Is Multitasking Effective For Career Moms?
As a work at home mom, conventional wisdom states that being able to carry out many tasks at the same time will make you more productive. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you may have multiple tasks of equal importance, trying to work at all of them at once will result in you making a little headway in each, but not completing any. Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind if you want to keep your productivity up in the face of simultaneous tasks and the demands of your family.
Phone distractions
When you work from home, you will need to be constantly on the phone since you will have limited face time with your employer and clients. However, phone calls can tend to put you off-task and provide distractions from your work. In order to ensure you minimize interruptions from phone calls, make sure you utilize your operator’s phone ID feature and allow calls to go into your voicemail so you may screen what is important to your work. You should also limit the time you spend on personal calls during work hours.
Email and Instant Messaging
Although email and instant messaging are essential to you as a telecommuter, they are two elements of your work day that can eat up a lot of your time. Trying to juggle your work assignments with communications with your clients through email may sometimes take up more time than explaining yourself over the phone. You therefore need to make a judgment call on which method is more effective. Sometimes, however, you may need to shut down your email program or your instant messaging client and focus solely on the task as hand. You could choose to only open them on schedule, during your breaks and before and after work hours.