One of the bigger challenges of being a home – based professional is deciding how large or small your business should be. On one hand, you want it to be big so that you generate a lot of income. On the other hand, it must be small enough for you to comfortably manage all of the work, especially if you are doing it as a solo venture. Fortunately, it can be fairly easy to know with some degree of certainty when your capacity has been reached.
Whether you have one home – based business or more than one, your calendar is probably your most important survival tool. You use it to keep track of your work and personal commitments, and to schedule exactly when you will do the work associated with each job or project related to your home – based business. Your calendar can also be an important visual guide that you can use to determine how close you are to your operating capacity at any given time.
For example, if you are a freelance writer and you are thinking of bidding on a project, you will consult your calendar to see when you could fit that job in if you win the bid. You could find that if your schedule is light this week and it is a quick job, it fits right in. If it is a bigger, more long term project you will be thinking about how much of it you can do each week. Either way, you will not bid on it if it would not fit into the time that you have available. If you look at your calendar and you find that there is quite a bit of time that you have scheduled yourself to work yet that time is not filled with work to do, it is time to schedule some administrative or business development tasks and to find yourself some more work to fill those empty spaces.
Each type of work will have its own sort of schedule, too. If you mow lawns, you probably visit each client at a regular interval. You can schedule your entire season for each client in advance. That way, you can know at a glance whether you can accommodate new clients that call and express an interest in your services. Whether you are practicing law or accounting, cutting hair or walking dogs, you can find a sort of predictability in the timing of your work. This can help you to know when to look for more, and perhaps even more importantly when to stop trying to stuff one more client or project into your already very full calendar.
Photo by jdurham on morguefile.com.