Managing Time Effectively as a Blogger

John Chow www.johnchow.com produced a terrific video, which you can see right here .

The premise was that although he enjoys the money he makes from his online businesses, the thing he most relishes is the time it creates for him. In the video, you’ll see him in the park with his daughter, at a time of day when the rest of the world is hard at work in their offices. He and Sally have the park to themselves!

Like most early stage bloggers, my focus is on earning enough money to become a full time blogger, but I do dream of having that freedom to be able to spend time with the kids, to plan my day exactly the way I want to. It’s a paradox that you can actually save so much time, when you are in control of it! You can go to the bank at 08.30 when there are no queues, you can do your shopping at 4PM on a Wednesday when nobody else is there and because of that you’ll end up with even more time to spare to do the things you want to do.

Time is like a bank account, but you never know how much you have in the bank, and you can only withdraw from it – you can never pay more in. We should treat it as our most precious resource.

As bloggers, we do have the benefit of being, by and large, in control of our time and work planning. But we do have the added complication of having to multi task. How many tabs do you have open in your browser while you are reading this? How many times have you checked Twitter in the last 10 minutes? Are you itching to look at your site statistics right now?

This piece is intended to provide you with some simple tips for making the best use of your work time, in the kind of high task load environment we all work in.

1/ Planning
Planning is essential to be effective. If you just dive onto your PC without a plan, you’ll end up working for hours, but are unlikely to achieve all the things you need to. You have to work your own plan out, but I’m happy to share mine with you, to give you some ideas. I have found that I work best in two hour bursts, and as I work on three blogs, that means 6 hours a day, which is quite tough when working full time as well!

I break each two hour burst into segments:
• For 30 minutes I catch up on contacts, with Twitter, RSS feeds, email, comments on the site, and I also check my stats via Google Analytics, my affiliate dashboards and my Adsense account.

• For 60 minutes I write posts, which I already have planned in my head.

• For the final 30 minutes I focus on site administration – things like the look of the pages, adding new features and so on.

2/ Avoid Interruptions
This can be tough – the phone will ring, a member of the family will want some help or you’ll an email will pop up that you really, really want to look at now. Try to avoid breaking your focus – each time you stop what you are doing, start something else, then restart the original task will cost you time while you disconnect from one thing and refocus your mind. It may only cost you 20 seconds, but if you do it 30 times a day, you’ll lose an hour a week!

3/ Recognize “Time Thieves”
There are some people we meet and know in life who are “Time thieves.” They are usually people who are very good at getting things done for them. Have you ever had a conversation like this?

“Tom, can I call you back later, I’m in the middle of something right now’”
“It’ll only take a minute, Mike, what I wanted to ask you was………..”

And then you’ll end up on a 20 minute call helping Tom deal with his latest computer issue.

The only way to deal with time thieves is to be firm with them. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help people, but you must do so on your own terms and at a time that suits you. Don’t be afraid not to answer the call – let the Tom’s of this world wait for you to get back to them – you’ll be amazed how often they solve the problem themselves once they can’t get you!

4/ Be Orderly!
Being disorganized can waste tons of time. Are you wading through pieces of paper on your desk? Does it take you ages to remember where you stored that logo on your PC? Is your desktop a huge clutter of stuff you don’t ever use?

Keep your files and folders organized, keep your desk clean and tidy and you’ll find your frustration levels decrease dramatically.

5/ Use a Daily “To do” List
I covered this in a previous article you can read here , but essentially you should list everything you need to do in a session or day, prioritize it and work through each task until it’s completed. That way the important tasks always get done and you have the satisfaction of crossing each out as you achieve it.

Time management is a huge topic, but by following these five, simple points, you’ll have a little more of it to spend doing a lot more of what you want to do.