Making Time for the Whole Family

When I decided to make the change from work at the office to work at home, I expected to have a whole lot more time to spend with my family. I had envisioned day trips to the park with the kids, early afternoon movies with my honey and vacations where we would just pack up and leave on a whim, it seemed as though it would be so easy since I would no longer have a boss looking over my shoulder. The problem was I didn’t figure one aspect into the equation, myself.

Its something I have known for quite a while, I am a work-a-holic, I love working and once I get going it becomes very hard to pull me away from my project until its finished. I think I must have overlooked that or maybe thought I could change once I setup headquarters at home, but I didn’t. The reality is that I found myself working more hours than ever before, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I wanted to sit in front of this computer and type up articles, manage numerous websites and so on, I love it and thats why I do it to this day, but it was effecting my family and I couldn’t even see it.

I felt like it was a blessing for my family, I was home and they could see me or talk to me whenever they wanted, but I realized that I wasn’t really there, it was kind of a shell they were talking to. I mean sure I was sitting there, but I was so engrossed in the work that I couldn’t fully devote my attention to the conversation. It had got to the point where we would go out and I was always in a hurry to get home, I had to see if I missed anything important, maybe an email I was waiting on came through, or worse yet maybe one of sites were down and would often ruin the outing because I cut it short to be with my work. I hate to say it, but it was almost as if I were having an affair with the Internet.

It took me over a year to finally realize this myself, that even though I was technically spending time with my family, I really wasn’t spending time with them at all. Once I was able to see that I knew I had to make a change, but how do you stop doing something that you love? The easiest way is to think about which you love the most, because after a while you will have to choose one so it had better be the one you want. The one I wanted was my family, I love them with all of my heart, they are the reason I decided to work from home in the first place, to spend time with them.

The strange thing is, that even though I had began to sacrifice time from my work to spend with my loved ones, my business actually began to flourish, more so than it was before my insight. Now that I look back, I can see that sure I was spending 18 hours a day working, but most of the time I was so burnt out that the work just wasn’t good, it was hurting me more than doing good. So once I pulled away from the work a bit, I again was able to enjoy what I was doing with the added benefit of more free time to do what I really wanted to do.

The Moral of the Story

Whether you’re poor, rich, working or out of work you have to stop and realize what truly is number one in the grander scheme of things. You always have to put your family first, everything else can fall into place in a close second, but family has to come first. Once you put family first, everything else has this weird way of working itself out.

If you can do all of this, your life will be better, fuller and more enriched than it ever has been before, I promise. Just do what comes naturally and let your family know just how much you love them.

Tags: family, family time, Managing time, schedules, Time-Management, work, work at home, work from home

Learning How to Delegate Tasks

I raise my hand plead guilty to not being able to delegate tasks very efficiently, but it is something that I have worked on and gotten much better at doing for several very good reasons. Learning how to delegate tasks will increase your efficiency in the workplace, at home and just about everywhere and every time throughout your life.

The majority of you that have a hard time with this, are probably experiencing the very same problem I had. Something in my head told me that I could do the given task better, faster and with less worries than if I were to delegate that to someone else, even if it meant that I had to work myself to the bone to get everything finished. However, that’s the problem. When you begin taking on to many tasks in the course of a day, you begin to rapidly lose the valuable time needed to accomplish your days work, which coincidently makes you less efficient than you would have been had you just let someone else do the job in the first place.

So in an attempt to combat the evil that resides in all of us, I decided to share some of the tips that I used when learning how to delegate tasks.

Tips for Learning How to Delegate Tasks:

Get over yourself: Yes, you are probably very good at everything you do or have been trained to do, but that doesn’t mean that no one else is just as good at the same thing. Even if another person does a given task in a different manner, doesn’t mean that they are doing it wrong or don’t know what they are doing. Everyone does stuff differently and what works well for one person may not work so well for you. So try not to be quite so impressed with your own abilities and allow others to show you theirs.

Organize yourself and your schedule: Before you can even consider which tasks to delegate, you have to know which ones will free up the most time for you. Simply choosing the easiest tasks, sometimes known as “busy work”, and passing those off to someone else is not properly delegating. The tasks should be chosen very strategically so that you can get the most out of your day, while completing the most important jobs yourself.

Choose your helpers wisely: This where a lot of people go wrong, though it sounds like common sense. When delegating any task be sure that the person you are delegating it to knows what they are doing. Handing out jobs carelessly to anyone you see will only get you in trouble, because chances are they might just make matters worse. So choose wisely and be sure that you have given the job to the most capable candidate.

Explain the task thoroughly: I don’t think it can get any clearer that that. Anytime you are delegating tasks be absolutely sure that the person in question completely understands what it is that (s)he should be doing. This will avoid any confusion and problems that arise from lack of communication.

Be sure to follow up: Anytime you have gone through the process of delegating tasks to family members, co-workers or whom ever else it may be, make sure to follow up at the days end. Ask questions, how did it go, were there any problems with the given task, did you complete the task and so on. If there was a problem, this is a perfect opportunity to discover why the problem arose, was it on their end, your end or out of everyones control? You should also take this opportunity to offer a little praise if all went well, everyone loves to hear thanks or great job once in a while.

So what do you think? Can you delegate tasks or are you a do it yourselfer? Share your tips for learning how to delegate tasks in the comment section below.

Tags: delegating tasks, delegation, handling tasks, how to be more productive, learning how to delegate tasks, managing tasks, Productivity, properly delegating tasks, tasks