This is a topic where I almost do not know where to start. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything I have to do to move my internet business along.

Just yesterday I watched a video by Liz Tomey where she gives tips on how you keep your focus and keep yourself on track. Her suggestion is to only work on tasks that are directly related to making money. Make a list consisting of one hour blocks of time with these money related tasks. She continued by saying that you should make sure that when you were working during those one hour blocks that you have no distractions. She even says get a babysitter for your kids if they are a problem. Of course, she quickly hastens to say that no one watches her kids but her. Anyway the idea is that you completely focus on what you are doing. Liz guarantees that by following this routine that you will move toward successful money making.

Now I can tell you from my own experience that one hour blocks do not work for me. And here is another thing. I like one block for learning something new or organizing to make the rest of the tasks go smoother. Another successful marketer named Robert Plank says he uses 4 daily two-hour blocks of time. What Robert does is to try to work only 8 hours a day so he can spend time with his family. Again he says focus and make sure you have undisturbed time. He says that this works for him.

There is one thing I can say for sure. Planning what you are going to do is far better than no planning at all. I am the queen of to do lists and action plans. You definitely will get more done and more projects finished. I admit that your days will often take off on their own and you do not follow your plan at all. Yes, and another thing, I confess I am a workaholic and stay on task like my life depends on my completing a project. But, I do not mind telling you that this internet marketing thing has challenged me to the hilt. Every night before I quit for the day, I set out what I need to do the next day. Sometimes I have more tasks than I have day. That is when prioritizing comes in. What tasks are more important to get accomplished first? Yes, and I use the Google calendar to chart events that have to be repeated for my websites. Laying it all out will make you realize how much you should be doing. You won’t skip steps like social bookmarking, pinging, making rss feeds etc.

O.K. everyone says outsource. I discovered that even outsourcing requires that you plan the tasks you want your helpers to do and you have to communicate with them regularly. All of that takes time. Depending on the difficulty of the task you have them doing, it may take quite a bit of your time getting them through their execution portion. Sometimes you have to look at the hours they put into the task that you might have had to put in to rationalize why it was worth your hours of supervising. Outsourcing at times seems to make more work–and supervising is hard to schedule.

Recently, I was very fortunate to spend two days with my mentor who is a 7 figure marketer. He has quite a few people working for him in an office that he has established for them. In addition to his in-office employees who are full time, he has workers not on site doing article marketing, software designing, etc. Now he spends some bucks maintaining that situation, but he accomplishes a lot every week. He knows he has people who he can depend on and most importantly delegate too. For me that would be the perfect situation—-but who wants that kind of overhead and that kind of pressure. Right now he is loving every minute of it. At least I get to see how that half lives.

Here is an example of how my time gets away from me. I joined Traffic Geyser to distribute videos. There was a learning curve to using it. The Traffic Geyser guys have been saying that the videos made by a service called Article Video Robot do not get any traffic. I hope I am quoting them correctly, but the groups said only good videos really do well. So I bought a set of videos called Camtasia Cash that is super fabulous that teaches how to use every feature of Camtasia. There was something like 22 hours of video to watch, but I did it by devoting about 90 minutes a day to watching them. I was competent, but really needed to feel more comfortable using that tool.

In addition, I decided to master the art of Powerpoint. I thought I knew how to use ppt but Microsoft Office 2007 is totally different so I had to learn how to use it again. All the terminology and the task bar had been totally changed. Anyway, I spent several hours figuring out how to import templates and use flash animation on the slides. Like I said, I am like a dog with a bone. You see where this is all going. Now I know how to use Camtasia like a pro and I have powerpoint making down so I am ready to make super-fantastic videos to distribute.

Now to get my assembly line going, let me talk about using outsourcing. My article marketing lady is going to convert some of the articles into powerpoint slides for me. She is breaking the documents down into slides. So my plan is to just be able to take the slides she prepares, redo them on the templates, and convert them to super fantastic videos that get traffic. For a while, I am going to do the voiceovers.

Can you see how much time this all took? Try scheduling all of that in. Everyday, I will have to schedule a 2-hour block to do videos. Hopefully, that will give me time to get at least 2 done. Unfortunately, you just have so many two hour blocks. Of course, all of the other tasks continue.

Basically what I need is a day stretcher. Do you see why I am so confused—and frustrated?

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