As a promoter of home based business opportunities, it can be difficult reaching your goals. One of the biggest reasons why many people struggle is because of lack of effective time management. Here are some great tips to assist you.

1. Write down everything you need to do

When you start your day, begin with the end in mind by writing down what you need to do. Focus mainly on the activities you have to handle yourself, not delegated activities. Constantly look over your list and track your progress. Anything that you did not get done that day, move it over to tomorrow’s list.

The list helps you in that it reminds you what you need to do during the day. Put the most important tasks first and work from there. If you do that and you have a lot of unexpected things that occur, you will at least have handled the most important items you needed to do.

2. Do not Live in Email

Checking email can waste a lot of your time when building home-based business opportunities. It typically leads to one thing after another and gets you off course. You should check your email at a scheduled time during the day so that it does not interfere with your high payoff activities and you can better manage your time and schedule.

One common misconception is that email is not distracting if you do not reply, only check. This is not true because even if you only read, it still takes some of your mindshare away from other activities that are more productive for building your business.

3. Do not Waste Time Surfing the Internet

Wasting time surfing on the internet is very easy when you run home-based business opportunities. You may not notice how much time you spend on surfing activity that is not productive. Obviously, the internet has some use in building your business. That being said, you need to make sure you restrict non-productive use. Productive internet use is anything that generates revenue for your business, like internet marketing and advertising related activities.

4. Be Wary of Phone Time

As owners of home-based business opportunities we do need to use the phone. The key is to manage when and how we use the phone and not have it dictated to us. When you are working on productive activity, make sure that you have your incoming calls received by an assistant or let them go to voice mail. Once you pick up the phone it is hard to get off if the activity is not productive. This way you can keep your focus on the activities that are going to generate income for your business.

Take some time to evaluate how you spend your day. Look at the time you spend on email, on the phone and surfing the internet. Apply some of these suggestions so you can improve your time management ability.