Time-Waster & Time-Fillers

With schedule getting tighter and tighter I was starting to fear that I will not be able to do things that have to be done. So yesterday I sat down and wrote Top5 of my time wasters and decided to get rid of them once and for all.

It’s day 1 of my “Eliminate Time Waste” journey, but I’m already aware of where my time did go before — now I have more than enough!

First of all, I’m an online guy, so most of my time is spent online But there are too many distractors to keep you focused on your tasks 100%. Here’s mine Top 5:

1. Travian. It’s a new online madness. A simpler form of WoW (you should make a market research and see if you could sell anything to these guys, because they are CRAZY about this game and there are thousands of them!) I would spend about an hour a day playing, building, trading etc. And I don’t get any financial benefit from doing it! Obviously it’s a time waster, so I gave away my account, deleted all the bookmarks to that page and now have 1 hour more in my 24 hour day.
2. Email. I did that before, but went out of my route after about 2-3 weeks. Now I’m back for good. Email is a such time-filler that you probably wouldn’t be able to notice when you are doing it. For example this morning, I was waiting for my girlfriend to get ready to go out, and guess what my first instinct was? “Let me check my email…” Luckily I slapped me out of this. But now I start to notice those moments when I want to sit down and check my email and by becoming conscious about it you will start to notice how much time this little task consumes! Believe me! Email is a cancer of XXI century.
3. Skype. It’s the next thing after email. Although I mostly use it for my business purposes and project management, sometimes small useless chit-chats come into the scene and these can eat at least an hour of your day! Minimum an hour!
4. Family Guy. This is my new weakness. I stopped watching Seinfeld and went with this one… Now this one little funny show can eat up from 0.5 to 2 hours a day! Crazy!
5. Forums. I like chatting with like minded people online and forums are a great place to find new business buddies. But guess what! 1-2 hours a day!

So the conclusion is that you would probably spend your whole day playing online games, watching TV shows, reading forums and chatting on Skype instead of doing a job that must to be done in order for you to earn a better living.

Eliminating these won’t be easy but the I do understand that if this continues, it can become worse with time.

I already mentioned that I gave away my online game’s account, I activated Gmail’s autoresponder function and am checking email only twice a day (12 and 4 pm. Today I missed 12 o’clock check so I will be checking my inbox only once! A New World Record, ladies and gentlemen.) “Pamela” — Skype plugin will automatically tell everyone who is trying to reach me that I will only answer their messages at 8 pm and forums will be checked only once a day at 9 pm.

It seems so simple but you wouldn’t believe how much time there is when you eliminate this waste! In fact today I sat down and wanted to check my email, then I remembered that I can’t do that… So instead I decided to go and see how’s my little Travian tribe is doing… But once again I remembered that I don’t have an account to do it. How about forums?! Well, it’s not 9pm yet, nor even 8 pm so I can’t chat with my friends through Skype. Ahhh… I know! Family… Shit, I can’t do that either…

So there I was, sitting in my chair and thinking that there’s so much time to do what you really want and have to do!

Try it! You will understand me on the first day you decide to do that!

As to my membership site, a final touches on THE player are being done and my programmer will install all the necessary functions to add the Optin form at the end of it. I currently am making some simple design tweaks to the look of it, to match the site’s design. Once we are done with it, I will start uploading some Videos to Amazon AWS and getting ready for my list boosting sequence.

This must improve my optin rate at least 2 times. That’s what I am guessing. We will see.

By the way, another lesson that I’ve learned is — OUTSOURCE!

I am never going back to those days, when I would do everything myself. Why should you do that when there are thousands of tasks that YOU must do. It’s not time for you to start learning PHP or Flash. You job is to find people who are capable to do things that you want to do. I don’t have money to spare so I spend a little bit more time looking for people who would do the job of the same quality but for a lesser price. Then again, I don’t spend as much time as I would trying to figure out how to “send variables from Flash file to PHP file and then to Aweber.” I would better start learning how to write a decent copy or spend that time writing followup sequence for my list.

I was lucky enough to learn lot’s of programming and web stuff when I was younger, while I was looking what would really interest me, so now I can explain or at least fix some minor bugs myself, without having to wait for programmers to answer. But if you don’t know anything about it — don’t waste your time trying to. You will be able to study anything you want once you are filthy rich. But for now — concentrate on making more money!

So once again — Outsource. There are thousands of really talented people who will help you for a minimum price!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!