New to The Life Uncommon? Stay up to date with the latest information, tips, and strategies by signing up or subscribing to the RSS feed.
This week for the first time I really realized the importance of setting up a work routine when working at home. Since the beginning of November, I’ve been in a very comfortable cycle of working about five and a half days a week, between five and twelve hours a day, cycling through various projects, networking activities, and general business research. It’s been incredibley productive, and really easy, to get all my work done and then some. In fact, I even made enough freelancing last month that I could pay off an additional $300 from my credit card – that’s right, instead of dipping into savings, I was able to pay for all of my bills in cash and then have enough left over to put more to reducing my debt. I left my corporate job three months ago, and 
just as my plan outlined, after three months I am standing strong on my own two feet and succeeding financially. Getting into my work routine helped me hit my stride, and it has really been painless. Sweet!
However, last Thursday morning my boyfriend came home from his day job and informed me he was on vacation from it for a week. Totally awesome, I thought to myself – we’ll have the days together, and then when he goes to his night job (from which he had no vacation, alas) I can get my work done. This will be perfect!
Not so.
This past week has been one of the least productive since I can’t remember when. Not that I haven’t enjoyed every stolen moment with my guy, and relished sleeping late, and ignoring my email and writing queue…I have (what, I need a little vaca now and then too!)…but it made me realize how important the general work routine I had created for myself was in the overall picture of time management for the work-at-homer/entrepreneur.
One of the best things about working for yourself is setting your own hours, being able to work around events and activities you want to incorporate in your life, and generally taking the approach of as long as it gets done it doesn’t matter when it gets done. However, being flexible and able to shift your schedule at a moment’s notice is not a carefree lack of structure, but a elastic sense of time management based on a basic routine.
My elastic routine was broken last week, and it has been really interesting from an experimental p.o.v. to see how one small change, like altering the time you get up each day, can make the whole deck of cards come down. The mentality of “Oh, I slept too late today…I’ll get to that later…looks like I’ll just do it tomorrow” can snowball, and suddenly it is not “oh this day is shot,” but “oh, this week is shot.” Those of you who have ever been on diets get what I’m saying – you think that classifying one day as an “off the wagon” day will satisfy you, but once you do it is too easy to say, “Well, this is an off the wagon week.” That can turn into a month, and then heck – your whole year is shot!
I really underestimated my ability to be as flexible as I was planning on during his vacation. Maybe I got a little cocky with the whole “finally making some decent money” tune stuck in my head – who knows. But what I do know now is that 1) I need a better way to keep on track and work around major life shifts, like an unexpected vacation and 2) I need to pay more respect to the gods of time management.
Time management, like a diet, shouldn’t be something you use to get a job done (finish that project, lose 10 ibs), it should be part of your lifestyle, and like a diet should be able to handle various ebbs and flows of activities and events. So now the question is, how do you make time management an effortless, and elastic, part of your lifestyle design? Life is unexpected and full of surprises (or, at least should be!) and we should be able to get our work done and still rock and roll with the best of these spontaneous shifts.
I’ve jotted down a few ideas – you can check them out here - but am still exploring and thinking. How do you make time management an effective and productive part of your uncommon life?
Let me know, and I’ll keep you posted on what I discover!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Yesterday I wrote a post about time management, which explains how to set up a daily agenda to get things done.
I use this method at work as well as in my personal life. for example, when I take a day off…
you can read it here: http://www.productivewise.com/2008/12/09/time-management-get-things-done-by-setting-up-an-effective-agenda/
here is the link again:
http://www.productivewise.com/2008/12/09/time-management-get-things-done-by-setting-up-an-effective-agenda/
Twitter: evanhadkins
My time management is about priorities. As long I have a good sense of priorities I know what I can let slide. For prioritising I use Top, High, Medium, Low. I suggest holidays are normally no less that a medium priority.
First of all, Nacie, congrats on becoming cash flow positive (or whatever they say in the business world)! I would have expected this to deserve its own post!
For me I am pretty efficient in time management but I have a hard time prioritising. Just because I’ve got a huge plate of things to do for my freelance stuff and I’m only doing that ‘on the side’, I’m limited in my hours as I make sure I do get some sleep in there too.
@Evan – I def agree with you, priorities are very important when managing your time. Makes no sense to get the stuff without a deadline done before the stuff due tomorrow! Great tip!
@Andy – thanks
It is really hard when you have to time manage your day job and your “on the side” job – they have to be like two overlapping entities: separate, but linked. Confusing! I want to tell you it gets easier when you freelance full time, but it just gets a little more complicated! I found when I was working and freelancing at the same time it was actually easier to get my freelance work done, because there was a sense of urgency to it. Now that there is all the time in the world to get my stuff done, it is harder to be motivated. But sleep is def. important, thanks for mentioning it!
@Eyal – That is a great, in depth analysis on how to make a great to-do list, a must visit for anyone interested in time management techniques. Thanks so much for sharing, keep putting out that great work (and keep sharing it with us!)
Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago on Technorati and have been reading it over the past few days.