How To Form A Schedule That Would Keep You On Track

March 26th, 2008 | by Chris |

Getting organized and systematizing the way you do things can greatly help you in building your business. You get more efficient by doing more in less time, time that would have been spent unproductively in wandering from task to task without completing them and countless lost hours that start as “what should I do now” and end up in purposeless surfing on the net that won’t lead you anywhere.

Do not wonder that I know how most of your time gets spent, I wasn’t behind your shoulder all the last week, it’s just good ol’ been there done that.

To get out of that bad habit and end the frustration it might causing you, you need to form a schedule for all your business activities and actually follow it.

But in order to do that you first need to define what that activities are.

For better presentation let’s work with an example.

Jennifer is a network marketer and uses the Internet for lead generation. She only uses a lead capture page that drives traffic to it. Let’s suppose that the whole system is set up and her autoresponder is uploaded with a series of email messages to convert the subscribers. Her only business now is to drive traffic to it.

To accomplish this, Jennifer uses only free methods for the time being. The methods she uses are

1. article marketing
2. forum posting
3. comments on blogs
4. comments on article directories

So the activities can be broken to

1. write articles
2. submit articles to article directories
3. finding forums
4. posting to forums
5. finding relevant blogs
6. leave comments on blogs
7. find article directories
8. leaving comments at relevant articles

Jennifer is just starting so she is unsure of how much she can handle or how much time each activity would take. So she decides to start small and if she can handle it to start doing more.

She decides to

1. write an article every week
2. submit that article every week
3. finding a new forum every week
4. make one forum post every day
5. finding a relevant blog and leave a comment immediately 3 times a week
6. leaving comments on 4 articles per week at her favorite article directory

Next she takes a sheet of paper, uses a pen to divide it to seven spaces, each for every day and shares the tasks among the days. She also decides to follow the schedule for a whole month and then revise it.

A whole month goes by smoothly and Jennifer is getting a grasp on it. She remembered when she was trying to make her first post on a forum how reluctant she was and didn’t know what to write. But now it seems more easier to her and do it faster while at the same time her posts are more intelligent and valuable to the community.

Of course, it’s also time for the revision. Jennifer is absolutely certain that she can devote more time so it’s time to scale it up. What’s more she also decides to start giving a try to advertising using classifieds and see if she could get results that worth the time.

So in that next phase Jennifer would

1. write 2 articles per week
2. submit those 2 articles
3. finding a new forum every week
4. make 3 forum posts every day
5. finding a relevant blog and leave a comment immediately 6 times a week
6. leaving comments on 12 articles per week at her favorite article directory
7. finding a classifieds website every day and place an ad on it

For a whole month and then revise it again.

Now she is on track. She has a plan that she’s following and build upon it. With every day that passes she is putting another brick to her business. Small things that accumulated over time can have a huge effect on her business.

Wee Westie Backlit on the Beach
Photo by Randy Son Of Robert

Of course, on the above example we tried to take a case as simple as possible for illustrational purposes, but you get the whole idea. Define what the activities of your business are and then put them on a schedule that you would follow. Start small and build up.

You would be able to accomplish much more that way than by hopping from task to task trying to do everything at the same time or overdo one thing to the expense of others.

Technorati Tags: Getting Organized, Schedule, Strategy, Task, Activity, Plan