How To Maximize Your Content Creation Time

byAJTrimble1

9.1K followers

Updated 5 years ago

Everyone has 24 hours in a day. Not a single person can create even one second of additional time. Thus, the key to maximizing your time for things like content creation is to utilize the time you do have. This can be achieved through multiple skills and strategies. Here is a few to get you started…

Whatcha Doin’?

If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know one of the most important things you can do to increase your chances of success is to track everything you put in your mouth.

Time is no different. In order to identify where you are potentially wasting time, as well as to discover pockets of time when you can knock something off your to-do list, is to track your time.

Spend the next week tracking yourself in 15-minute blocks. 15 minutes is a good target as it is big enough to see what you are really doing, but not so small that you would go insane trying to write every minute down.

At the end of the week, look and see where you are losing the most time. Are these tasks that you could potentially give up? For instance, if you are spending “only” an hour a day watching non-educational videos on YouTube, that’s actually seven hours per week you could devote to reaching your goals instead.

Consider how your time affects your goals. Are these activities bringing you closer to your desires, or further away? And don’t forget that goals are not just for business. You should set goals for every facet of your life – health, family, spirituality, etc.

Master or Mediocre?

One thing you want to take a look at when you are tracking your time this week is just how much time you spend on social media.

Yes, yes, I know. “But AJ,” you say, “I’m an affiliate marketer. I need to be on every social media platform for my business.”

First of all, I am addressing more the time-wasting aspects (what I call the Black Hole) of social media. Just getting on there and gossiping about nothing for hours on end. This is precious time you could be spending leveraging social media for your business instead.

However…

I am also talking about the aggregate “social media”. A big mistake I see a lot of new affiliate marketers making is thinking they have to be on every social platform out there.

Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest. Snapchat. YouTube. The list goes on and on. But here’s the truth: if you are trying to keep up with 5, 10, 15 or more social media sites, you will never master even one of them; there is just not enough time in the day. At best, you will merely be mediocre at all.

A better practice is to choose one or two of your favorite and then focus like a laser on reaching those audiences. Once you have mastered that platform, then feel free to expand.

By the way, don’t make the mistake I made. I am a HUGE disciple of marketing “gurus” like Gary Vaynerchuk. And, yes, they are on dozens of social media sites. But here’s the difference them and us… people like Gary have entire teams of assistants behind them helping manage their social media. I guarantee if Gary were doing it on his own, he would stick to one or two primary sites like he did when he started.

10% or 10X?

How big is the number 10? Seriously, think about how big it is. Okay, that’s a bit of a trick question, because as you know, math is a bit of tricky science. Sometimes a number only has value relative to another number.

I have learned to lump my time blocks into two categories: 10% and 10X. Every activity is either a 10% action or a 10X action. What’s the difference?

Let’s say you write a new blog post. It’s pretty good. Perhaps it doesn’t set you up to be the next Hemingway, but it’s decent. Maybe it even has a typo here and there, but overall it's pretty good and does its job; it gives the reader the information they were looking for.

Now, a 10% action would be going back and editing, re-editing, and polishing this thing until it shines like gold because someone left a comment about how you forgot to dot your tees and cross your eyes (or something like that.) Thus, as the name implies, a 10% activity might increase your success by 10%.

A 10X activity, on the other hand, increases your success ten times greater than where you are now. What would a 10X activity be in this scenario? How about instead of focusing on making the post the greatest-post-ever-written-that-nobody-is-going-to-see, you spend that time promoting the hell out of it and driving traffic?

See the difference?

As you know, I am a writer, and I’m a fanatic for words, and even a bit of grammar now and then. So, I’m certainly not advocating you write like garbage on purpose. You still want to shoot for quality.

That said, however, if you really want to maximize your content creation time, you must live by my motto: good enough is good enough.

Besides, If someone is so uptight that they are more concerned with “i before e, except after c” than they are with the awesome knowledge you are presenting… well, I don’t know about you, but that’s not really someone I need in my life. As much of a fan as I am with words, I abhor the Grammar Police. Just sayin’.

(To prove my point, notice at the beginning I said, "Here is a few to get you started…" Grammatically it should be "Here ARE a few..." but did you notice or even care? I rest my case. :-)

Take this same concept and apply it to every activity you do. At the end of the week, once you have identified everything you’re doing, decide if it is a 10% or 10X activity. Then adjust. Try to do less of the former and more of the latter. The more 10X activities you can do the faster and higher your success will be.

Feel free to share a tip or two yourself in the comments. If you know of an awesome 10X activity that others might find useful, let us know.