The best way to avoid getting stressed out over your home-based business is to make sure that everything is organized and that you are following a clearly prioritized plan of action.
However, it is important to emphasize that you leave some space for flexibility so that when the unexpected happens, you can respond to it with the least amount of friction.
Getting organized does not mean spending an hour every day tidying your desktop or having a little box for everything to be placed into. To be organized means that you can find anything you need, when you need it. If it takes you more than a few minutes to find something, then you need to get more organized.
Another key point is that “good enough” really is sufficient in most cases. A lot people get distracted by seeking perfection. Being too concerned with organization will cause you to waste a lot time fine-tuning a system that already works. In that sense, being over-organized can be almost as bad as being disorganized.
For example, a lot of people think everything should have a label on it so that you can see what everything is and where it goes. In reality, most people simply don’t need to do this. You may want a few labels in areas that you will benefit from having them, but that doesn’t mean that they should be everywhere. If you know where every thing is, whether labelled or not, then your workspace is organized enough for you.
Perhaps even more important than organizing your things, to be truly organized, you need to organize your ideas and your priorities. To do that, write notes and lists of goals. You should be aiming for at least one clear and challenging long-term goal, which is the driving purpose of your business.
You should also know what your top two or three goals are for the year, the quarter, this week and today. Make sure that the shorter term goals help you to make progress towards your longer term goals. In short, prioritize every job that moves you towards your goals, and seek to reduce time spent on lower priority tasks.
Knowing your priorities will help you organize your schedule and help you to say “No” to jobs and requests that do not help you move forward.
By understanding these key concepts, you can greatly improve your ability to organize your home-based business and run it well.
“In The Power of Habit,” Charles DuHigg explains how all of our lives are a mass of habits. Many of our choices are not based on careful decision-making. They are instead habits and these habits have a tremendous influence on our health and productivity. Once we understand how habits are formed and how they work, we can learn how to change them.
Tags: focus, Home Business, Listbuilding, Organize, Retired, Working from Home
