One of the toughest obstacles for working for yourself, especially online, is being able to manage your time properly. There are so many distractions and with nobody to look over your shoulder at all times to tell you to get crackin', the potential for disaster is always looming. The worst part about time management online is that most don't even realize how poorly that they are spending their work days. Answering emails here and there, trolling forums and social media are all forms of procrastination that need to be cut out of your daily work schedule. Please don't misunderstand me that forum marketing and social media marketing are a waste of time, we all know the difference of when we are being productive and when we're just browsing to put off doing our work. If you intend on writing an article about SEO, stop browsing topics on a forum about PPC and if you intend on spreading the word about your business or product through Facebook, stop browsing pictures of the crazy night that you had over the weekend! The easy solution to improving how you spend your time working on your business is to set a daily or weekly schedule for yourself. I tend to do both, I'll usually set my schedule for the upcoming week on Sunday night and then narrow that schedule down to hourly or bihourly tasks for each individual day. My schedule is always changing but to give you a better idea of what my work week looks like for this week, it goes something like this:
Raising children and taking care of the responsibilities of a household can keep you quite busy. When you add all of the activities that children are involved in, the stress can start to spin out of control.
Tuesday - Submissions/Link building Hopefully all of my blog posts will be indexed by the time I start my day on Tuesday (probably a little bit later than most as I unfortunately can't break my habit of being an intolerable night owl). After the indexing, I have a tedious day of article/video submission and link building ahead of me. This is easily my least favorite day of the week but I'll set an hourly schedule with a few breaks in between to make it not AS bad. If I'm completely not in the mood (rarely), I'll outsource. *Note that this does not include my daily forum marketing. I truly enjoy helping and getting helped in forums so I pretty much just do that in my free time and don't chalk that up to work.
So how do we break the cycle of poorly managing our time and being stressed out? Here is a tip sheet to offer some suggestions.
Thursday - Researching My Own Business The key to any business is to always try to test and improve your campaigns. Whether it's a squeeze page, sales page, subject line of an email or any other facet of an online company, everything needs to be tested. This is often an overlooked part of the online world so I make sure that I dedicate an entire day to the process to stay one step ahead and to maximize my efforts.
Friday - Miscellaneous Friday is kind of a lax makeup day for me. I'll generally have worked 30+ hours on the week coming into the day and usually just spend time tightening up all of the work that I've done. Whether it's building more links, editing articles that may have been rejected for whatever reason, doing more research for my businesses, networking with other list owners to plan an ad swap or whatever the day calls for. It's hard not to look forward to Friday's knowing that there is a cold beer waiting for me once I hear my alarm go off that the day is done.
Make sure that you put on the full armour of God to protect you from Satan's attacks. God asks us to test him. Test Him to see if He gives us more time when we give it to Him first. Meditate on this scripture: "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12
Raising children and taking care of the responsibilities of a household can keep you quite busy. When you add all of the activities that children are involved in, the stress can start to spin out of control.
Tuesday - Submissions/Link building Hopefully all of my blog posts will be indexed by the time I start my day on Tuesday (probably a little bit later than most as I unfortunately can't break my habit of being an intolerable night owl). After the indexing, I have a tedious day of article/video submission and link building ahead of me. This is easily my least favorite day of the week but I'll set an hourly schedule with a few breaks in between to make it not AS bad. If I'm completely not in the mood (rarely), I'll outsource. *Note that this does not include my daily forum marketing. I truly enjoy helping and getting helped in forums so I pretty much just do that in my free time and don't chalk that up to work.
So how do we break the cycle of poorly managing our time and being stressed out? Here is a tip sheet to offer some suggestions.
Thursday - Researching My Own Business The key to any business is to always try to test and improve your campaigns. Whether it's a squeeze page, sales page, subject line of an email or any other facet of an online company, everything needs to be tested. This is often an overlooked part of the online world so I make sure that I dedicate an entire day to the process to stay one step ahead and to maximize my efforts.
Friday - Miscellaneous Friday is kind of a lax makeup day for me. I'll generally have worked 30+ hours on the week coming into the day and usually just spend time tightening up all of the work that I've done. Whether it's building more links, editing articles that may have been rejected for whatever reason, doing more research for my businesses, networking with other list owners to plan an ad swap or whatever the day calls for. It's hard not to look forward to Friday's knowing that there is a cold beer waiting for me once I hear my alarm go off that the day is done.
Make sure that you put on the full armour of God to protect you from Satan's attacks. God asks us to test him. Test Him to see if He gives us more time when we give it to Him first. Meditate on this scripture: "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12
