Productivity Hack: How to enhance your To-Do Lists with Time Limits

Productivity Hack: How to enhance your Daily To Do List (with Time Limits )

One of the most important changes we need to make as members of Wealthy Affiliate is to see our training as a business right from the get-go. Some of us still regard it as less than a business and so fail to prioritize it.

There are so many reasons why we should regard our Wealthy Affiliate training as business but two of such reasons are the fact that it has the potential to morph from part time to a full-time occupation and more than replace our income. We also know that members that have made such a transition abound in our Wealthy Affiliate community.

An important psychological shift we need to make is the employee to business owner mentality transition. Kyle wrote of such a transition in the blog he published in the New Year.

As an employee, our employer gives us a job description and tells us what to do. He expects us to work according to his script. If we fail to comply with what he has asked us to do, he reprimands or even fires us.

Working as an employee does not allow us much originality. It is doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out and that’s why it can be boring.

As a business owner/entrepreneur however, we write our own script. People not only expect us to be original and show a lot of initiative, they also want us to be problem solvers putting off fires as they come. That’s what we actually get paid to do- put off other people’s fires.

Nobody breathes down our necks if we decide not to work all day neither will anyone compliment us if we decide to work all day on our business. The motivation has to come from within us. That’s why a lot of people are afraid of being entrepreneurs.

When we are able to make these mind shifts, we will begin to take our business seriously and be open to embrace risks as entrepreneurs.

We will know we have made those shifts when we are ready to invest more time and effort in our business instead of on Social media. That pull of Facebook that seemed irresistible at first will begin to grow weaker and weaker. Time spent on Instagram and Pinterest will be inversely proportional to the amount of time we put in our business to enable us maximize the potentials inherent in Wealthy Affiliate, and take it to the next level

As a business owner, time is a finite resource which we use to build our business so we guard it jealously. It is even more valuable than the dollar, euro or pound sterling!

Most businessmen place so much premium on time that they would prefer to give you money than their time.

This is how it works. At the start of the day, we are each handed 24 hours or 1,440 minutes. Some of us put it to good use; others fritter the most part of it away on social media socializing with friends and engaging in unrewarding activities like checking emails and Facebook.

It is amazing how much time we spend on these activities. At the end of the day, it is time to go to bed and wake up to another fresh new day.

Because of the vanishing nature of time, it is important for us as entrepreneurs to come up with some framework to maximize its use.

One of the best ways to do this is to schedule our tomorrow today.

So what does it mean to schedule your tomorrow today? It just means that at the end of the day before turning in for the night, we draw up a list of activities we hope to do the following day.

We just don’t draw up a bunch of activities. Instead we should prioritize the activities by putting the ones that have the greatest impact on our goals first. Ask yourself this question:

“Which of these activities has the greatest ability of transforming my life?” Or “Which one of the activities if accomplished will take care of all my other goals?” That should be the no.1 activity.

The other activities should follow in their order of importance. Remember to include some down time and email time in your schedule.

What this little planning does is give us a focus and a sense of direction. Instead of rifling through a list of activities to decide on which one to do first, we already have our day structured for us.

That is powerful because it gives us motivation to go to work immediately we get out of bed. We feel a sense of exhilaration and satisfaction as we come to the end of our first task, cross it out and seamlessly go on to our next task, and next, and next……... until we come to the end of our list.

Even though scheduling our tomorrow today gives us a focus and a desire to work on our goals, I have come to realize that it is not enough to enable us achieve our objectives for the day. We need to go a step farther.

To maximize time, each list of activity should carry a duration or time limit. For instance if our priority item is working on our Wealthy Affiliate business, we should write Activity 1: Wealthy Affiliate:. On the right hand side, we should put in a time limit: 2 hours. Be specific. We should not leave it open-ended.

No.

Tasks

Activity

Duration

Time

1

Exercise

Working on Weights for muscle building

30 mins

6:00-

6:30

2

Wealthy Affiliate

Write a 2,500 word Blog on ‘Fasting for Weight Loss.’

4 hours

6:30-

10:30

3

E-mail

Checking e-mail from clients

30 mins

10:30-

11.00

The danger in leaving our list of activities open-ended is that we run the risk of spending a whole lot of time on preferred activities to the detriment of non- preferred activities. Most times than not, it is the non-preferred activities that hold more potential for our future good than the preferred items.

I daresay that motivation is key in moving our business forward. Drawing up a framework like a To do List with a time limit will provide us a structure that will enable us accomplish our daily goals for ourselves and our businesses. But it is purpose fueled by those compelling reasons that made us opt for Internet Marketing as the vehicle to our success that will drive us past the finish line.

See you at the TOP!