4 Tips to Help You Prioritize Your Time and Home Business Tasks By Leslie Truex Updated October 05, 2015 Running a home bu...
4 Tips to Help You Prioritize Your Time and Home Business Tasks
By Leslie
Truex
Updated
October 05, 2015
Running
a home business takes a great deal of time and energy. Many new
entrepreneurs are surprised to discover they’re working more, not
less like they’d expected or hoped. However, working more hours
isn’t always the key to success in a home business. As a mentor
once told me, it’s not about the time you put in your business,
it’s about the business you put in your time.
The
truth of the matter is that many newbie entrepreneurs spend way too
much time on busy work and not enough on the tasks that make money.
In
fact, Pareto'a
rule suggests
that 80 percent of your results are coming from 20 percent of your
efforts. That means 80 percent of your actions are a waste of time.
Instead, you're better off discovering and focusing on the 20
percent that's generating income. Here’s how.
1)
What tasks make money fast?
When
I make my daily
plan,
I always prioritize tasks that generate income the fastest. This
will vary depending on your business. For a blogger, an email to the
subscriber list will likely make more money than a new blog post. A
freelancer will make more doing billable client work than networking
on LinkedIn. Does that mean blogging and networking shouldn’t be
done? No. What it means is that you should know what activities
generate income now versus later. Make a list of all the tasks you
do in a day and circle the ones that directly bring in income.
2)
What tasks make money in the future?
In
the previous example, you identified tasks that make money,
separating them from activities that support your business, such as
blogging and networking. The next item to identify are the tasks
that generate indirect income. Usually, these aremarketing
tasks.
What builds your email list so you can send offers?
What
brings in paying clients? Not only do you want to list the actions
that generate traffic and clients/customers, but also, you need to
determine which work and which don’t. If Twitter isn’t helping
you build your list or sell your products or services, maybe you
don’t need to tweet.
3)
Schedule money-making tasks every day.
It
seems like a no-brainer that you’d focus on activities that
generate income, but you’d be surprised at how easy it is to come
to the end of the day having done a lot of stuff, but nothing that
generates income. You’ve filed, networked, discussed marketing
challenges in your mastermind group, read blogs related to your
business, but none of these things make money now. They might
provide you with future money (#2) or give you important insight,
but those tasks should always come behind the ones that make money.
While
you may not want to email your list every day, you do want to take
action on tasks that generate income every day. If you don’t have
something you can do that will make money today (#1), you need to
spend time on the top actions that generate traffic and
clients/customers (#2).
4)
Delegate tasks that need to be done, but not necessarily by you.
Although
doing everything is a great way to have total control over your
venture and learn about all aspects of running a business, it’s
also a waste of time. One of the first things you should invest in
is virtual support.
WorldOutsourcingSolutions offers
list of activities that most entrepreneurs can outsource. Further,
it has a daily time tracker you can use to determine what tasks you
do each day and then suggests that you select three you need to do
and outsource the rest. It can be difficult to let go of the
reins, but it will free up time that can be used on money-making
tasks (#1) or on personal pursuits, such as more time with the
family.
You can start small, hiring
a virtual assistant to
take care of the tasks that you don’t like or are difficult to do
such as bookkeeping or website maintenance. As you get used to
delegating, you can pass more tasks to your VA.
If
you feel like your home business is taking over your life, it’s
time to take a serious look at how you’re spending your time.
Instead of wearing all hats and doing all tasks, focus on those that
make money and work to eliminate or delegate those that don’t need
to be done by you.
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