Not getting enough done?! Try THIS!

Here’s something that might help if you (like me!) sometimes get to the end of the week and feel frustrated that you’ve not got more done.

 

This is especially useful to do if you’re you’re running a business and being a Mum, or running your business AND working a job. But read on, read on! It’s still a very GOOD thing to do if you’re neither of those!

What is it? Well it’s keeping a Timesheet! Goodness, that really doesn’t sound like much fun does it? But it’s actually super-easy and VERY enlightening!

A few years ago I was trying to be super efficient but still wasn’t getting much done. I was totally over it and couldn’t really understand what was going wrong. Then I started to keep a very simple record of how many hours I had available for work, and, HELLO,  it turned out I didn’t have as many work hours as I thought! Why? We’ll if you’re a Mum you’ll know! Kids sport, admin, popping to school for something, sick kids, dog to the vet……Goodness! I was spending a LOT of ‘work’ time doing unwork-y stuff.

So I started doing the Timesheet thing and it really helped:

1. Show me how many hours I REALLY had available for work

2. Make me use those hours more efficiently ‘cos I realised how scarce they were

3. Got me changing my work habits so I used “good” hours for hard work and “iffy” hours for the easy stuff (see below)

How to keep a Timesheet

You might want to try the Timesheet thing TOO! Here’s how:

1.The simplest way to start tracking your hours is just to get a little notebook and write down every 15 minutes you spend working. You can do this like a tally chart with a ‘I’ for every 15 minutes you work  – and at the end of each day you can just add the ‘I’s up and work out your hours.

2.If you want to be a little more sophisticated you could write down what you are working on in those 15 minutes. This might feel like a chore but it’s actually super-interesting!

3.One of the things I teach in the Healthy Income Program is to look at how much time you are spending across your three key work types: your product, your marketing and your admin. We call these areas CUP (product), COFFEE (marketing) and COCOA (admin). You can record this on your timesheet too!

What next?

Once I started doing my Timesheets it became super-clear to me that while some of my work hours were GOOD hours, some of them can only be described as iffy. The GOOD hours were where I had a nice amount of quiet and uninterrupted time to get stuff done. The iffy hours were when I was sneaking  bit of work in while at the kids football training, or doing quick emails at the same time as making dinner.

If you have GOOD and iffy hours too you might want to record in your timesheet how many you have of each. Then you can make sure you do the hard, important or thinking type work in your GOOD hours and leave the iffy hours for checking email, paying bills, social media etc etc.

I worked out I have a maximum 24 GOOD hours a week (but loads more iffy ones.). Once I realised this I became so much better at using those GOOD hours for the right things. Hurrah!

What do you think. Fancy giving the Timesheet thing a go?!

♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*

HELLO! Hello!  Ready to make a Healthy Income from your solo, boutique, homebased, homemade or other little business? You might like our Healthy Income Program! We start it again on 7 September. That’s NEXT Monday! You can read about it HERE and there’s a ton if info HERE and if you’d like to join us you can sign up here NOW! ♥

 

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