This post is part of 12 Days of Blogging 2010: 5 Golden Rules. Make sure you check out the rest of the series for more awesome advice from bloggers around the world!
I’m getting better every year with time management. While procrastination used to be my middle name, I’ve learned that the most successful bloggers out there have a plan of attack for things. They manage their time well and, because of that, they seem to have more hours in the day than the rest of us.
Blogging is hard. So many people start blogging thinking that it will be a quick and easy way to make money from home, but there’s a reason why so many blogs are part of the mass Internet graveyard of sites that haven’t been updated since 2006. So today, I wanted to highlight five bloggers who are talking about time management, since they can help you escape this fate.
Sid is one of my favorite bloggers when it comes to productivity and reaching your goals, and this post is one that every person needs to read, whether you’re a blogger or not. We all have a tendency to lie to ourselves, but the sooner we can admit these lies to ourselves, the sooner we can actualy get stuff done! From Sid’s post:
Time is the most valuable resource we have – and yet we often squander it by making small mistakes, and telling lies to ourselves. In my years mentoring and coaching, here are six of the biggest time management lies I’ve found – and I’m no better, I usually catch myself telling at least one of these lies before lunch!
Check out more from Sid’s blog on personal development and follow him on Twitter @SidSavara.
Jimi Jones’ site on productivity has a ton of awesome posts about time management, but I wanted to highlight this one since I’m guilty of wasting time online with things like social media, Skype, and email. The tools of our business can hurt our business! From the post:
One sure-fire way to make time management easier is to eliminate time wasting activities and follow a schedule or to-do list.
I’ve tried to manage my days without them but came to realize that I am just not that great at avoiding things that distract me or cause me to spend too much time doing.
One reason for this is the fact that we assign a greater level of importance to some things than they deserve. We make them a priority over things that are more beneficial to our goals. We allow our focus to shift from what’s most important.
Check out JimiJones.com for more productivity tips and follow him on twitter @JimiJones.
Many of you may know Sonia best from her gig as senior editor at Copyblogger, but her own site, Remarkable Communication, is an awesome resource as well. In this post, she talks about an affliction common among bloggers – awesome ideas that never move past the idea stage. We flake. Writes Sonia:
You, my friend, are a flake. Congratulations. We are a worldwide force. If we could all get ourselves moving in the same direction, we would change the world. However, that will never happen.
Most of us are creative and smart. We’re often very funny and really pretty charming. We get things quicker than a lot of people do.
What we lack is focus. Everything looks good to us. We want dinner in Paris and a dive trip to Fiji. Most of us care more about experiences than about stuff. But because we don’t take care of the “stuff” aspect of life, we don’t have the experiences we really want to have.
If you’re tired of being a flake, check out the full article at Remarkable Communication and don’t forget to follow Sonia @SoniaSimone.
Life Without Pants is a recent blog discovery of mine – god bless recommendations on Twitter. This is one of my favorite new reads (though LWP itself isn’t new – it’s been around since early 2009). This post’s title isn’t a crazy tactic to make you click – Matt really does talk about a way to find 15 extra days of time in your annual schedule. That’s over two weeks of additional productivity! From the post:
Spending more time with you family. Finding time to exercise. Clearing out your e-mail inbox on a regular basis (I know, shocking). What would you do with an extra 15 days each year? 15 days you can take that vacation you’ve been putting off, 15 days to start a business, 15 days to discover a passion you didn’t know existed.
One of the wisest decisions I’ve made this year has also been one of he craziest. But that’s the thing about wisdom – it often parallels insanity.
To learn Matt’s secret, head to Life Without Pants, and make sure to follow Matt on Twitter @mattchevy.
Nathan Hangen first came on my radar when…well, I can’t remember when, to be honest. He’s the MC for Lifebeat (with Oleg Movhov DJing), which is hands down one of my favorite podcasts out there, and he’s involved with a number of other interesting projects, like The Fountainhead Society. This is a guest post he wrote for Remarkablogger, a blog by Michael Martine that I highly recommend if you want to make more money with your blog. From the post:
Seriously, I can sleep in as long as I want without worrying about a boss riding my ass, or a co-worker waiting on me to complete a project. It’s just me baby…me. With freedom, comes responsibility. But then I thought about the other side of the coin.
I’m responsible for my income now, and if I get comfortable being lazy, then that attitude is going to bleed over into other areas of my business.
Sleeping in one day becomes 2…2 becomes a week…suddenly my traffic is dead and I haven’t sold anything for a month…I’m toast.
To read more from this post, head to Remarkablogger. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nhangen and Michael on Twitter @remarkablogger, and check out Nathan’s blog at his Building Digital Empires website.
And just because time management is so important (seriously, nothing else matters if you don’t devote time to your blog!), here are THREE bonus posts about time management:
Add your own posts about time management with a comment below!
This post is part of the 12 Days of Blogging Series. The 5 Golden Rules are:
You can also check out all of the posts in this series here: 12 Days of Blogging 2010
Routines. Set up a weekly routine and put it on your calendar. I like to start my week out by writing on Mondays and Tuesdays. That way I have the rest of the week for social media, meetings and anything else that comes up. Some weeks, I have to rearrange, but I try to stick to that routine. By having it on my calendar, I don’t spend any time figuring out what I need to do. I can be productive as soon as I sit down at my desk.
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