Day Eleven - Managing Time to be a Better Blogger

I was educated in England, but live in central Europe now, and I miss the UK tradition of adding an extra day to the holiday and calling it boxing day.
Here, we don’t do that, and therefore day eleven was a normal working day, which meant a day of problems to deal with for me.

You may remember Martin, who we had to make redundant. Well our accountant decided that he wouldn’t provide the necessary papers for him until we paid our bill, which was around 600 dollars. We simply didn’t have the money, but we couldn’t let Martin down. In the end we managed to scrape around half the money up in cash, which then meant I had to travel into town to pay it in, rather than transfer it online. This is what I mean when I talk about the amount of time you waste when you have no money – if the cash had been in the bank it would have taken 3 seconds to transfer it, but as it wasn’t I used up two hours of time and a load of fuel to do the job. In the end the accountant relented and produced the papers, so that’s one more difficult situation dealt with, but it was touch and go for a while.

It’s so frustrating - we seem to have everything for sale at the moment – one of the cars, the house we bought as an investment, and even a jet ski. If the house, or even the lesser items would sell, it would greatly alleviate our position, and we wouldn’t be scraping around for a few hundred dollars. The phrase "How the mighty are fallen" reverberates around in my head every day, despite the fact that I was never really mighty!

We spent most of the day working on a new website for our main business. The research I have done for this blog stood me in good stead, and I applied a lot of the learning to it. The trouble is I am now so focused on this new career as a blogger, I’m finding it difficult to stay on the ball with my existing business. This is something I have to overcome as this blog, and the other one I have now started, are not going to pay any decent money for several more months.

Which brings me to the key point of this post, the issue of time management, and I guess this is one faced by all bloggers, especially those of us with challenging objectives. For me, these are very early days, and I am keen and desperate to succeed to the point where I can leave behind my failing offline business, and as a result, I’m working at this almost every waking hour. Yesterday, for example I continued working until well after one AM, despite knowing I needed to be up early this morning. This left me tired and quite bad tempered all day, and reading the posts I made at that time of night, well, they will need revising! The other big problem I’m likely to face is alienation from the family. I’m lucky as my wife is 100% behind what I’m doing, but the kids are already wondering why I’m spending all my free time working on the PC.

I decided on a solution, which should mean I get a decent amount of time to work on my blogs, and still have time for family related stuff, as well as general “life housekeeping”. I’m going to devote 6 hours a day, every day, to my new role as a blogger. But, I’m going to only allow myself to work on the blogs in two hour “bursts”. That will prevent me from becoming jaded and force me to go and do something else, like spend time with the kids, walk the dog, wash the car, or read a book.

At weekends, I’ll do my three bursts when it suits me, but during the week, I’m going to have to adjust my lifestyle, and I will get up earlier, and do my first stint from 0700 until 0900, the second in the middle of the day, and the third after dinner – this will accommodate working a full time job as well.

Today has been my first day of doing this, and it has gone well, and I believe the quality of my work has improved, so let’s hope it stays that way. It will take a good deal of self discipline, but I hope to stay focused, and this should prevent burnout, which I think was a very real possibility the way I was going.

This was my own way of dealing with my current situation, but if you want to read lots and lots of high quality personal development advice, you should visit www.stevepavlina.com it's a site I've spent a great deal of time on, and is full of excellent, and in some cases, radical, ideas.