Skip to content
{ 2010 03 04 }

Time Management and Keeping Things on Track

I’ve been thinking about the multi-tasking post on this blog and how I handle (or not) working on multiple projects. Quite often I’ll find myself dreaming about some new project to work on and before you know it I’ve either started researching or implementing something. Then I sort of wake up and realise I’m wasting my time since I’m not working on my main money earning projects.

One of the biggest problems I find with beginning to research things is that curiosity gets the better of me so that I keep coming back to the same distractions again and again, ending up with more and more reasons to divert from my main projects.

One of the biggest time-wasters I indulge in is SEO. Trying to build links can often turn into a big pit of wasted time. Going onto  forums to get a few more sig links can end up wasting hours if I’m not careful. I’ve never been good at managing the time I spend doing SEO.

Being human, I realise that I can’t concentrate on a single thing all the time. However, maybe I need to think about non-software related items when I’m bored so that at least I won’t end up with too many projects in progress.

So, my belated New Year’s resolutions:-

  1. Spend less time working, so I’m less likely to be bored/ jaded when trying to knuckle down
  2. Waste less time working on speculative projects
  3. When I do research, confine myself to things related to those projects that already earn me money

Similar Posts:

  • Manageable multi tasking
  • Motivation in an uncertain financial period?
  • How do you multi task with multiple project?
  • Ideas on how keep writing a news blog
  • Keeping a note of your daily / weekly progress
    		•

    Posted by MikeL on Thursday, March 4, 2010, at 4:40 pm. Filed under Motivation + Multi tasking. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

    { 1 } Comments

    1. Dipsy | March 4, 2010 at 5:33 pm | Permalink

      I didn’t get round to replying to your last comment on the other post, so I’m combining them here.

      I did intend to work on the most profitable projects last year but ended up working on a project which I thought had the most potential. I’d been successfully not trying to start new projects until
      this year, when I’ve done nothing but.

      I’ve always found it difficult to find time to read books, I’ve had a marketing book for a year which I hadn’t opened. At the moment, during the day I’m working through a teach yourself book for
      iPhone development. On an evening I’ve been doing softtester pad spider program fixes and at bedtime I’ve been reading my marketing book.

      I don’t do iPhone stuff everyday, I’ve had to do Softtester stuff, but I feel happy that I’ve been able to do three things at once.

      With the iPhone learning, I can only do when its quiet and when no child is in the house. Also I can only read at bed time. So once the softtester program stuff is done I guess I can go back to my K
      program.

      I think this approach where I’m swapping things breathes life into each of these activities.

      I do think that you need to factor in speculative projects, but I think its would be best to find one time each week for them. After all, you can’t tell if something will earn money until you try them.

      I couldn’t do iPhone or reading at the weekend and in the evenings, but I can do some simple vb.net programming on my laptop.

    Post a Comment

    You must be logged in to post a comment.