As I had mentioned in my previous blog post, I treated this Saturday as if it were a work day, scheduling my time  on research and planning for my computer support business. Even more importantly, the day was meant to be an experiment to see how well I could handle working from home on a self-paced schedule, which is something I’ve never done before.

In part one of this two part series, I’ll take a look at the work-from-home productivity aspect of my day at the home office.

So how did it go?

First, lets take a look at the schedule I laid out for myself.  I went so far as to schedule meals, workout time, and even what time I’d wake up and take a shower.  I did it this way because this is probably the approach I’d have to take if I were working on my own, in order to make sure I don’t get off track.  Here’s what the schedule looked like:

Saturday August 23, 2008

8:00 - Wake up
8:15 - Light morning workout
8:45 - Breakfast
9:30 - Shower
10:00 - Leave for the library
10:10 - Arrive at Library (Find general “starting a small business” books and take notes)
12:00 - Leave the library
12:10 - Lunch at Subway
1:00 - Work on Business Plan
2:30 - Lay out in the sun and read a business book
4:00 - Prioritize to-do list and schedule future business related tasks
4:30 - Dinner
5:30 - Work on my blog (write rough drafts for two posts and think of topics for future posts)
6:30 - Done!

Not too bad huh?  I made sure to schedule in a little bit of “me” time so that I wouldn’t go too crazy!  The problem with making this schedule is I had no idea how long each activity would take.  All of these were rough estimates.  As a result, throughout the day, I started deviating from the schedule.  Here’s what the schedule ended up looking like after all was said and done:

Saturday August 23, 2008

8:00 - Hit the Snooze Alarm
8:20 - Rolled out of bed
8:30 - Light morning workout
9:00 - Eat breakfast
9:30 - Got caught up in Olympic coverage on the morning news
9:45 - Shower
10:15 - Left for the library
10:25 - Arrived at Library (Found 5 “starting a small business” books but had time to take notes on only one)
12:30 - Left the library
12:45 - Lunch at Subway
1:00 - Got caught up in Olympic coverage while eating lunch
2:00 -Worked on business plan (got one more section completed, did some online research, got overwhelmed)
3:30 - Laid out in the sun and read a business book, but mostly listened to music
4:30 - Prioritized to-do list and schedule future business related tasks, checked personal email
5:30 - Dinner (more Olympics)
6:45 - Worked on my blog (wrote some of this article, checked my visitor stats)
7:30 - Done!

So, at the end, I was an hour off and didn’t get as much done as I had hoped.  It’s not easy motivating yourself for an entire day when there’s nobody around to care except yourself!

I’d say the day was a moderate success as far as productivity toward my business is concerned.  But I think the day was an overwhelming success in that it taught me a lot about what it will take to work from home if I ever decide to take that plunge.  Here are some lessons I’ve taken away from this experience:

I am NOT a morning person: …but I already knew this.  I’m actually surprised I got up as early as I did.  One of the big motivators for me to stop working as an employee for someone else is that I’m not good at doing anything productive before about 11 am and I usually have only 3 to 4 really productive hours at work.  With that in mind, in the future, I’ll probably start my day a bit later, but try to be more productive so I finish my day at the same time I would if I had woken earlier.

No TV during meals: I thought I could get away with flipping on the tube for a minute while I ate.  Bad idea.  TV has a way of sucking you in and not letting go, even when there’s nothing on.  Since the Olympic coverage on TV this year has been the best ever, I ended up convincing myself to stay tuned to see the end of the woman’s underwater synchronized badminton, or whatever happened to be on at the time.  I’ve heard about the idea of eating without distractions as a great productivity tool, but I was never really convinced until now.  On days when I’m working for myself (and as a good habit, any time) I will make sure to eat my meals without distractions, meaning I’ll eat just to eat.

No checking personal email anytime during the “work day”: This is just a time suck waiting to happen.  And it did happen.  Luckily, I was only tempted once…so if I just shut down my gmail and excercise a little discipline, I should be okay in the future.

It was a good idea for me to schedule some relax time: I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and confused by the time 3:30 rolled around, so the time I scheduled for myself to sit outside with a book was WELL WORTH IT.  I didn’t read as much of the book as I would have liked, but I was able to decompress enough to get back to work afterwards.

I need to make sure to write my blog entries outside of Wordpress:  Wordpress, for those who don’t know, is online software that I use to write and manage this blog.  the problem with writing the entries from within the admin console in Wordpress is that there are so many other things to look at.  The visitor statistics are one click away, as well as recent posts and my feed reader (which shows the most recent entries of all the blogs I’m subscribed to).   These all serve to distract me and undermine the task at hand.  As a result, from now on I will write all of my blog entries, from rough draft through to final version, in Google Docs (so they’re available from any internet connection) and transfer them into Wordpress when I’m ready to publish.  i’m doing that now infact.  Go me!

I know that by no means was this an acurate representation of what it would take for someone to actually sustain a productive small business career, but it was a decent start for me, and it was a big eye opener.  I’ll definitely be planning more of these kind of test-drive days in the future.  Hopefully I will come to develop a system that works for me and maybe one that could work for you too!

In my next post I’ll explore the things I learned on the business planning side of things and where I plan to go from here on out.  I’ll tell you one thing, now that I have a clearer understanding of what lies ahead for me, I’m more overwhelmed then ever before!  But, I’m confident that in time everything will begin to fall into place.

How did you spend your weekend?