Time Management for Craft Businesses

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Time management can be a challenge for owners of craft businesses. Laundry, personal phone calls, errands or other distractions are always calling your name. If you're a work at home parent, then adding young children into the mix will make time management and getting down to work that much harder. Depending on what you’re working on, all of the distractions and other responsibilities at home can be a lot more compelling than business related tasks that need to be finished.

When I first started working from home, I was a case manager, and although I was self employed, I worked with a great team of other case managers as well as an extremely supportive team leader who helped me get over the adjustment of starting to work from home. It would have taken me a lot longer to figure out the time management strategies I needed to work at home effectively if I hadn't had good tips from people who had been working from home for a while.

I hope that some of the time management tips I've learned through experience, trial and error and the great team I worked with will help you get focused and get to work too.

Set a Schedule
When I first started working from home, I thought I'd just work whenever I had a free moment, like when my son was napping or in the evening. I didn't realize that time management would be such an issue, and I thought that being flexible with my schedule would be ideal for my family and my work. Big mistake! Every time I was handed a new project, my first response was huge stress. "Between diapers and laundry, how on earth am I going to find enough time to get that done?" I'd be thinking.

It's tough to commit the time needed to run a home based craft business by grabbing a minute here and there. Setting a schedule and building that work time into your week is probably the most important working from home time management tip anyone has ever given me.

Some people set consistent office and studio hours which they stick with each week. However, you don't have to stick to a rigid schedule if that doesn't work with your other obligations and work preferences. Some people have a more flexible schedule that they plan at the beginning of each week, and that strategy works fine too as long as you stick with it.

Childcare
Although you probably won't need full time childcare, if you have young children and you're working from home, you probably will need a certain amount of childcare. I'm fortunate to have extremely flexible childcare, so my big time management mistake when I started working from home was to set up childcare as the need arose. Again, big mistake! Like my bright idea of working whenever I could find time, having no childcare planned ahead of time meant huge stress every time I had a new project with demands on my time.

Planning a few hours of childcare ahead of time each week (maybe even trading days with another work at home mom) can go hand in hand with setting up a work schedule and sticking to it. I'd also suggest that you shouldn't cancel your childcare days if you don’t think you’re going to be busy. It's amazing how quickly things pop up and you'll be glad you had the time, or you can use that time for tasks you put off, like filing receipts.

Minimize Distractions on Your Computer
Many people who work from home use their home computer for both business and personal use. Storing your craft business documents and email in the same place as your personal documents and email can cause time management issues if you're not careful. It can become very easy to be distracted by personal things, like reading the five email jokes your friend just sent you and then forwarding them to all of your other friends, when you're supposed to be working on something else, like your craft business plan.

Setting up a separate email address and a separate user account on your computer that is only used for business purposes is a useful time management strategy when you're working from home. That way, when you're in your craft business user account, you know you're working. You'll have to log out and switch to your personal user account to access your personal items on your computer. If you have to make a bit of a conscious effort to access your personal items, you won't be able to drift into doing personal things without first thinking about what you're doing.

To get started setting up a separate craft business user account on your computer (sorry, I don't know how to help with this if you have a Mac), from the start menu, click control panel. From here you should find a user account icon. Click on that icon and follow the prompts from there to set up your separate user account for your home based craft business.

Minimize Distractions on the Phone
I've had a few days that I had intended to use as work days, only to have my time slip away as a result of taking personal phone calls. When you're working from home, you may decide that you will not take personal calls during your scheduled work hours. This strategy becomes very easy to put in place when you have a dedicated business phone line (so you know which calls to ignore). This time management strategy has been very useful to help me focus when I need to. After all, if you were off at a traditional workplace you wouldn't be picking up endless personal calls.

Give Yourself Space
Probably everyone who works from home tries to grab bits of time to work on tasks while kids are playing or between loads of laundry. That strategy is fine for simple tasks, but for more complex tasks, you really need a dedicated work space where you can get away and think. If I need to make several pairs of simple earrings that I've already designed, then putting them together in between other tasks is not really a problem. On the other hand, if I'm trying to design a full line for the coming season, I'll need a lot of quiet time in my studio.

Without a dedicated office and studio space, most people who work from home will really struggle to focus on more complex tasks. From a time management point of view, the less you focus, the more time you will waste and the longer it will take to finish a task.

Expect Respect
Others may not respect your time management needs when you run a home based craft business. If you aren't working at another job while you run your craft business, you may become the first person others call on when they need a favor on a weekday. First of all, you own your own business, you work from home, and you have a pretty flexible schedule, so people think you have lots of extra time to run errands. Second, because craft businesses are based on something that's considered fun - art or crafts - many people may see it as more of a hobby than a business. Artists and professional crafters may actually struggle even more than people with other types of home businesses to get people to respect work time.

I've dealt with this issue in a couple of ways, depending on the person and the situation. If I feel someone is impacting my time management and really imposing on my work schedule, and they're someone I deal with on a pretty regular basis, then I'll have an honest conversation with them and explain the time I need for my business and what I need from that person to ensure I have that time.

This kind of conversation goes better when you use 'I' statements like, "I feel that I'm not getting enough time to focus on my business because...(politely insert description of the other person's offensive behavior here)." It's better to avoid 'you' statements like, "You always expect me to..." or "You never respect my time and my business." When you're starting a difficult conversation, the conversation will be much more productive if you start off with some version of an 'I' statement.

Those kinds of difficult conversations can be, well, difficult. Honestly, there are situations when I feel like they're just not worth the effort. For example, when I'm dealing with someone who is imposing on my work time on a one time basis, and I'm pretty sure they won't understand if I simply say I need to work, in that case, honestly, I just make up an excuse. Some people will disagree with me on this point, and that's fine, but I personally find that there are times when I feel a difficult conversation will take a lot of energy, and my energy would be better spent somewhere else.

The trick to being comfortable with protecting your work time is to respect it yourself. A lot of people work from home so they can have more flexibility in their day. You actually may want to drop everything and help out in some situations. If you have a good sense of respect for your own time and draw some lines between when something is an imposition on your time, and when something is worth dropping everything, then time management will be less of a struggle. You'll be better able to expect respect for your business and your work time.

Time management can be a challenge for people who home based craft businesses. If you use a few simple strategies to minimize distractions and schedule your time, you'll find that getting to work when you're working from home is much easier.

 
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