When you work for yourself it can be challenging to juggle different jobs for different clients. Of course that can also be part of the fun and excitement.

But sometimes you can end up with more work than you bargained for. Despite your best efforts you can find yourself with a huge workload and seemingly not enough time to do it in.

When this happens you need to be organised and disciplined if you are to get everything done on time. Firstly, you should look at your workload and identify which are the most urgent or important jobs are. You need to be strict with this and not spend too much time doing it otherwise you are losing vital work time. This exercise should result in you putting some kind of plan together that will give you a format and list to follow. The higher up the list an item is, the sooner it needs to be done.

You then need to get a good head start on the work concerned. Of course if it is late in the day when you realise you have this huge workload waiting, it might pay you to get an early night and start afresh the next morning. Earlier starts than usual might help you to do well, but consider your own preferences when you are thinking of working a longer day in this situation. For example you might be the type of person who works better later in the day. In this case get up at your normal time and work later instead. Alternatively you might want to get up at 5am instead of 7am and get two hours work completed earlier in the morning. It all depends on how you want to approach the task.

The next important point to consider is creating regular progress checks to make sure that you are on track. Not all jobs will take the same amount of time to complete of course, but you should still have a fair idea of when you should finish a particular job and whether you are still on track to complete everything in time.

Perhaps most important of all though is the need to consider future work. It is very easy to focus only on the work you have close at hand at a time like this. But you also need to think about booking in more work for when your workload returns to normal. It might be good to have a break from your work for a day, or even just an afternoon off once you have completed a big workload like this, but you don’t want to be left with no new work at all, so don’t turn it away.

As you can see it takes careful planning, preparation and skill to make sure that you can be ready to cope with an unexpectedly busy time. Ideally you will have the perfect workload at all times, but we all know things aren’t always that simple. Provided that you are prepared however you should sail through periods of high workload perfectly easily.

Author Bio: Naz Daud – CityLocal Directory UK Business Guide Ireland Business Guide Manage Workload

Category: Business Management
Keywords: workload, work, jobs, plan, manage,