Last week and then again this morning on the Moms Morning Show, I shared that I found a work schedule that was really ‘working’ for me. Kelly McCausey urged me to share it, so I am doing that now, and I hope it helps you.
One day I was brainstorming how I could be the most productive with my work time. I was sitting at Barnes and Noble with a huge notebook in front of me and had running around in my head the concept of interruptions, flow, and stuff like that. I’ve heard over and over that it takes your brain 15 minutes to recover from an interruption. Of course, I probably won’t eliminate interruptions entirely for some time while my kids are small, but one way to minimize self imposed interruptions is to focus on just one thing for an entire day.
Now, there are certain things that I do daily, regardless of my bigger picture or whatever project I have going on. I blog on this and my other blog every day, for one thing. I write a to do list in the evening for the next day. And I have some things that take place on a weekly schedule for my podcast.
I sat down and thought about all the individual things an online marketer does, and put them into 4 basic categories:
Content
Progress
Promotion
Analysis
Then I assigned one week to each major theme. So my monthly schedule looks like this:
Content, week One
Progress, week Two
Promotion, week Three
Analysis, week Four
I actually devote 8 days, not 7 to the first 3, so that the least amount of time is spent on week 4 (from 4 to 7 depending on how long the month is).
What do the 4 categories mean?
Content refers to growing my virtual real estate. So that would include:
- Downloading my plr content from the membership sites I belong to
- Deciding where it all should go and editing then publishing it on websites, blogs, and in autoresponders (I outsource much of this)
Progress refers to things that grow my information business like creating a new information product or special project. It also includes writing and editing reports and using those to build my mailing lists or grow my affiliate income. If I don’t have a product to work on, this is when I tweak and improve an existing site.
Promotion refers to marketing. This is the time for writing articles (I send them to a VA for distribution) and press releases (ditto). I also actively find new affiliates during this time.
And finally Analysis. This is the time for analyzing my website stats and seeing what’s working in terms of traffic generation, analyzing affiliate sales and seeing what I want to promote or drop for next month, do organizing like updating my affiliate link document (where I keep my affiliate links and log in info) and bookkeeping.
One thing I’m liking about my new system so far is that I never have to wonder what to do next. My brain is kind of at ease because I know what’s going on for that week. Even if I forget to write my to do list, I know what to tackle that day when I sit down at the computer, and I focus on that main thing for the entire week.
I hope this helps someone else, it’s working great for me!
