It doesn’t matter if you are a mom building webpages at the family computer after the kids have gone to bed or an old hat who has incorporated; there is one thing that labels us all. We are all executives of our own small businesses. When I say executive, I mean it. We earn that title a hundred times over our mega-corporate counterparts because we have to wear so many hats just to get through the day. Our businesses depend on us alone. We have to do so many different things to effectively manage our two most important assets that we are truly ‘Jack’s of all trades’. Today I am going to talk about our number one MOST important asset: Time.

Time is that thing we never have enough of. It’s that thing that disappears in large blocks whenever we sit down at the computer. Many things draw our attention away from the tasks we have to complete. However, unnecessary drains of time are not conducive to success. The day job is a large time drain. As much as we hate having to answer to some pencil neck geek and his unpredictable fits of emotion, we still have to play the game (or at least show up until our web business becomes self-supporting) and earn that paycheck he “gives” us. As if “give” were the correct term . . . (he wants us to think it’s a gift) we know we sweat blood to get it.

Nevertheless, I digress. This isn’t a rant about why we started our own businesses, it’s a hard look at managing the small business persons golden assets. The broadest time stealer we run into is our attitude. That’s right, your mindset can waste more precious time than you think. It all has to do with focus. How many times have you caught yourself surfing for things on the web when you were supposed to be doing research for your site? It happens all the time and is an easy trap to fall into.

Your work ethic also plays a part in how much time you will spend at a task. If you are like me, you quickly discovered just how HARD building websites can be. Not that hard work is something to be avoided; I just never truly believed the Protestant Work Ethic that was sold to me by my grandparents. They felt that as long as you worked hard, it didn’t matter what you did. That may have been fine 70 years ago when companies and corporations took care of their people, but today, that “dog don’t hunt.” Today, it is imperative that you work smart, not hard. Maximum utilization of your time is essential to excel at this job. Keeping yourself motivated to succeed can be hard sometimes. None of us can be “up” all the time. All of this makes up your attitude. Being able to recognize the distractions to your productive time is the first step in managing your time wisely.

Knowing what your demands are will aid in effective time management. First and foremost, we all have to code our WebPages. Whether you use an HTML program or a text editor, the pages must still be written and your ads and linking codes set up. As much as I’d like it to be, this job is not just about building sites and marketing them. There is also the drudgery of the small business that must be taken care of. Accounting has to be done. Your statistics have to be checked (and verified). Unfortunately, not all affiliate programs are honest. Your transactions have to be journalized. It takes time to keep track of all the money you spend and all the money you receive. Ultimately, the bills have to be paid. Hopefully, it’s with the money you get from your affiliate programs and not the “gift” you receive from the pencil neck.

Problem solving is a demand on our time. It’s a problem when an affiliate program drops you from his program. It’s an even bigger problem when he doesn’t tell you why. Finding the problem and correcting it takes time. Traffic drops are also a problem. People just don’t stop coming to your site for no reason. There has to be a logical explanation as to why your numbers are down. Finding out why the drop occurred (buying trend analysis and market research) helps prevent the same thing from happening again in the future.

Billing errors have to be corrected; whether you’ve been billed incorrectly, or have mistakenly billed someone. Finding and fixing the problem takes away our precious time. Researching coding errors takes time too. I recall one night; I stayed up for six hours looking for a mistake in a Java code and finally gave up in disgust and went to bed. The next day, with a fresh mind and a fresh outlook, I was better able to solve the problem in record time. (Actually, I asked Girlie Girl to look at it. She found the fix in less than a minute). Frustrations like that eat up precious time.

Webmaster research takes a lot of time. There are a number of resource boards that all of us should be reading. Big corporate executives have to keep up with trade journals and industry news. Those webmaster boards are our trade journals and industry news. They are also the main link to our network. I’ll talk about networking in another article. Continuous learning is essential but is also a constant time drain. HTML is always evolving and we will never know enough. The Search Engines are evolving too. Our lifeblood comes from search engine traffic so we must keep up with those trends as well. Researching anything that will help you learn, earn, and grow is time well spent.

