Making the Most of Your Limited Time

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By Philia, Social Media Springboard

From time to time, I’m asked about how it is that I’m able to manage my Internet marketing business while holding down a full time job and raising a family. Some time ago, I addressed this question in the TKA private forum. I’ve received feedback from several members about how that post was quite helpful to them so I thought that it would be worthwhile to revisit the matter today.

It’s my hope that this post will help some of you who may be struggling to find the time to spend growing your online businesses, develop work habits that will help you achieve your goals.

Regardless of Who You Are, Everyone Faces Time Management Challenges

One thing that many of us struggle with is finding the time to sit down at our computers and write articles or promote our websites on a consistent basis. Whether you have a lot of free time or you have very little, the chances are high that you could make better use of your time if you employ a couple of strategies that I’ll talk about today.

The two main issues that I’ll be writing about today are having good work flow systems in place and developing the self-discipline to manage your time effectively.

The Importance of Developing Good Work Flow Systems

Without good systems in place, I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the work accomplished that I do. The tasks that many of us here at The Keyword Academy do are very similar. We do keyword research, we build websites, we write content for these websites, and we promote them through either link building or other website promotion strategies.

While the tasks are the same, some members are able to perform these tasks on a much larger scale than others. Oftentimes, it’s even the people who have less time to actually sit down at the computer who get more work accomplished.

For me, the reason I’m able to produce a massive amount of content with limited time is because I have developed efficient systems that help me to make the best use of my limited time. Many of us feel like we are working as efficiently as possible but you would be surprised how taking a good hard look at your workflow can make you even more efficient.

Because much of what we do tends to be quite repetitive, anything we can do to streamline our daily workflow will result in us being able to get more done in the same amount of time.

What I like to do is make a flow chart that shows every step that goes into performing a certain task. Then I ask myself two questions. The first is, “are all of these steps really necessary?” and the second is, “how can I perform each of these steps faster with less effort?”

Eliminate Low Value Tasks and Focus On High Value Tasks

When I first got started in this business, I spent a lot of time in front of my computer doing what I considered to be working. Now that I’ve been at this a while, I realize that most of my time was being spent on low value tasks that simply occupied my time and made me feel like I was working hard.

There’s no question that I was putting the time in but I hadn’t yet learned the importance of identifying low value tasks and eliminating them out of my daily workflow.

Let me give you an example of what my days were like back then.

The first thing I would do was check my many email accounts and respond to any emails that I thought I needed to respond to.Then I would go to the forums to see if anyone had replied to any of my posts and find out what the latest forum chatter was.Then I would pop in at a number of other MMO blogs and forums that I was in the habit of visiting each day.Lastly, I would spend whatever time I had remaining to write some articles for my websites as well as some articles to use for backlinking.

One day when I was feeling really frustrated because I wasn’t getting enough work done, I took a much closer look at my work patterns and asked myself some tough questions. I was putting a lot of hours in but I rarely had much to show for my time. You might say that I was lying to myself by convincing myself that I was actually working when, in reality, all I was doing was wasting time.

What I was actually doing was spending 50% or more of my efforts on tasks that wouldn’t have any impact on the growth of my business whatsoever. This is when I first sat down and analyzed my work habits to identify the low value tasks that could be culled out of my daily workflow.

After I made the list, I was blown away when I realized how inefficient I was with my time. Here are some examples of tasks that I thought were so important at the time.

Low value task: I was keeping detailed spreadsheets to record every link that I had ever built along with what I considered to be important details about each link. Solution

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