Time Management is important if you want to be successful. If you work full-time for yourself you might feel you have plenty of time for everything, but it is a common fact that bad habits will get you sooner than later and in the end you will be leaving money on the table. From my experience Internet Marketers who worked part-time for a long time first then go full-time show much better time management skills compared to someone going full-time cold turkey. Why? If you are already working an 8-10 hour day in a normal job + your part-time business you have to be much more efficient to be successful. If you do this for time long enough this necessity actually becomes a valuable skill. As a successful part-time marketer you cannot just dooze away into lala-land of instant messaging, online gaming, or reading forums and blogs all day long. If you would, your success would suffer. As a full-time marketer, do you work 14 hour days maybe? Look at your habits of what you really do during the day and discover eventually why you could be even more successful if changing some behavior and habits.
A biggie for me was to turn my Blackberry to the “quiet” profile. No more vibrating, no more phone calls ringing through. The interruptions of my work processes suddenly got reduced dramatically and the output of work increased. Unless I am waiting for an urgent email, I check my emails briefly once every 60-90 minutes. Believe it or not, but this works great – once you get past the initial paranoia of missing out.
By all means, instant messaging is a great tool. Instant chats with friends, family, and affiliate managers are awesome. But IM (instant messaging) is also a big distraction or interruption in regards to your work. Being visible and available invites people to “ping” you and before you know it you chatted another 15-30 minutes about some non-work related stuff. Make it a habit to set the IM status to “DO not Disturb” or go invisible completely and ignore any incoming message. Even better, log out of your IM client and turn it back on for 15 minutes every 2 hours. Or schedule (and communicate that schedule) a fixed time during the day when you are available on instant messaging. Then be available for an hour and cover anything you need. Again, with these steps in place your productivity should go high up during the same time of being less connected.
Checking your income stats. Does your Firefox Web Browser has the infamous Google Adsense plugin that shows you income from Google Adsense? Or do you have any toolbars installed that show your affiliate income up to the minute? Unless you are monitoring an extremely busy PPC campaign with high volume for testing, chances are you do not need to know your income every minute. If you are honest and sum up how often you check stats, you easily might spend an hour or more per day just to see how much money you made. This one hour or more could be easily be used to make more money. I usually check my stats in the evenings – in most cases PPC campaigns are paused and numbers are stable. The day is winding down and overall movements in income will be slower and less dramatically than during the day.
There you have it. With a few simple tricks you can still cover all your needs in regards to communication and information, but at the same time be much more productive and earn even more money without spending more time in your office as needed.
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