This morning, I stood at my kitchen window taking in the outside scenery. It's my common practice in the mornings while drink my coffee and contemplate the day. My coffee, by the way, tasted especially good today because I was excited about what lay ahead. It seemed as though my business was finally starting to take off. But it didn't take long for my soaring spirit to come back down to earth. I opened my office door and was greeting by a pile of paper work and about ten unrelated projects all wanting my attention. I haven't felt this overwhelmed in a long time and I couldn't shake the feeling of wanting to dig into everything all at once.

The Importance of Time Management for the Self Employed Parent

Self employed individuals, and especially parents, have a unique take on the world of work. We are solely responsible for our productivity, our outcomes, our profitability and our work/life balance. If we fail to structure our days then it is almost certain that we will either lose money to lack of productivity or lose family time to over-stimulated work habit. And it's almost always our kids and our spouses that suffer, not our work.

The Pitfalls of Time Management for the Self Employed Parent

Learning to manage our time efficiently means utilizing the right tools, creating priorities and then sticking to them. Certainly we have some room to change our priorities once we create them, however, such a practice becomes habitual more often than not. Not only is sticking to our priorities challenging, setting them can be challenging as well. Sometimes we have days that seem to exist for the sole purpose of putting out fires. How on earth do we balance all the things we have to do into days like that? It all boils down to effectively managing our time.

The Benefits of Time Management for the Self Employed Parent

It's surprising what we can accomplish with a little structure and focus. Managing our time really means structuring our day so that we focus on the things, or people, that are most important. Once we learn to plan our days, at least the work portion, we can begin to concentrate on focusing our efforts on the priorities that we set out to accomplish for that day. As we become better at time management we find that our efficiency has increased, odds are our stress levels have decreased and our families are probably starting to remember that we exist. Time management is an import factor of our success as business owners and as parents. After all, our kids do like having us around.

Some Tips on Time Management for the Self Employed Parent

Invest in time management tools. Use calendars to record your appointments, office programs to record your notes, a Rolodex or email program to record your contacts and perhaps software that helps to manage to do lists and priorities. Learn to focus. Shut your email down while your working. Emails are terrible for interrupting focus. We could be clicking away writing an article, making a calculation, or about to make that important phone call and then.....WHAM!.... email strikes with an enticing call to read the brand new piece that just came into our inbox. Terrible stuff. Open your email at intervals throughout the day to check it.

So What Does Time Management for the Self Employed Parent Have to do with Internet Marketing?

You guessed it. Internet marketing a business. We set out to turn a profit from our efforts. So it only behooves us to treat internet marketing as a business by growing our skill sets, utilizing the proper tools for our industry and working on our personal development.

I am a married mother of two children. On top of internet marketing, I own an accounting practice and partner in a retail store with my friend. Time management for self employed parents has special meaning for me. Click here to view my website and learn more about my views on time management. I offer a much more in-depth review there.