Many business affiliates and online merchants are now starting to create businesses from the comfort of their own home. Despite the initial ease of the succession from spare bedroom to professional home office, building a business within the domain of family life is far from simple. With the constant hubbub of children, spouses and excited family pets, finding time to complete overbearing projects can prove challenging. Not only does the term ‘flexible’ seem to involve midnight working whilst the rest of the world sleeps, enjoyable activities seem to become more of a priority than those with impending deadlines.
The key to building a successful business from your home comes from the capacity to create a working schedule and stick to it rigidly. Building a brand requires dedication and focus; things that are easy to achieve within an office environment. Unfortunately, when attempting to build that brand from your favorite leather armchair, family and life tend to get in the way. So how do we avoid this?
1. Organization
When attempting to build a brand using the Internet as a forum, you need to be clear in your mind on which tasks need to be completed and to implement a realistic deadline. Setting out clear initiatives allows you to ensure that every small task is completed, helping to pull together the wider aim.
2. Prioritizing and Planning
Knowing what needs to be done isn’t enough. In order to set attainable targets that will spur the growth of a brand, you need to prioritize which tasks should come first and plan how and when you intend to complete them.
3. Rigid Timing
Giving yourself too long to complete a task causes procrastination. Building a business is initially born from the urge to share a passion, but there are tasks within that forum which we would rather were avoidable creating bias in our time allotment. Without sticking to rigid timing, you will find each task not only bleeding into the time allocated to other tasks but also taking over your family life and spare time.
Practical Methods for Ensuring Balance
Tammy Morales is an entrepreneur who works from home in a number of business domains, including her own affiliate business, a design company, and assisting her parents with an online therapy business. With two teenage children, a husband and a rather enthusiastic dog, Tammy understands the importance of balancing businesses whilst incorporating that with her family life, as to build an effective brand without being drowned in work.
Tammy sees the two premium themes to building a brand whilst working in a home environment as ‘scheduling’ and ‘timing’.
In terms of scheduling, Tammy believes that ‘To Do’ lists are an invaluable tool which help keep you on track and allow you to remember to “dot your I’s and cross your T’s”. She says that people go wrong because they don’t understand where they need to focus their time and energy. Although it is very easy to set up a website nowadays due to sites such as WordPress, often those building businesses forget the smaller issues that need addressing. By writing lists of the tasks that need completing and the deadlines they need to be finished by, it enables you to build a short and long term schedule documenting the growth of a brand. Tammy creates schedules that allocate certain days of the week to particular business interests and allots specific timings to those tasks.
But how do you ensure that you stick to the schedule? Sometimes tasks can be all-consuming and before you know it, you’ve spent four hours on something you meant to spend half an hour. Unfortunately it is our inherent nature to procrastinate from completing boring tasks by convincing ourselves that the enjoyable job we are doing is just as important. Unfortunately this is counterproductive to achieving what you set out for the progression of the brand.
Tammy combats this human fault by rigidly using a timer. She says that keeping to time is key when trying to keep focused on a task. Spending too much time on one project dilutes concentrate meaning that overall working is inefficient. Using a timer to signal the progression to a new task or to enforce frequent breaks helps to maintain a continuous focus in order to meet impending targets set out in the schedule.
What if a Timer isn’t for Me?
Not everybody can easily move on from one task to another without completing the one in hand. Sometimes in business a job needs to be done immediately. Tammy’s timer method is usually more effective in cases where a little of a job can be completed at a time so that ‘brand building puzzle pieces’ don’t seem so daunting or overbearing.
Alternatively, if a task needs to be completed without hesitation, respected Internet entrepreneur James Martell suggests employing the ‘Blitz’ method. If a task needs finishing,set out a viable time frame and just do it from beginning to end without stopping. This way of completing work allows you to be fully enveloped by the task in hand but to also ensure you don’t run over your time schedule.
Emily Jenkins is a freelance writer who believes that businesses are created by the words and presentation. After learning the value of a well presented website, she took to personally promoting WordPress layouts from www.shopwpthemes.com and now aims to develop businesses using literary skill.