Last week, I had seemingly accomplished very little even tho’ I had spent the better part of 16 hours at my desk. Why you ask? In one simple word-interruptions. Unless you live in total isolation you are going to deal with interuptions of one sort or another during your day. This is true for all of us whether we work at an office outside of the home or at home.

How do you stop interuptions from totally taking over your day?  If there is one thing I’ve learned about working at home that is you absolutely have to stay in control of your time and your environment as much as you possibly can.
Here’s a few tips to get us started:

Close the door to your work area. Put up a curtain. Hang a sign. Do whatever necessary to prevent someone from invading your workspace.

When someone asks for a few minutes of your precious time, schedule it. Look at your calendar and be specific. “I can speak with you for 10 minutes at 12:30 tomorrow”. Or, if they say they need to talk to you NOW have a handy kitchen timer on your desk; set it for the 5 or 10 minutes they are asking for when the timer goes off, the conversation ends immediately. If there is still discussion to be had, schedule it with the person for a later time.

The latter especially works great with the kids (and spouses too). My now 7 year old daughter constantly was saying she needs to show me this or that. One day I counted up that I was spending roughly 45 minutes of every hour dealing with her. I could not make money actually working 15 minutes an hour!  We began looking for ways to implement better strategies and this is one our psychologist suggested. I took that tip and ran with it. There are so many ways you can It’s been a real life-saver. Now, if she needs me, I tell her I’ll be there in 5 or 10 minutes, set the timer for that time period and she knows when she hears the timer ding that I will be there to tend to her whims. It has cut down on the stress both of us have because she is not constantly ocming in the office asking me stuff and I’m not yelling at her to give me a minute more.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Real Estate Time Management, Virtual Assistant Time Management, Virtual Assistant Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.