In this post, I will share with you 7 tips that you can use as a blogger to make the most productive use of your time and to have a healthy work-life balance.
Most of you reading this post are not yet to a point where your day job is a thing of the past and if you’re in that situation I understand what it’s like to be trying to balance a normal job and build up your side business to help you achieve your goals.
Whether you’re working a normal job or whether you’ve already passed that and you’re working for yourself, either way, I want to share some tips with you to be able to manage your time better.
When you let things get out of balance you can suffer significant mental and emotional damage.
So hopefully, the 7 Time Management Tips for Bloggers that I have to share with you today will help you to be able to better manage your time, to be as productive as possible yet have a healthy balance between the work that you’re doing and the life that you’re living.
Let us get started.
Decide What Matters
This one is the most important tip.
Decide what matters most to you in life.
What are the things that make you happy? What are the things that you want to accomplish? What are the things that you most enjoy? Make sure that your plan centers somewhat around that.
Obviously, you can’t spend all day every day doing exactly what you like and exactly what you want to do. But the things you’re working on need to help point you in that direction. If they don’t what’s the point?
Many times I’ve allowed myself to get so caught up in my work that I start to get just totally drained and the things that matter most to me like my family end up taking backstage and that’s not an acceptable way for me to live my life.
That’s why always decide what matters and allocate time to it to get away from the things that matter a little bit less.
Do 2-Minute Tasks Now
This comes down to sort of the things the daily things that you need to get done.
If there’s a task that comes across your desk that you can accomplish in two minutes or less, don’t put it off if you absolutely can. Just do it right now.
The more tasks that you have on your plate is like having more balls being juggled in the air. The more things that you’re trying to manage all at once the less likely you’re going to be able to do any one of them very well.
So again if you can get something done in two minutes or less just do it now and get it out of the way, check it off and allow yourself to be happy and satisfied and proud of the work that you accomplished.
Make a To-Do List
Any other task that comes across your desk that you can’t do in under two minutes make sure you write it down.
The thing that sort of gives me the heaviest amount of stress and that has the greatest weight on my shoulder is when I have all these things that I know I need to get done and I’m trying to hold them all in my mind until I get to them.
It keeps me from sleeping and it keeps me from doing a very good job of accomplishing anything right now because I’m always worried about what it is I’m gonna have to accomplish next. I feel like I have to keep it in my mind.
If you write it down in a place where you know you’re gonna come back to it later then you can put it off stop worrying about it and it will leave your mind.
Just try it one time and you’ll be amazed how much stress it takes off your shoulders and doing a good job of making a to-do list. A list of things that need to get done will allow you to do a really good job.
Plan Your Day
Actually plan out each day, have a plan for what it is that you need to get accomplished today.
I find it easiest to take that list that I have of things that need to get done prioritize that in the afternoon for the next day and basically lay out my schedule.
Includes what are the main tasks that you need to check off tomorrow and just plan out when you are going to do each one of those and then as you get those all checked off you will know what you’ve accomplished and what you need to accomplish for the day.
This will make you satisfied with your work.
If you don’t have a plan, it doesn’t matter how much ever you accomplish you probably won’t feel satisfied.
So have a plan for the day, know what needs to get accomplished tomorrow and then if you accomplish all of it, you can add one or more things.
Like this, you can have a great sense of accomplishment.
Prioritize Important Tasks
The next tip is to prioritize the big stuff first.
This doesn’t necessarily mean to take the tasks that are gonna take the longest and schedule them first. It’s more about taking the tasks that actually matter (that move the needle in your business) and scheduling them first. Those are the things that are going to have the most impact on your business.
You may have seen this analogy foot before of filling a jar with marbles and sand. If you fill the jar first with sand and then you try to pour in the marbles, the marbles won’t all fit and they’ll spill out the top.
This may seem obvious yet we do this all the time with our work.
From day to day, we get up in the morning, we sit down in our computer and check our email and then we check it again twelve times before lunch. We go check our Google Analytics, Amazon account, other affiliate accounts, bank account, PayPal and more just to kind of see how our business is doing.
We spend our time tweaking little things on the website, maybe adding a little widget or tool here or there or maybe playing a little bit with the design here.
They’re all good things, worthwhile things to do sometimes but not the things that are going to move the needle most in your business.
If you’re in the early days of building your passive income business whether it’s a website or maybe a YouTube channel or a combination of the both, there’s rarely going to be a day where anything is more important than publishing new content.
Publishing new content and making that the priority of your day scheduling that first is going to allow you to actually move the needle in your business. It’s going to allow you to actually be successful.
That is more like putting the marbles in the jar first. When you put the big, more important things in first that all the little things that you want to get done like tweaking a design, you can fit those things in around the big stuff that matters.
In the end, you can fit a lot more work into your day and you’ll be significantly more productive because the things you accomplished are the things that actually matter in your business.
Set Reminders for Time-Bound Tasks
Take the important things that need to get done that may not be able to get done today or tomorrow maybe things that aren’t even things you can totally control when they’re gonna get done and make sure that you put them on your calendar or at least set some sort of reminder for yourself to get to those things.
This kind of goes back to the to-do list. If you have something weighing on you know, there’s some event coming up or you know there’s something that you need to get done this week it’s going to weigh on your shoulders until it either gets done or until you’re confident that it’s going to get done.
By scheduling it out or by setting a reminder you’re going to have the confidence that you know you’re coming back to it so you can leave it for now and focus on the things that you need to get done today including the things that again matter most to you like maybe spending time with your family.
If you don’t do that then the minutes and if you’re lucky hours that you have each day to spend with your family are going to be burdened by those things that are weighing on your shoulders. So put them off, write them down, schedule it out and set yourself a reminder so you know to come back.
Take Time for Yourself
Give yourself a little bit of downtime.
If you’re working a normal job and you’re trying to build up a side business and you have anything else going on in your life you’re probably very busy but nobody can run constantly.
I’ve known a lot of like really long-distance runners and every single one of them has to take downtime. Even in the middle of a 100-mile race, they have to stop at certain points and allow themselves to rest and sleep. Everybody needs that.
If you were trying to run constantly in your business and in your life you are going to burn out.
Allow yourself to take a vacation don’t break the bank and don’t be negligent in the things you need to get done. Maybe you just take half a day maybe you just take two hours to set things aside and go do something that is going to allow you to recharge.
You have to allow yourself to recharge otherwise you will not be productive in any of the work that you do and you might as well not do it at all.
Give yourself a chance to recharge, do something that you love to do and focus on again the things that matter most in your life so that you can remember why it is that you’re building this business in the first place.
Conclusion: Time Management Tips for Bloggers
These are my seven tips for time management and work-life balance for bloggers or internet marketers. It’s really easy to let that balance get out of whack and letting it get out of whack is going to cause you emotional and mental turmoil.
It’s gonna prevent you from actually accomplishing what it is that you want to accomplish. So if you’re trying to be productive in your business but just not quite getting done everything that you know, you need to get done try incorporating some of these tips into your life.
If nothing else allow yourself to take a little short vacation from maybe your business or from your problems even if that vacation is just a couple hours.
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