Making time for success

byKettei

1.4K followers

6 years ago

Sometimes, when life is overwhelming, you need to make time to work on your escape plan.

That's what I realized yesterday after a frustratingly unproductive fortnight (from a WA perspective, anyway).

My sucky month

Since I got back in the WA saddle back in May, I've made brilliant progress and I felt I was getting somewhere. I was writing posts, starting to see traffic (although most of it was from my Twitter channels) and I was feeling pretty positive.

Then my day-job intervened and knocked me for six.

I'm working on a very big client project at the moment and it's consuming all the available time I have, besides the time I spend looking after my children and, to be honest, it's depressing me.

I've been unable to write a single post for one of my WA sites for the last two weeks and my engagement in the WA community has been almost nil.

Yes, I need to pay the bills but it's really dragging me down, not being able to write, so I can generate income in the background. I know this will lead to a much happier, more relaxed life as I won't need to take on so much client work to make ends meet.

My super solution

During a break yesterday, I found myself re-reading @dylanrieger's excellent guide on creating a six-figure website and I had an epiphany.

Dylan's guide focuses on using best-of reviews to create a website that will result in lots of sales. Each review has 10 items or so but the review for each one is only 250 words long.

I might not have the time to write an entire 1,200 word review in one shot, but I do have the time to write 250 words at a time and that's what I've resolved to do.

Each day, I'm going to devote 30 minutes to working on a review. Not the whole review but just a section of it. As an example, here's the sections that Dylan recommends:

1. Introduction (100 - 200 words)
2. Feature Guide (300 - 600 words)
   
3. 10 Product Reviews (250 words each = 2,500 words)
4. Conclusion (100 - 300 words)

The more mathematically minded among you will be thinking, "But Phil - that means it's going to take you 13 days to write a review post and you need 50 of them to see the traffic you need!"

That's okay - I'd rather spend 13 days working towards an awesome post that's around 3,500 words long than spend the same time feeling overwhelmed and doing nothing.

As the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Do what you can

I realised last night that I need to give myself the same advice that I'd give to anyone else:

Do what you can. The other stuff can wait.

Right now, I can't write full blog posts because I don't have the time. My family and their needs come first but I can write 300 - 600 words.

Once I realised that, I felt that a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders because I can finally start moving with my affiliate websites again.

We can all do a little a day!

Finding time to do everything in our lives can be overwhelming.

Fortunately, if we just take a step back and look at a problem, we can often see that it's made up of smaller pieces that we can slot into the little slots of time we have sprinkled through our day.

It's better to do a little each day than nothing at all. :)