Time Management Pt.3 - Do What's Important, Now!

In previous posts I've talked about the importance of learning how to correctly value your time, and we looked at the idea that once you know how to value your time you can start to assign time correctly. With that understood, the next step is to ensure that we maximise the time we allocate to our business. If we allow ourselves 3 hours in a day to work on our business, we need to know that the 3 hours is being used effectively. 


There's a couple of methods that we can use to help maximise our use time. The first is to only do the stuff that makes the best use of you and your skills. Yes there are always going to be occasions where you have to do things that aren't particular interesting or inspiring, but you should always try to avoid spending large amounts of your time doing things that you could get someone else to do for a bit of money. 


If you're in the offline SEO consulting business for example, would your time be better spent dealing with your clients and planning a new marketing campaign to bring in more business, or would it be best spent building backlinks to a client's site? Now you may actually think it's the latter, but that all depends on your skillset. Personally, I get people to make backlinks for me, because they're time consuming, and I think there's more value to my business when I spend the time organising business development. 


But that's just me. 


If you're an affiliate marketer, is your time better spent writing up boring content to go on a small niche auto-blog website, or is it better spent creating exciting and inspiring content you can offer to your list, building your relationship with them in the process?


Again, I know which I would go with, but you get the point. 


Outsource wherever and whenever possible, unless it's something that you and only you can add value to. 


The second method is to work off of lists. I love lists because of their simplicity; You prioritise your workload, establish what needs doing and in what order, and mark stuff off as you go along. 


That's it - There's no hidden science behind creating to-do lists, it's as simple as that. But they work, and they also work alongside a wonderful time management technique known as the Pomodoro technique. 


I'm not going to waste your time trying to summarise this technique here, instead I'm going to suggest you go and read up on it yourself. It's available as a free PDF from it's own website. 


That's it for my time management ideas for now - More to come in the future


Mark