Prioritizing Work-Life Balance Systematically
Working for yourself can be very grueling and more brutal than working in the corporate world. Your enthusiasm and drive as a business owner will surpass anything you’ve ever felt working for someone else.
It’s easy to put your needs on the back burner. You will be wrapped up in ensuring that your business is a success. But you have to make sure that you take care of your needs and the needs of your family so that all of your hard work is paying off.
When you are developing a routine as an Online Entrepreneur, you don’t want to just focus on work related tasks. Yes, you do need to make sure that money tasks are at the forefront of your day.
But you also want to highlight things like self-care, relationship building with loved ones, healthy activities, and personal enjoyment. These can be scattered throughout your day or scheduled at the beginning or end of your day, whatever you prefer.
Some of this will depend on who else is in your life. For example, if you are single and live alone, then you may be able to spend more time working during the day and spread your tasks out with plenty of relaxation in between.
However, if you have a spouse or significant other, you may want to complete all of your work tasks before they return home from their job at the end of the day so that you can spend ample time together.
The same would hold true for Online Entrepreneurs who are also parents. You may need a routine and schedule that works around your parenting duties. In fact, if you are raising a young child, you may need to have certain systems that you activate at times when your children are either quiet or noisy.
For example, many people need a quiet space to work in when they are creating a product. It may be impossible for them to focus their thoughts if their toddler is happily playing and laughing in the background.
In that moment, you could set your product creation aside and turn to a different portion of your routine where you are doing mindless tasks that don’t require a peaceful atmosphere.
These could be systems where you take time to update your WordPress blog, engage with your audience and fellow marketers on social networking sites, or set a product app on a platform for a future launch.
Working in Bulk and Automating Your Tasks
When you are trying to achieve your goals in incremental steps, it often causes you to go slower than if you were to put all of your focus on one task and knock it out as a whole. A good example of this would be writing product reviews for your blog.
For many people, creating content means they have to put themselves in the right frame of mind and get in a certain groove where they are not distracted and can be on a roll for an extended period of time.
Working in bulk is a very effective method for some tasks that need to be done on a regular basis. If you are an affiliate marketer, then it stands to reason that you will need to publish product reviews on a regular basis.
Instead of spending time each and every day to write those product reviews, you could spend one or two days of the month creating 30 days’ worth of reviews. Then, instead of keeping them stored on your hard drive, you could enable a system where you take each product review through a publication process.
Blogging is one task that can be easily automated on a WordPress platform. You can queue up your product reviews to go live each and every day for a month or longer. In fact, you can create a publishing schedule that you can refer to so that you can see what topics will be published and when.
You can also develop mini systems for each of your tasks. For example, for those affiliates needing to publish product reviews on their blog, you might create a systematic approach to that process.
You could start by pasting the body of the content into the blog area. The next part of your system could be to make sure the product is properly hyperlinked. Then, you could insert any images or graphics that you wanted to include.
After that, you could add your keywords and choose the category that the review would go in. Lastly, you could queue up an email that would send your loyal subscribers to your blog on the day that it goes live.
For everything associated with this one task, you can create your own mini system and routine. Since you know you will need graphics with a call to action on them, you might spend time creating 30 days’ worth of images for your reviews so that they’re handy when you need them.
Doing tasks in bulk like this and then automating anything that can be scheduled ahead of time will free up more time in your day. If you are in an evergreen niche, you can even create a follow up email campaign that serves the needs of your customers for years.