Site maintenance also takes a big chunk of time. Finding and fixing broken links, checking your link receipts on link lists and improving/updating existing WebPages are all necessary and all take valuable time.

Now the solution to all these time intensive tasks is good time management. I know, “easier said than done.” Start by getting used to using “To Do” lists. Have a Daily-List with tasks that are prioritized. You should base your priorities on the activities that will earn you the most money. For example, which task has a higher priority? Submitting a new site to the search engines (this will bring in ten dollars over the course of the next month) versus failing to pay the credit card bill (that your server is billed to) now, (this will cost you hundreds of dollars a day if it isn’t done). I think I would drop everything and pay that credit card bill.

You should also have Monthly-Lists. These lists should track time sensitive items (like those pesky credit card bills) so you won’t have to face the panic of overnighting a payment to avoid a cancellation. Annual-Lists are also important. They should track coming events you must attend and such things as renewals of services and other periodic occurrences. Long-Term lists should also be used to track those items that span more than one year such as strategic events (long range plans to build the business) and more routine things like domain renewals. You should build your “To Do” lists from the longest time-span list down to the shortest one. This should be done every day because priorities change.

Start with the Long-Term list. Find out if anything on that list needs to be done today. The same goes for the Annual and Monthly list. After you build the Daily list, stick to it. What you don’t complete can be rolled over to tomorrow’s Daily list. IMPORTANT: Make sure you note time sensitive tasks. A task that can be put off for tomorrow has a lower priority today than it will tomorrow. Another way to manage your time effectively is to set time limits for your tasks. I learned this secret from one of my business professors. He was a retired 87-year-old multi-millionaire who loved teaching, so I think he qualifies as a credible source. Give yourself one hour to read through your favorite forums. Use an egg timer if you have to, or the alarm on your watch. After that hour is up, set a time limit for your next task, then do it. The more aware you are of the time you spend, the less likely you’ll allow yourself to waste it.

Minimize your distractions. I don’t know when in this century it happened but somewhere, an urgency developed that forces us to pick up the phone when it rings. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, we respond to the bell. Get an answering machine or voice mail and use it during your work periods. Don’t get drawn into the hell of a phone call from that freeloading relative who “just happened to be thinking of you.” B.S., he heard you were making a fortune building web pages and wants a free lunch. Get a baby sitter for your kids or have your spouse take care of them for the time you are working. It doesn’t have to be all day, just for the time you set aside. Also, teach your family that the computer room is a workplace just like an office. Train them to treat it that way when you are working.

Organization will help save you time too. Make a three-ring binder with all your affiliate program information. Separate the TOS’s with tabs and on the front of each affiliate program’s page use sticky notes to identify what you can and can’t do. For example, I have red sticky notes for the things an affiliate program won’t let me do, like use their trademarked names in PPC bidding, or send them traffic in frames. Then I have green sticky notes for the affiliate programs which do allow those methods, etc. I write on them in big letters so I can quickly see what I need without having to pull up a saved page from the computer, or dig through pages in the binder just to find the information.

Customize a browser start-up page with all your important links on it. Put links to your statistics/affiliate login pages, and other places you have to frequently visit. If you add up the time it takes you to open your browser, click on your bookmarks, then find the link you need, over the course of a week, you will be amazed at how much time is wasted. Build a WebPage with your affiliate banners and the proper linking codes on it. That way, when you are building your pages, all you have to do is cut and paste between pages. No more hand-coding linking information. You can do the same with text links for affiliate programs too. Anything you can do to save time and energy is time well spent.

Recognizing that, without time you cannot make money, is your first step in building your business. As small business people we do not have the luxury of a graphics department, a technical department, an accounting department, a marketing department, or a public relations department, etc. We are all those departments and many more. That is why time is so precious to us.

One final tip; if you don’t know how to do something, ASK someone who does. Set the task aside and do the next item on your list until an “expert” becomes available. It will save you a lot of aspirin and hours of beating yourself up by trying to figure something out on your own. If I had done that when I was trying to figure out my Java problem, I would have saved myself three days of work. This is because the tasks I was putting off to appease my pride required my computer. For the next three days, due to circumstances beyond my control, I couldn’t get near my computer.

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