Setting a Schedule and Sticking to It: Part One

by Hava Lyon | More from this Blogger

13 Jan 2007 12:00 PM

In yesterday's blog, I talked about staying aware of your time sinks, using a kitchen timer, and why chocolate is important. Today, I wanted to tackle the problem of trying to set up a schedule for working from home.

One of the biggest pulls towards working from home is the fact that you can work anytime--it's flexible! But the biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Many people who work from home end up working throughout the day from morning until evening, seven days a week. Although that sounds admirable (what a work ethic!) what actually ends up happening is people get completely burnt out on their work. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy...or something like that. I know that I ran into this problem big time when I was working from home--it is a large part of the reason of why I went back to a normal office job. I liked the fact that when I left work, it stayed there; I came home. There isn't that mental and physical separation when you work from home.

So to keep yourself sane, it is imperative to set some sort of schedule and stick with it! The first step to setting up a schedule is look at how much money you need to bring in each month to make ends meet. Divide this by the amount of money you will make per hour. Decide which days of the week you want to work, then allocate the hours needed to be worked amongst the days you want to work. Then you can search for a job that will allow you to work those hours.

An example: I work for Families.com as a blogger, obviously. After three months, my pay is raised to $4 a blog. I can only post 75 blogs per month per topic that I cover. If I needed to pay the house payment with my blog postings, that would be $500 a month I would have to make from posting blogs. 75 x $4 = $300. I would obviously need to do something else. Families.com allows us to cover more than one topic at a time, so I would have to add another topic so I could do more blogs, and post 50 blogs on this second topic to bring my monthly check up to $500 a month. That is a total of 125 blogs per month (125 x $4 = $500). If the blogs took 30 minutes to write each, and I had to write 4-5 a day to reach the 125 per month goal, then I would be working 2 - 2.5 hours a day to reach my blogging goal.

But what if I only wanted to write Monday through Friday? This is the crucial part of scheduling--deciding how much time you actually want to spend working, and what days you want to do that work. I personally can't work 7 days a week--it wreaks havoc with my brain. So if I was trying to write 125 blogs per month, and only writing them Monday through Friday, that would be roughly 6 blogs a day I would need to write, or about 3 hours a day.

Please check out Part Two to see some ideas to bear in mind as you set up the actual time you work each day.

Learn more about Hava Lyon

Hello, my name is Hava or Havs (depending on my mood and yours!) I am a freelance writer who writes for several blogs, both paid ones such as this one, and personal blogs.

View Full Profile | More from this Blogger