One of the attractions of working from home is the associated freedom, no time sheets, and no one to pester you about hours and still make money online. While an attractive concept, it can have a downside, for one the risk you are wasting a lot of time.

My husband uses a lot of his time filling out spreadsheets to account for his daily work. He works for a rather large engineering corporation and his daily work usually includes a variety of different tasks. He loathes this process and frequently dismisses it as a waste of time, at least until my home business took off and I realized there not enough hours in the day to accomplish all my goals.

I now have my own spreadsheet I need to keep control of the day and productivity. If you don’t think you need a schedule for your home businesses then think again — and read on.

After a few pretty unproductive days when my task list grew insanely, I knew something had to change.

Granted I was going through a rough period of time. My home business was experiencing growing pains and taking up more than the usual time, my four-year-old was only in preschool part-time, my husband wasn’t pulling his weight on the home front, and my extended family was experiencing a number of crises.

After some research and chatting with friends, I discovered five reasons to embrace the scheduled life style.

1. It becomes easy to waste time on low priority tasks
2. It’s too easy to get sidetracked or distracted from your current task
3. Unscheduled work time often overlaps into free time to the point where you have none at allUnscheduled work time often completely consumes your free time
4. If free time eats away at work time, you may fall behind on tasks
5. Concentrating time and effort on the highest priorities really gets more done

I’m not the only work at home business person encompassing the schedule. I quite recently took part in an online forum where men and women had moved to embrace it — and found it more freeing than restrictive.  

If you find it confusing setting up your schedule and priorities for the day and week then perhaps your significant other or a friend can help you set your schedule.