Productivity (Management of Time) is just as important in an internet business, your personal life as in a factory environment or you will never achieve your goals. In a machine paced work environment it is very easy to work out how effective workers are using their time but in an office environment it is more difficult to measure productivity.

Time is a precious commodity once it is gone it’s gone and you can’t get it back!!

The interaction of goals and time management is an important factor in achieving success in your internet or in fact any business. How many times have you said yourself or heard someone say

“There are not enough hours in the day”

Be honest with yourself would it make any difference if you had 50 or even a 100hrs in a day.

Organising your work schedule so that you achieve your business or personal goals is not an inborn skill but a skill that can be learned.

Here is a list of things in a home based internet business that can have a detrimental effect on your productivity or achieving your goals

• Delay doing those tasks or the work which we don’t like doing or is difficult
• Interruptions – family members, friends – apart from the time lost you can also lose your train of thought
• Lack of clearly defined goals with no timescale
• Not appreciating that you can’t do everything yourself – outsource or delegate
• Multitasking – complete one task before moving onto the next i.e. Prioritizing tasks
• In order to understand where we are currently wasting time, we need to establish a baseline to see how much time is being wasted in a day and then take steps to reduce the unproductive time. A simple table recording everything that you do for two 24hr periods, account for every minute of the day – including sleep time, meals, watching television, etc.

Task Time Started Time Finished Total Time Comments
I have previously used this technique before in determining the productivity of office and management staff, you will really be surprised the amount of unproductive time that you have in the day

Step 2 – analyse your results split out into headings e.g. reading emails, eating, chatting to wife, coffee etc, then work out productive time vs. unproductive time

Step 3 – take action to improve your productive time

Step 4 – repeat the procedure after one week and you should see a 50 to 60% improvement in your effective time

You should recheck the utilization once/month to ensure that you have not slipped back into bad habits.