Many people start out in internet marketing and quickly become confused and overwhelmed, with a general feeling of "information overload". They jump from one opportunity to the next without sticking with something long enough to try it out, or they have too many eggs in the one basket and spread themselves too thinly over too many opportunities or websites without seeing success in any of them.
Do any of the above descriptions match you? If so, then read on...
If you are just feeling overwhelmed in general you may want to read my previous blog post on Information Overload.
Here's how I organise myself on a daily/monthly basis:
(1) I have a master To Do list, which I call my Home Business Backlog. I keep this list in an Excel spreadsheet. I have different sections in the spreadsheet for different things e.g. one worksheet for all my home business website work, which includes all the work I need to do to promote my Home Business Ideas website and my various home business blogs. I have another worksheet for general business related things e.g. tax returns, keeping my laptop up to date, brainstorming business ideas, reading business books etc. I have a worksheet for all my smaller Google Adsense related sites and blogs, a worksheet for all the training and reading that I want to do and a worksheet for each of my other projects. Everything in this Home Business Backlog spreadsheet is prioritized - High, Medium or Low and there is a rough time estimate beside each item.
(2) Every 2-3 weeks I do something called a "sprint". I create some goals for myself and I look at everything in my Home Business Backlog and choose the most important things from it that I will need to do to achieve my goals. I work out how many hours I have available to me over that time period and ensure that the total amount of work I take from the Home Business Backlog adds up to roughly the amount of time I have available. I put all of these things into a new spreadsheet and this becomes my "to do" list for the next 2-3 weeks. Each task in the spreadsheet has an estimate of time beside it and every day when I work on a task I update the hours remaining on that task. Here is a screenshot of part of this spreadsheet:
There is a little graph on the top right that has a line on it, which should eventually reach zero once I have "burned down" all my work for that 2-3 week period. It is a great way to keep organised because it keeps me very focused on the most important tasks and I can only wander astray and surf the internet aimlessly if I am ahead of schedule.
This way of working may not be for you, but I really do recommend at least having a master to-do list or backlog.
The important thing for me is that it stops me from getting distracted and jumping from one thing to the next. If a new opportunity arises, instead of jumping on it I just add it to my main home business backlog and give it a priority. If it is more important than everything else, then I can include it in my next 2-3 week sprint.
All of the above techniques are borrowed from something called "Scrum", as I was a "Scrum Master" before I quit the day job. You probably won't have heard of this unless you have been involved with software development. It sounds weird, but if you want to know that I am not making this up, do a search in Google for "Scrum Master" :-)
If you wish to download an example spreadsheet right click on the following link and select "Save as" to download the Microsoft Excel worksheet. Hover over the comments on the spreadsheet to see how to use it.
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