Unless you are a highly-disciplined individual who also has very clear boundaries, you may have difficulty separating your work and home life if you are self-employed. This is especially true if your office is in your home. Consider some of these ideas for creating margins* at work when you are self-employed.
1. Evaluate the number of hours you work for yourself in a week and see if it is reasonable for your line of work. If not, hire help.
Note: You are the only person who can determine what is reasonable. For some people, 40 hours per week is reasonable while for others, 80 hours is reasonable.
2. Do work that only you can do. This is a mantra that I repeat often. If you are doing work that someone else could do, then you are not working to your full potential.
3. Schedule planning time for your next project, client, sale or other task. Effective planning will help you create margins. The best idea is to determine the deadline for the project and then "back plan" so that you have scheduled time to work toward the goal of the project.
4. And be sure to find a place for your planning or project files so you don't waste your margins searching for paper. Consider a software program like Paper Tiger((R) help you stay organized.
5. Figure out how much "discretionary" time you have in a given day, i.e., time that is not scheduled for meetings, travel, appointments, etc. Then, only plan a "to-do" list for 50% of that discretionary time. This will give you some margins (since our tasks usually take longer than we think they will AND we rarely have the amount of discretionary time that we forecasted).
6. Plan for interruptions. For most professionals, interruptions are part of the day. Phone calls, drop in visitors, unexpected opportunities, etc. can all interrupt our day. If you realize that this is going to happen, then you can just plan for them. It doesn't mean you plan that at 10:20, you will have an interruption, but it does mean that you are not blindsided when your day has 1, 2, 3, or 10 interruptions. You just know that they will occur (and this is part of why you must pay attention to #4 tip above).
7. Schedule "home" time. If you only have one hour of home time per week (excluding sleeping time), that's not enough. Review item #1. Part of taking care of business as a self-employed person is taking care of yourself--physically and emotionally--so don't ignore this part.
8. Don't try to wear more than one "hat" at a time. If your home "office" is a card table in the living room, you won't get much work done when your family is watching TV. Even if you have to set up "shop" in the garage, this may be the best situation.
9. Being your own boss means that you have to be the boss. Would you let another employee dawdle away at a two-hour lunch when he/she should be working on an important project? Well, then apply the same guidelines to yourself. Don't let yourself quit early on Fridays unless all appropriate work is finished.
10. If you are self-employed and your office is in your house, then there are a whole set of "margins" you have to create for yourself and your family. Because your work and home aren't really separated by miles, you have to do something else to indicate that you are "at work" or "at home."
Know your limits. This is the only way you can build in margins, i.e., "the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. It's something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations" (Swenson). You know what your time, health, relationship, money, client, product, etc. limits are. Be clear on those and then create margins so you don't reach or even approach those limits.
*Margins are "the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. It's something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations" (Richard Swenson).
The self-employed person has a natural tendency to ignore the limits and even to flaunt the fact that s/he is ignoring them. And it's to the person's and his/her business's detriment to do so.Margins are "the difference between calm and crazed." To receive weekly tips about margins, just go to Pumpernickel Publishing where you can sign up to receive one tip per week in one or more of the following series:
**Tips: Creating Margins in Your Personal Life
**Tips: Creating Margins in Your Professional Life
**Tips: Creating Time, Energy, & Life Margins: Tips for Teachers
Tip: If you are interested in more than one, it's better to sign up for one at a time...or at least only sign up for one today and then a different one tomorrow. That way, you really will only get one tip on a given day and you'll have a chance to implement that before you get the next one.
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**From the Desk of Meggin McIntosh
(c) 2008 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., "The Ph. D. of Productivity"(tm)
Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do via seminars, workshops, writing, coaching, & consulting.
