Once you leave the 9-5 world, weekdays open up and you get the sense that time is an endless resource to finally drive your business to success. If you are not careful, your new found “free-time” will get swallowed up in minutiae and you’ll spend 20 hours a day in your home office without getting anything done. Here are some tips to keep you productive without working your tail off.

Defend Your Time

Many people who do not work from home have the mistaken assumption that those of us who do wake up at the crack of noon, sit out on our deck with a martini on Tuesday afternoons and get to play video games all day. The truth is that we often juggle an intense workload while working more hours for less pay than our employed peers. Some of your friends or family might think that because you work at home, you are always available.

Respect your time by defending it from interruptions. If you have a separate business phone, then you simply do not need to answer your home phone or even non-emergency calls to your cellphone while you are working. Try to avoid the temptation of checking personal E-Mail, stay off of Facebook and don’t fall into the time-wasting trap of running errands when you should be working. If you are that bored while running your business, then you made an unfortunate entrepreneurial choice and will hate your life in no time.

You wanted to leave the corporate world to experience the freedom of self employment, but in order to run a successful, solo venture, you should practice a solid business work ethic to make that happen. With that said…

…Take Time Off

The ability to pay rent and feed ourselves every month rests squarely on our shoulders. Especially when starting out, the crushing pressure of this fact is enough to instill a workaholic attitude where long, isolated days stretch into long, isolated nights toiling away in our home office.

A common habit for those of us who are doing something we truly love is to forget to take regular breaks. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve worked straight through lunch, spending an entire 10 hour day glued to my laptop. This is unhealthy and after just a short while, will affect productivity. Creativity and fresh ideas are not sustainable in a vacuum. You’re the boss. Get out there, enjoy life and allow yourself to be inspired with new ideas. Fresh ideas inspire productivity and provides new avenues for achieving success.

Always remember that your life is not your business, so be sure to take walks outside on sunny days. Meet a friend or lunch. Take 15-minute breaks throughout the day and get in a little physical exercise to keep the blood flowing. Take a half day. Take a day off. Take vacations. Quit every day at 5pm…or earlier!

Rediscover a Hobby

Launching a side business while employed full time usually means that you have to let go of enjoyable hobbies. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do everything you want to do. Now that the day job is out of the way, be sure to rediscover an old hobby or start a new one. Give yourself a reason to quit at 5pm every day. Give yourself something fun to look forward to on the weekends, otherwise you’ll spend all day Saturday and Sunday toiling away in your home office…alone. What’s the point!

Enjoy the freedom of being your own boss. Give yourself permission to pursue activities outside of your business that spark your passion. Check off things from your life list. Actively engage yourself in living your dreams instead of simply running your business. How does this enhance productivity? You’ll be full of energy, passion and new ideas that will make you a better, well-rounded, more productive (profitable) person. You’ll also reduce the risk of burnout.

More Productivity Tips for the Newly Self Employed

Never agree to charge less than you are worth. If you don’t respect the value of your product or services, neither will your customers and clients. You will instead trap yourself in the cycle of working harder and longer hours for less pay.

Also, don’t undercut your competitors. Instead, find ways to outshine them on the value you provide. Starbucks launched a wildly successful business not by having the cheapest coffee, but by differentiating themselves from the competition through providing a product with higher value.

Don’t be afraid to outsource. Once you’ve got a steady cash flow coming in, focus your efforts on growing your business. Hire a housekeeper, find a personal assistant or outsource low-yield efforts that do not directly generate leads, products or revenue.

What is the best way to ensure you run your business in the most productive, profitable way without working 100 hours a week? Read these five tips for supercharging your productivity by becoming an early riser, batching tasks, limiting distraction and following the principles of a deceased Italian economist.

If you are short on time but big on ambition, here are 5 easy ways to supercharge your productivity and get more done in your already crowded day.

1 – Wake Up Earlier

I know, I know! Just hear me out. I am not a morning person so I would not recommend this if I didn’t try it first-hand and saw how great it worked. Last fall, I was juggling a temporary job with a deadline-driven freelance editing project. My time was squeezed for sure. I noticed a pattern with my day, though, that helped me finish both the job and the editing assignment on time. I simply started waking up at 5:00 AM. That gave me a solid 3 hours of uninterrupted work in the morning. I would go to bed earlier at night. My evenings are not productive anyway as I am usually too low on energy from a busy day to start anything creative. Plus, the distraction of having my wife home made it hard to concentrate in the evenings. By going to bed earlier and sleeping through the unproductive late-evening hours and moving them to the beginning of my day, I literally “discovered” an extra 21 productive, distraction-free hours a week! Since that experiment, I’ve continued to wake up earlier in the morning.

