Since many of you are here because you received 6 Week Recipe to Creating Digital Products, let’s talk about getting organized as you work on your first product at home. How to manage your time working at home can be difficult if you’re not paying attention.
I’m in the process of creating a small product for homeschoolers….for FREE. Oh, I plan to sell it but initially it will be free. When I create free products, I really need to watch how I manage my time.
I don’t know about you, but I can waste hours on the computer. I start working on a product to sell and before you know it, 3 hours have passed. All I have is a one-page outline. Can you relate? What did I do during those 3 “work” hours?
I use two simple tools to keep me on track while I work at home. I hope you will implement a time management strategy this week that helps you follow a system of how to manage your time.
I use two simple tools to keep me on track while I work at home. Sometimes we forget to use simple tools that we already know about. I hope you will implement a time management strategy this week that helps you follow a system of how to manage your time.
Use a Timer
When I set a timer for a task, I am more focused. I also close facebook and gmail so I’m not distracted. For me, using the timer is like a race. I’m racing against the clock to complete a task so I stay focused.
It’s time to write this email, so I think it will take me one hour (30 minutes to write the email and put it on aweber, 30 minutes to put it on my blog and create an image). In the end, it took me 57 minutes, so I did pretty well. I have 3 minutes for me to send it to you.
Record Your Time
I’ve been using this tool for the past several months. Every time I sit down to work, I open up a google docs spreadsheet. I enter the day/time that I begin and the task I will complete. When I am finished, I enter the ending time. Today I wrote FamilyEbiz email / blog post.
At the end of the week or month, I highlight the activities using a different color for each business. The colored highlighting makes it easier to see how much time I spend on my homeschool business or my marketing business or simply doing office work like bookkeeping.
The spreadsheet has been a valuable tool for me to see how I am really spending my time. I compare my time with my profit in that niche to make future decisions about my different businesses.
If you’d like a copy of my very simple time keeper, enter your name below and you’ll get it in your inbox.
These are simple tools I use. What about you? How do you manage your time in your online business?
How do you decide if you are using your time in the best way possible?
