Time Management for Internet Marketers

If you’re an online network marketer, or have any sort of Internet business, you spend a lot of time in front of your computer. Like many, you may be working a full-time day job and building an online business during your personal time. Your goal may be to eventually quit your day job and work from home, so you spend as much time as you can working your online business.

At times you will feel overwhelmed, and badly squeezed for time. After all, our lives are filled with many things we need to do, and our online business activities can only have a certain part of our personal time. How can you get more done with the time you do have to spend online? If you have two hours you can work your business, can you squeeze some extra productive time out of that by eliminating time-wasting activities?

Here are a few things you might consider. Most of us tend to waste precious time without even realizing it.

1) Prioritize your time. Write down the things that are most important to accomplish in the time you have each day. Review what you have written periodically while you work, to ensure that you stay focused.

2) While you are working online, it’s really easy to get distracted. Do you find yourself clicking links not really related to the business at hand? If you see something interesting you want to check out, bookmark it and consider visiting at a later time when you are not engaged in business activities. In my case, following this rule has saved me a LOT of wasted time online.

3) Use a digital kitchen timer to help you stay focused. For example, if you know you need to devote 30 minutes to working on a new sales page for your web site, set the timer. Work intensively for those 30 minutes, then move on to your next task for the day. Doing this can help you avoid time-wasting habits like working 10 minutes, getting up an piddling with something for 5 minutes, working another 15 minutes, and so on. Sometime it’s hard to focus down on a particular project, and setting the timer helps you stay on track.

4) Limit the time you spend on email to answering inquiries and responses related to your business. Most of us get lots of junk mail – for example, we have friends who constantly forward jokes. It’s certainly tempting to open those emails to see what’s there, but it’s amazing the amount of time you can kill just by reading those things. Create a new folder in your email program and drag mail like this into it for later review. Then, when you are relaxing and not working your business, spend whatever time you wish looking at them.

These are just a few things you can do to increase the amount of time you have for your online business activities. As you go about prioritizing tasks and paying attention to your time, you’ll easily find other ways to squeeze out even more productive time for your online business.