2 – Never Check E-Mail In The Morning

Checking E-Mail first thing in the morning is a time-suck. Reading messages fragments your thinking, distracts you from important tasks and weighs on your mind with pending obligations and requests throughout the day. It is best to first check off a couple important items from your to-do list before you check your E-Mail. I have found that checking E-Mail twice a day, once at 11:00 AM and the second time at 4:00 PM works well. You might also try avoiding E-Mail until after lunch. If the anxiety of an unattended inbox bothers you, simply use an auto-responder to communicate your E-Mail schedule to clients, coworkers and your boss.

3 – Batch Your Tasks

Batching is a highly effective time-management strategy. Your productivity is affected every time you switch gears and change tasks. Instead of doing everything every day, try scheduling certain tasks less frequently. For example, instead of paying bills as you receive them, check your due dates and only touch invoices twice a month. The E-Mail strategy above is a perfect example of batching since you are only touching it twice a day instead of all day long as each message hits your inbox.

4 – 80-20 Your To-Do List

An Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, noted that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto Principle or 80-20 Rule would later be used in a business context to suggest that 80% of sales comes from 20% of clients. You can take this even further: 80% of your results/revenue are generated by 20% of your efforts. This number isn’t set in stone either. Your ratio might be 75/25 or 90/10.

When you have limited time in your day to get things done, applying the 80-20 Rule to your to-do list is the best way to maximize your efforts. It also allows you to weed out unimportant tasks forcing you to focus your efforts on the 20% of things you do that generates results: revenue, sales, signed contracts, content for your website or blog, artistic output (paintings, sculpture), etc…

Let’s look at a sample blogger’s to-do list with 5 items on it:

1 – Do Laundry
2 – Check website traffic stats
3 – Tweak blog color scheme to something prettier
4 – Write 2 posts for blog
5 – Tidy up desk

If you had only one hour in your day to do any of the items on this list, the 80-20 principle would suggest you choose item #4. Writing 2 blog posts is that 20% of your effort that will generate results for your blog (content, page views, revenue). While the other four items on your list still need to be done, you’ll never launch a business by prioritizing an empty laundry hamper or knowing up-to-the-minute traffic stats for your blog. Find a way to batch the remaining tasks and complete them at a time when your schedule has more room.

5 – Block Time and Set Aggressive Due Dates

Blocking time is an effective strategy for getting things done. Set aside an hour or two to complete a task. Be sure to also set an aggressive deadline. Working within an open-ended block of time in which to complete something is a sure way to take twice as long to finish or not finish at all. This is one of the reasons why the average employee wastes 2 hours of each day slacking off. The 8-hour workday lends itself to the illusion of having “all day to get things done”. In reality, having 8-hours in which to get your work done promotes procrastination and poor time-management tactics. It’s better to break your day down into 1 or 2 hour blocks of time and set a hard, self-imposed deadline. Don’t give yourself until the end of the day to complete a task, give yourself until 10:00 AM!

The above time management strategies have served me well, especially when I was juggling a full-time job as well as a side-business, marriage and social life. My next post will focus on increasing productivity when you have “all the time in the world” when you are self employed.

How many times have you sat at your computer to type a screenplay, a short story, an essay or blog post only to face the blank screen of despair? Your mind frantically claws at ideas while the cursor blinks at you, mocking your inadequacy. This has happened to me before and here is how I blast through it.

1 – Just Start Writing. Write whatever comes to mind, even if it’s nonsense. Sometimes, we have so much on our mind that our internal dialogue clogs the way for our creativity to flow. Get your head on paper, clear out the bottleneck, and then return to the topic you are writing about. For me, I find that it usually takes a page and a half of mental brain-dumping before I can start focusing on the topic I’m writing about.

2 – Write Poorly. Don’t get caught up in making your writing great. The pressure to write well is enough to prevent you from writing anything at all. Your first draft doesn’t have to be great. It doesn’t even have to be good. Go ahead and write. Make it terrible. Misspell words, make grammatical mistakes and just write awful. It’s kind of fun! Your next draft will only get better!

3 – Limit Distraction. Nothing derails concentration and creativity than a ringing phone, an instant message or feeling compelled to check your E-Mail. Turn your phone off, turn the TV off. Work on a computer without a network connection or disable your Wi-Fi. Set up a time limit – say 30 minutes – before you can check your Facebook again.

4 – Create an Outline. Write a general outline of your topic. Then go back through and flesh out each idea. Continue to flesh out the ideas until you have paragraphs written for each heading and subheading. You’ll find that your article will practically “write itself” as you work from the skeleton outward. I’m writing a whole eBook this way and after going through the outline 3-4 times and fleshing it out, it does feel like the entire book is writing itself. My thoughts and ideas are neatly organized.

5 – Keep a Journal. A great way to proactively counter writer’s block is to keep a journal. I like to write two to three pages of stream-of-consciousness in a notebook every morning. Preferably, I like to do this fist thing in the morning, as soon as I wake up. It clears my head and organizes my thoughts. I might remember dreams I had that night that will inspire creative ideas later in the day. You can also write three pages in a journal prior to starting a writing task.

I don’t believe in writers block. All I need to do is find a way to clear the path for creativity to flow through me and onto the page.