At Home Mom Blog

You might be an expert at budgeting your money (let’s face it, if you work from home, you have to be!), but most of us forget to budget something that is just as important or even more so, our time. Do you have a schedule that you follow?

I often write out schedules, trying to fit everything that I need to get done into tiny little slots. There usually aren’t enough, so I start breaking everything down into smaller and smaller time increments, half an hour, fifteen minutes, etc. And then comes the extension. You start to think “I can’t do all this in the time I have in one day. I’ll have to stay up three hours later and get up an hour earlier.” By the time the schedule is finished, you only have a handful of hours to sleep and the rest is spent working!

A schedule works for some people, but not everyone, and many work at home moms find that schedules are just not feasible when you have kids around. Try explaining to a three year old that this is your time to check emails, not deal with her potty accident! As moms, we need a different way to budget our time. Here’s what I have found works well for me, working with percentages.

You need to decide what your priorities are and write them down in order. Stick to just a handful, five tops. This makes it easier to deal with the percentages later. For example, here is my list for working online:

1. Long term earnings: blogs, websites, etc.
2. Short term earnings: writing for content sites, freelancing, etc.
3. Learning: reading blogs, articles, etc.

As you can see, I’ve kept my list pretty general and very short. This basically sums up what I need to do in a day in order to get things moving with my online earnings.

Now you need to figure out what percentage of time you should dedicate to each area. For example, if I work 10 hours a week, how many hours should I dedicate to each of my four goals? Obviously, most of us work more than ten hours a week, but it is a nice round number to get you going.

Here is what I come up with for my list:

Long term earnings: 60% (or 6 hours out of every ten)
Short term earnings: 25% (2.5 hours out of every ten)
Learning: 15% (1.5 hours out of every ten)

This might not be the ideal, but since I am not yet well-established, it works for me. The great thing is that you can constantly be adjusting the percentages to fit where you are with your business. All home businesses require extra effort and work early on, but if you are successful, you can eventually have things rolling more or less on their own.

By working with percentages, you ensure that you budget your time flexibly. You need to spend the majority of your time in one area, but if that amount of time gets cut for any reason, you can simply adjust everything to fit. For example, if I am normally spending three hours a day working on my blog and website, but my son is injured and has to be taken to the hospital, I might only get one hour in. Instead of completely getting off track, I would adjust my other two priorities and work on those in the evening, fifteen minutes on short term earnings and about 10 minutes learning. For a flexible time budget, this can work much better than a set schedule where you can lose track of what is truly important.

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