Three Ways to Keep You and Your Business Organized When You Work from Home
By: Rheanna Bernard
Trying to keep yourself organized, especially when you work from home, can be tricky. Distractions come easier with family, kids, or just the house in general being right there. It’s easy to say, “Oh hey, let me just do this cleaning,” or, “Maybe I’ll just take a second to organize this.” On top of distractions, you have the organization factor that is a little different when you operate your business outside of the traditional workspace. Working from home can give you so much freedom, but sometimes you have to work a little harder. Here are three ways you can look at to keep yourself organized and less stressed.
- Use a scheduling system.
Finding ways simply your life can help keep you organized. Using a scheduling system like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule out social media posts can allow you to plan out a week or two ahead, saving you time in the long run. Buffer and Hootsuite both offer free options so that you can test out which set up works best for you. Both enable you to post to Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook all in one place. Setting aside a specific day of your month for scheduling can free up your other days to focus on interacting with your followers without worrying about what you’re going to post that day.
- Use a calendar system.
Whether you are a paper planner or electronic calendar person, using a calendar just for your work can help you stay on track. There are even online calendars that can connect you with employees and co-workers. Programs like Trello allow you to set up tasks that multiple people can view at the same time to discuss what is upcoming. If you are using a paper calendar, set aside that first few minutes of your day to remind yourself what your daily tasks are and focus on those. Sometimes putting pen to paper can really help.
- Check off those lists.
Something that I recommend to clients and fellow bloggers is a daily checklist system. It seems so easy and simple, yet it is frequently overlooked as a valuable tool. One of the easiest ways to get overwhelmed is to start thinking about all of the things you have to do in any given week or month. But if you task yourself out, using the calendar system, and then incorporate that into a daily checklist, suddenly those mountains start looking more like hills. Don’t pay attention to what is on the next day until the current day’s tasks are done. Line your business daily tasks and personal daily tasks up together and see how they can be incorporated so that you can make it through the day with everything checked off. Not only will it seem more achievable, but the sense of accomplishment after you checked off your list for the day can also empower you and remove some of the stress.
While this list might seem like a no-brainer, it is so easy in today’s fast-paced, technological, social media-driven world to let the simple things fall by the wayside and to make things more complicated than they have to be. Sometimes we have to pare down to help things go more smoothly, to allow us to start our day off right and end it feeling like we accomplished something.
