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One of the big advantages to having a home-based business that makes use of the Internet is that you enjoy the flexibility to design your own schedule in a way that best suits your temperament and lifestyle.

This can also be a disadvantage, because it is easy to become distracted and lose your focus when that schedule is disrupted for some reason, and who amongst us small one or two person businesses has not discovered that distractions are the order of the day, rather than the exception?

The desire to maintain strict adherence to an ideal schedule can be stressful when things do not go according to plan, so one of the elements of an effective schedule is the necessity to give yourself a bit longer than anticipated to perform critical tasks. Many people get caught in a trap of estimating task time according to a previous occasion where everything went perfectly and a task was completed in record time. This built-in time cushion will work wonders for your anxiety level and many productivity experts counsel clients that slowing down will actually permit them to accomplish more!

You should also spend some time reflecting on when you are at your most productive. A person with a night owl temperament might do well to delay an important job function until later in the day, after doing some less significant tasks as a warm up. This technique could prove detrimental, however, to someone with an early bird temperament who hits the ground running in the morning.

In a small business, particularly one where customers might be in distant time zones, to create an ideal scheduling scenario might seem daunting, but a willingness to evaluate routine tasks and build in some flex time that can be utilised to deal with the unexpected events is a bona fide way to increase productivity and make things go more smoothly.