Staying Focused and Maximizing Efficiency

Most Internet marketers I know struggle to stay focused. So do I sometimes. Staying focused when working from home can sometimes be really hard, as there are so many things which may keep you from working, and being your own boss doesn’t really help either. In fact, many of the fellows I know from the online gaming industry play online poker while they really should be working. Even though I have done it too, and when the occasion occurs, I still do, this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. While some people make a decent living from playing online poker, only a sparse group are really that great that they reach all the way up to the high stakes tables.

Thus the majority of entrepreneurs is simply better off working! Take PokerStrategy, the biggest affiliate in the world, as an example. There isn’t a living soul on earth that makes that kind of money playing online poker. From what I’ve heard, they have a monthly turnover of approximately $8 million dollars. Personally, I’m not working as hard anymore compared to when I just started working for myself, although occasionally I still have my moments. Averaging 60+ hour work weeks will eventually burn you out. Then again, I don’t have to as I’ve learned to be more efficient. For instance, I have outsourced all my writing, and I try to come up with neat things that help me to do more in less time.

Take statistics. Checking your statistics can be a very time-consuming action, that’s why many marketing blogs tell you to only do this once every week or so. I know this rule by heart, but still, the first thing I do after making coffee in the morning is checking my stats. I confess I’m a stats addict!

This morning I decided to invest some time into creating something that I had on my mind for a while, something that helps me out being more efficient in regards to the previously mentioned addiction; a dashboard. Since I make use of Piwik (open source analytics program) for all my mini sites, and Piwik has all these handy little widgets which can be implemented and used externally, I created a dashboard which displays the most important statistics of the previous day. Besides statistics, my dashboard also contains links to the home page, CMS, and the Piwik installation. I predict that my dashboard will save me up to 10 minutes a day.

Another thing I once created to become more efficient is LinkAdmin.net. I will dedicate a post to it some other time, as it still isn’t finished for the public, however, I’m already using it myself. In a nutshell, LinkAdmin.net  helps me to manage my links; paid links (shame, shame, everybody knows my name), and exchanged links.

Conclusion. Us entrepreneurs enjoy the most of freedom, nonetheless, we still have to pay our bills at the end of every month. Losing focus is easy, but staying focused really pays off. Learn how to do your work more efficiently, and you’ll be rewarded with plenty of time off to spend however you like it.

Let me end this post with a quote.

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Robert Heinlein