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Time
Management: From Employee to Self-Employed | |
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Changing a career track from an employee to self-employed entails drastic
life changes. Everything shifts 180 degrees, including the way you manage
time.
by
Isabel Isidro
Managing Editor, PowerHomeBiz.com
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Changing a career track from an employee to self-employed entails drastic
life changes. Everything shifts 180 degrees, including the way you manage
time.
(article continued below ...)
Here s the bad news: time management for the entrepreneur is tougher,
particularly at the start-up phase! But since time management skills are
crucial to the success of your business, you need to prepare and understand
how time management is different when you were an employee compared to your
new life as an entrepreneur.
How is time management different when you are an entrepreneur as against
that of a regular employee working in a larger organization? There are a
number of differences:
- Time management for an entrepreneur is
self-driven
: he
sets his own time, makes decisions on the day s schedule and determines
what needs to be accomplished during the day. On the other hand, the
salaried employee manages his time based on corporate demands, or more
specifically, what his boss wants him to do for the day.
- The price of not managing time properly is
higher for the entrepreneur.
A salaried employee can afford to slacken in their jobs (browsing the
Internet the whole day, doing non-work related tasks, and playing games
on the office computer), yet still receive the same paycheck every
month. If an entrepreneur fails to manage their time properly resulting
in a failure to accomplish the things he needs to do, he may see a
decrease in his income. Worse, he may not have any income for the month
at all.
- The salaried employee has a specific and
dedicated time and place to work, allowing him to concentrate fully on
the tasks at hand
.
By coming to a corporate environment, he is able to make a distinction
between home life and corporate life. During the 8-hours (or more) the
employee is at work, he can focus his time on accomplishing his work
assignments without being encumbered by the demands at home.
The home-based entrepreneur, on the other hand, faces a trickier
dilemma in time management. Since he works at home, there is a thinner
line between home and work, and demands between the two oftentimes
overlap. The home-based entrepreneur is faced on a daily basis with the
hard task of balancing family and work life. For example, the
entrepreneur may be faced with the conflict of meeting a client s 2 pm
deadline and the need to take time off to do some errands such as
picking up a child from school.
- Time management is easier for an employee
of a large organization as his work is more focused.
An employee in the accounting department works on accounting-related
tasks the whole day; same with marketing personnel. A small/home
business owner is most likely to juggle multiple tasks, even more so if
he is running a one-person operation. The entrepreneur needs to wear
multiple hats and do everything from product development to marketing to
record keeping within a 24-hour day period.
The life of an entrepreneur is fraught with challenges, even in the
aspect of time management. But you will know that you are getting it right
if at the end of the day you accomplished what you set out to do; you have
the satisfaction of knowing that the tasks you did today will lead to the
attainment of your goals and objectives; and you are able to do the things
that matter to you as a person (your work, family, and your own self).
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