A Time Management Tool for your Home Business

Running your business from home or trying to work from home in your spare time can be challenging. Especially with all these distractions – television, a plethora of entertaining websites, housework that needs done, friends phoning, chocolate to be eaten, children running around or the sun shining outside (not so much of the latter here in Scotland).
I am quite an organized person, with lots of to do lists in spreadsheets, but I have to admit that I can easily go off on a tangent, do something completely unrelated to my business and then realize an hour later that I’ve not really been working! This is where a time management tool can be really helpful.
One of the easiest ways to help yourself become more organized is to make a list of goals and things to do. I make a list of goals and a big to do list every month and then break this done on a daily basis to the things that I want to achieve in a day.
Over the last few days I’ve discovered a really cool time management tool called Action Enforcer which can also be used as personal time management software. You simply open this tool up every morning and add the things that you have to do that day along with an estimate of how long you think it will take. If you have tasks that you do regularly you can save them inside the tool and just click on them to add them to your to do list for that day. When you are ready to start a task just click on the “play” button on that task to start the timer. You then see if you can finish the task before the timer goes off.

This is a great way to motivate yourself, especially if you are a little competitive as you’ll always be trying to beat the timer. I’ve found that by using this tool I am less likely to get sidetracked and do something that is low priority (like online shopping). I’ve found that I get more done each day and it’s very satisifying to click on these tick buttons when you complete a task. I loved this tool, especially these nice big buttons and I’m going to be using it every day from now on.
If you are a contractor and need to provide some sort of time sheet to hand in to your employer this tool will also work very well for you as you can generate a report at the end of the day that shows exactly how much time you spent on everything.