Now that we are operating our own home businesses, we may be thrilled that those days of punching time cards and tracking hours and minutes of work are behind us. We have other ways of measuring our productivity, right? On the other hand, keeping track of the hours we are actually working at our home businesses might not be such a bad idea…
I have spoken with other home and small business owners who confessed that they didn’t want to actually figure out how many hours they were putting into their businesses because if they did, they just knew they would be horrified to learn how little they were actually making “by the hour.” I can relate to this, of course, things are not always so steady and comparable when we evaluate our home business results using those “traditional” methods. Still, tracking our hours might actually help us to become more efficient and decide if we are really spending and organizing our time in the most lucrative way.
Keeping track of the hours you spend in your home business does not have to be a complicated process—it can involve just jotting down the hours worked on a calendar or keeping a simple spread sheet. This way you can have the numbers to evaluate if you need to put in more or less time, if you are working as hard as you think you are, or if you might be spinning your wheels in an inefficient way. I think keeping track of a little data like hours worked can help us track our business operations—even if it does feel a little bit like “the old days” of working a more traditional job. That data can give us the information we need to measure if our revenue and output seem reasonable for the amount of time we are putting in…or not.
Also: A Home Business Means Longer Hours
Setting Office Hours When You Work at Home
Diary of a Home Business Owner