My New Regime for 2010
Over the weekend, rather than a new year’s resolution, I came up with a formula to break my day into pieces, by task, and hopefully boost my efficiency. My goals for this year are to spend my weekday workdays (starting at 7 a.m. and continuing through 10 pm, with lots of breaks for meetings, eating, outdoor time, cooking, relaxing, spending time with family members, etc.) approximately like this:
- Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
- My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
- Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
- Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
- Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
- Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
- Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
- Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)
Well, this is pretty cool for day #1: my actual breakdown, with an hour and a half left to go looks like this:
- Work for paying clients: 63 minutes (need to improve tomorrow)
- My own writing, research, and marketing: 62 minutes including writing this post
- Processing e-mail: 124 minutes
- Participating in social media: 42 minutes (need to cut back a bit until the other work is done)
- Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 65 minutes, partly because I have a very early tax appointment this year, so for the next couple of weeks this is going to get more attention, and partly because it took me 20 minutes to track down an error in the spreadsheet I was working on
- Office and household organizing and cleaning: 75 minutes, mostly organizing three weeks of trash for a dump run—tomorrow I hope to spend the quota on my office
- Professional reading: 31 minutes
- Physical exercise: 45 minutes with the dog walk, and 20 minutes on my exercycle coming later
I am realistic. I know that life happens, and I won’t be exact. But I’m pretty pleased—and I know that I’m going to spend the next half hour on professional reading, and come in very close on everything except client work. I don’t generally do client work at night, because my clients should get my best thinking, and that’s in daylight.
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
Good plan. I may have to borrow some of your ideas. I’ve been unsubbing from a LOT of email newsletters and lists and that’s starting to help.
I’ve also been unsubbing from a ton of stuff. Much of what’s left is from people I know personally, half of which really could go. But I can’t get it done in two hours a day.
The good news: I *am* getting done some of the higher priority stuff.
I can see that some things need adjusting. I have got to get less e-mail coming in. After making my quota on everything else except client work yesterday, I spent another 52 minutes on e-mail. Even at almost three hours, I still ended the day with 50 more messages in my inbox than I’d started with–and this is a slow e-mail week!
I’m going to be unsubbing from a LOT of stuff.