What’s On Your List?

Posted on October 2, 2007
Filed Under Planning |

Your “must do” list, that is.

You do have one, don’t you?

Allow me to explain, in the manner of the newly converted…

One of the drawbacks I’ve noticed while focusing on getting the new article site ready is that although spending all your time on one website until it’s up and running and turning a profit is really great in theory, it doesn’t translate so well into practice when you have more than one site to maintain.

As a matter of fact, it can be downright stressful. Especially if those other sites are done in a format where your visitors are expecting to find fresh content on a regular basis (like a blog).

So I’ve been feeling a little guilty about neglecting everything else while I rebuild one site. (I’m hiding it well, don’t you think?) I was whining to a friend about it, and he came up with an excellent idea…

He told me to create a “must do” list.

A “must do” list is better than a to do list, because it takes all the guess work out of it. The idea, he told me, is to set a schedule for what sites need to be worked on every day whether it be for adding new content, updating a blog, or doing some promotion, etc. and then that’s the bare minimum that you “must do” every day.

Now, for the ultra-organized, this may seem like a no-brainer but for me it was like a light bulb going off! To actually sit down and create a schedule of which sites and blogs I would focus on for a given day was something I had never even thought of. My time management planning was always more along the lines of getting up in the morning and doing the “gee what do I feel like working on today” routine. (That could go a long way toward explaining the stack of unfinished project folders on my desk.)

Not anymore.

I spent the weekend creating a schedule so that all of my sites get updated at least once a week and turned it into my “must do” checklists. It’s the first list I tackle every morning now, and I know exactly what I need to be writing about on any given day. It helps to keep me focused too, because I know that once it’s done and everything on the list is crossed off for the day, I can go on to my other to-do lists — the ones with the fun stuff on them.

And at that point, “what shall I work on today” takes on a whole new meaning. When the must-dos are done, it means I can give free reign to my inspiration and creativity, and just go with the flow… but that’s a topic for another day. :)

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