you spend your time is to install an application tracking program on your computer. These let you know which applications and websites you have open and how much time you have spent on them. This information can be a real eye opener.

Determine Time Estimates for Jobs

Developing time management skills also relies on knowing how long it will take to do a particular job. This will help you make the right bid and estimate when you will next be available for another job.

Again, a small computer program can help you with this or you can use a web application. Many of these work by clicking a button when you start a job and clicking again when you stop one, and they allow you to add notes and descriptions so that you can generate reports on how you have spent your time. This is a great advantage in billing correctly for the jobs you have done.

Set Specific Times for Your Work

The next step in acquiring time management skills is to work out how much time you have available to work.

balancing family life and work

Even though you are working from home you will probably have other responsibilities, such as domestic chores and caring for children or grandchildren. However as long as you can set aside a set time each day for your work and get everyone to honor that you will be well on the way to good time management.

Create Lists and Prioritize Your Tasks

Although we have talked about new technology one of the best ways to manage your time has been around for centuries -- a pen and paper. You can use these to make lists of things to do, prioritize them and keep a running calendar of the jobs you are doing. Good time management doesn't get much easier than that.