Prioritizing with your home based business

Yesterday we continued discussing being proactive and briefly touched upon prioritizing and time management to help improve your home based business. In prior blogs, we went into detail regarding time management along the lines of how do you carve out the time from an already busy schedule. Part of good time management is knowing how and what to prioritize. If you can't prioritize effectively, then your time management will be impacted.

The key to prioritizing is to decide what you can and cannot change. I know we talked about that before to, but this concept cannot be stressed enough. How many times have you worried about something when in actuality, there was absolutely nothing you could do to change that situation? It happens all the time, we all do it. The key is to try to minimize the impact of that type of worry and stress. If you try to change things you cannot change, you waste much of your precious energy and time working on a futile task. Then you don't have either the time or energy to focus on doing something productive for yourself or your home based business.

In helping me to personally remember to prioritize, especially when things get very hectic and time is insanely limited, I remind myself of the Serenity Prayer. According to Wickipedia, "the Serenity Prayer is a common name for an unnamed prayer by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr...". It is a prayer that is used in a lot of self-help groups and goes basically like this:

"God grant me the Serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

The courage to change the things I can;

And the wisdom to know the difference"

No matter what your religious belief, the concept here is excellent, especially for helping you to begin prioritizing your tasks with limited time resources. First identify what you can personally change with your actions. Eliminate all those things you cannot change and then forget about them. After you have probably cut your task list down by at least half, then start looking at the items that need doing and start categorizing them.

What items are either critical or in a crisis situation? Are there any pressing problems that need attention right now? (keep in mind that a 'pressing' problem is one that really does need to be taken care of, not one that someone else thinks you should deal with...) Do you have any deadline driven tasks? These are tasks that are necessary to complete. If you do not complete them, you or your business will suffer. Stephen R Covey classifies these types of tasks as "Urgent and Important". Severe problems will occur if you do not resolve these tasks or chores first.

Another set of tasks that will take a relatively high priority, (not as high as the critical ones listed above, but still pretty high), are the items that need preparation before completing (like a presentation), preventative tasks (like paying your business taxes when due otherwise more serious consequences will occur), and relationship building in your business. For relationship building, you want to make sure your customers are happy with your products/ services and you need to touch base with them frequently to see if there is anything else that you could do for them. We cannot stress enough the importance of relationship building in your home based business, if you get a bad reputation, you can lose your business. Therefore you do need to take the time to spend time with your customers and customer base.

Anything that falls into the categories listed above should be taken care of first. If you are proactive (yep, there's that word again...) and tackle those particular tasks quickly, you could easily save a lot of time for yourself and your home based business down the road.

Tomorrow we will continue the discussion of more prioritizing and time management techniques.

Until tomorrow...