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Working at home is a great thing. It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting in my garden wondering what I’m going to do for the rest of the day. I consider this to be a privilege, but if you’re not careful it can be a curse. Stuff happens, things get in the way. Here’s 5 time wasters and ways to avoid them.
Constantly checking email
You’d probably want to know if you’d won the lottery, but do you really want to know what Amazon is recommending straight away? Determine what is important and filter your email. Have a mailbox for clients for example, one for email newsletters or whatever you consider important. Then designate times in the day to look at email. Do you really need it to be on ALL the time?
Crashing IT systems
Admittedly this doesn’t happen very often and, without going down the smug Mac users path, it’s only ever Windows that crashes. Make sure your systems and backups are up to date. Tests your backups as well. Many people think that just because they’ve got back up software, they’re covered. Then they realise they’ve forgotten to include essential work files or worse, it doesn’t work at all.
The coffee pot and the biscuit barrel
In order to finish big jobs, I set myself deadlines, often hourly. An hour’s research for example or so many words written or translated.
While I’m not a complete coffee junkie, I like peppering my day with the odd cup. This involves leaving the office and spending the best part of 10 minutes making it. That’s 10 minutes out of an hour. 12.5%. And I’m not even going to think about the effect on my cholesterol!
I’m not saying don’t have a coffee or eat a biscuit. Just be aware of the time it takes from your busy schedule and allocate specific time for breaks.
Work expands to fit the time
Are you one of those people that, when given seven days to do a one day project, will do it on the sixth day? That’s fine as long as you don’t get asked to do a rush one day job on that sixth day. Will you be wishing you’d done the first job earlier? It’s always better to start (and finish) a job earlier because you don’t know what the future holds.
Worrying about things
Like most freelancers, I spend my life worrying about things that might not or never happen. Am I going to finish the job on time? Will this client ever pay me? What if the phone never rings again?
Now, a bit of worrying is probably a positive thing (you don’t want to get over confident do you), but no-one was ever successful because they worried all the time.
Worries and their twin brother fear are part of life. They are often irrational and prevent us making the right decisions. So here’s a tip. Imagine your worries or fear as a little boy (or girl) that is constantly with you. Then tell then good and firm. “OK you. I don’t mind you coming along for the ride, but here’s the deal. You just sit in that corner, shut up and let me do my work”. That way you’ll get things done.
We all have things that get in our way and stop us from being productive. What’s yours?
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