When you work for yourself, on your own, it can be challenging to remain on top of your game every single day. You are keen for your business to succeed, you are enthusiastic about what you do, it is just that some days it can feel like a really hard slog. That’s why today we are sharing with your our 3 tips to stay motivated when working alone.

Set Yourself Goals

First and foremost, you need to set yourself goals. These need to be realistic and broken down into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and so on.

The best way to tackle this one is to think about your long term goals first, and then gradually break them down into smaller chunks. Ensure that you get them all written down and refer to them in order to review them regularly.

You need to set business goals to give yourself a focus and be able to recognise and celebrate successes as you achieve them. It can be all too easy to work hard every day without taking the time to stop and look up and realise how far you have come, or how far you still want to go.

Seek to Learn and Develop All of the Time

When you work for yourself it is really easy to fall into a comfort zone. You have no manager pushing and challenging you, no colleagues nipping at your heels. You know that you need to work hard and you always put the hours in, but how often do you seek to learn new things and develop your skills?

Whether you need to book onto the latest online social media course or get yourself an EWP ticket for training, do push yourself to expand your skill set and therefore improve your business prospects and boost your self-employed income.

Learning new things will give you and extra burst of determination and motivation.

Use Time Blocking

If you find that there are simply not enough hours in the day and you are able to work flat out all day, then credit to you, it sounds as though you do not need time blocking. For those of you who want to work constantly and yet find yourself procrastinating or struggling to be productive, then time blocking could well be your answer.

Let’s assume that you have your daily goals written down for the day, you now need to assign each of the tasks an amount of time and work out which ones are the highest priorities. You can then see how much time you will need to work and you can ensure that you work on your highest priority tasks when you know that you are at your most productive. By working this way, you are not working to the clock, but working to the tasks.

Around each block of tasks, build in a break. This might be just getting up and walking around for a few minutes, perhaps fetching yourself a coffee. You might time block until lunchtime and then plan to walk the dog before moving onto your next block.

Start thinking in terms of tasks and not time and you should find yourself procrastinating less.