Did you know time management tips for entrepreneurs is actually a controversial topic?
People question whether entrepreneurs need tips for managing time or prioritizing time.
Whether you are an entrepreneur or a hobby blogger, you can be more productive.
Guest author Tim Salivan explains 8 tips for spending the 24 hours you have in each day more productively.
When youâre done, youâll know how to be more productive at work.
These tips apply to any work, even when youâre working on your blog.
Do you know how to be more productive at work?
8 Time-Wasting Blogging Mistakes
by Tim Salivan
What Wastes My Time When I Blog
The web has a lot of things that will literally waste your time but sometimes those activities are camouflaged as âresearchâ, âinformationâ and ânetworkingâ. Letâs be honest to ourselves; not all the time you spend in cyber space is productive. Since I started my software reviews and coupons blog, this truth has been haunting me.
I was well aware of the 80/20 Pareto principle â that 20% of my activities produce 80% of the results â and wanted to apply it to my working life in order to focus on the more important tasks.
I searched through all my online activities and thoroughly picked out those time wasters in order to make my blogging endeavors more effective and my time more productive. Here are some activities I think you should examine.
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Stop The YouTube Madness!
Is it just me or do you also end up watching funny videos with cute cats or people falling after a tutorial or a webinar on YouTube? What about checking your Facebook wall every other minute? Do these sound familiar? (BTW let me check my snaptchat for a second.)
The importance of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube cannot be over emphasized. They are very good avenues for growing our businesses and gaining an active online presence.
As beneficial as they are, they are also very good factors that can suck away your time without you knowing it.
Most of these sites are addictive in nature and you canât possibly get in there and out as you planned if you are not disciplined. Watching, uploading and downloading pictures, commenting on group posts, etc, has replaced most of our networking activities on Facebook.
You will always want to know whether somebody had a comment on your tweet, or perhaps to look out for a funny video or check out how many people have watched your video on Youtube.
If you want to be safe from these time-crippling activities, it is better if you donât go there at all at the first time or be disciplined enough to take that back step when you have to; if not, your online blogging business suffers the consequences.
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Stop Searching For Shortcuts
If there is anything you need to do to achieve an overnight success it would probably be on sale now and be so expensive I am sure I may not even be able to afford it.
From the short experience Iâve got with my blog, there is no such thing as a short cut. Donât spend your entire blogging time looking for one; you wonât find anything. Better get to work now. I recommend Sean Stephensonâs motivational book: âGet Off Your Butâ.
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Donât Let Your Goal Suffer
Once you have set a goal, keep it in mind and never let go. It is always better to have a list of things that will lead you to your goal and stick with them. Yes, once you get your concentration in one thing, it goes out of another. For example, if you pay too much attention to the design and layout of your site, you will lose focus on the urgent things you need to do to achieve your goal.
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Stop Doing Too Many Things At The Same Time
It is good to plan ahead and analyze all the surrounding factors, but doing that excessively several times a day will definitely have a negative effect.
Planning and envisioning is good but getting things done is what brings tangible results. You donât really need to plan and analyze everything; concentrate on the immediate tasks.
Get active; first do the hard stuff on the list (read the âEat That Frogâ by Brian Tracy) and face one thing at a time. âThe shorter way to do many things is to do only one thing at a timeâ â Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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Checking Every Email Is Not Your Priority
If you come online every morning and the first thing you do is open your mail box and stay there for the next one hour, you are not doing yourself any good.
Set out a specific period for checking your mail and donât go there any other time of the day. Avoid opening forwarded junk i.e. Guinness Record videos or nature photos slide presentation etc. when you should actually read your business e-mail.
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Stay Organized And Keep Your Focus
One of the major time wasters of every blogger is being disorganized. The time you spend searching for items may have been put perfectly into working on your business. Keep a clean arena and stay tidy.
In fact, take a look at your desk right now and see what papers and other things really need to be right there. Be organized in your computer folders too. Better keep your business related documents in a main folder and use sub-folders with clear titles for your various tasks. This will save you a lot of time and will help you stay focused and motivated.
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Avoid Too Much Information
When you gather more ideas than you have to, you may get overwhelmed, not knowing what to do first and where to start. Believe me it happens. Take one step at a time and act on every idea you know will bring you closer to your dreams. Check out their impact before taking another. This will also help you identify what is not working and the things you will have to concentrate on.
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Learn To Say No
Donât act to please people around you. Never give other people the key to the decision of your business. Take full control of your time and never accommodate any appointment, meeting or call, when it is not right for you. Learn to say NO when it is not right for you.
Bonus Tip
This bonus tip offers an additional hack explaining how to be more productive at work.
Make Automation Your Best Buddy
Automation can boost your productivity and how Stillio, a web archiving tool, can help you with automating a lot of your daily tasks.
Wrapping Up: How to Be More Productive at Work
To wrap this up; do not confuse your being busy with being productive. These are totally two different terms. Being in the ârat raceâ is nothing but a waste of your time. Donât forget that results are counted with numbers and statistics, not by how much time you sacrifice in front of your PC or how much tired you feel at the end of the day.
Author Bio: Tim Salivan is an internet marketing consultant for online businesses based Greece. Together with his team run several tech and health blogs providing software reviews and discount coupons. He is also one of the editors in Qetes and Spiqy.
Readers, please share so other bloggers and entrepreneurs discover how to be more productive at work even when working on their blogs.
I look forward to your suggestions in the comments. Do you know how to be more productive at work.
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