J.B.Slife dot Com

I was reading a series of posts at TylerCruz.com titled 40-Hour Week Challenge. In the initial post Tyler states:

It’s a well known fact that I’m lazy. I find it hard not to be, though. As much as I love doing this for a living, it’s hard to force yourself to work longer hours than you need to. I normally work an average of 2-3 hours per day, but I decided to try something new.

I’m challenging myself to work 40 hours within 1-week.

I started reading Tyler’s blog because I stumbled accross one of his forums, which then pointed me to the rest of his sites. He has some successful sites. He makes more money than I do. I wanted to have the lifestyle of Tyler Cruz. However, after reading this series, I don’t think I could handle his lifestyle.

I have a full-time job and a family (wife and two daughters). I am used to working many, many hours per week. If I only had to work 40 hours per week, I would be very happy. To add to that, I don’t think I will ever totally retire, I would get too board.

Tyler’s post has really motivated me again. I now consider myself to have a great advantage, I am used to working. New websites are being created every second, but they’re not all being worked on. Every second that I spend planning, dreaming, and typing puts me ahead of someone else.

How do I know all this work is worth it? My household income is going up. We (wife and I) have decided that she will be running our ecommerce site full-time and not returning to work. She will now be pulling an income from our ecommerce site. We are living the “internet income” dream, we have eliminated her regular full-time job.

My Point…

Work hard…my successful sites have developed in the niche of gymnastics. My wife was a full-time gymnastics coach/manager for over 10 years, I still am a coach. My sites have not developed by chance over a few days or months. My successful sites have all taken 2-3 years to develope. I never gave up during the rough times. I fine tuned and tweeked things until they worked. I took planned risks, some of them worked and some did not.

My first ecommerce website is my only ecommerce site. It did $50K in sales last year and is on schedule to do over $60K this year. It will achieve its goals because of hard work and dedication, not luck. My first forum was a gymnastics forum. It failed because I didn’t put any time into it. I brought back that same forum under a different name and it is now successful. First try with one site, second try with the other. Wow…maybe I do have a clue or maybe it’s just about hard work and determination.

Does this mean I don’t enjoy sitting on the beach with a beer, of course not.

Back to Work,

JBSlife

Yesterday I started off with Part 1 of this 3 part article. Just as I was getting to the section on “budgeting your time”, I had to take my own advice. Today I’m back with more time, so here we go.

Budgeting Your Time Wisely

As a person gets older and gains more resposibility, time becomes more and more of a factor. I am absolutely terrible with time. Over the next few months I am going to try and break some of my bad habits and become a little more efficient. Here are a few of my problems.

• Lack of a Laptop (problem solved)
  • Having a laptop allows you to be anywhere and post. You can keep content fresh and fix issues from anywhere in the world. It allows you to be in the same area with your family and still get some work done. By having a laptop, I can work 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there instead of waiting to get home and locking myself in the computer room for 3 hours. (My 3+ year old Gateway laptop died the other day, so I went out and bought a Toshiba Satellite. $1000 + a $300 warranty, I would reccommend the Satellite to anyone.)
• Tied to a Laptop
  • A laptop should be used to help you out when needed. You should not be on the net doing nothing for hours just because you have a laptop. Get outside, go shopping, clean the house; make sure your life comes before your laptop. Laptops are very addictive, be careful.
• Create a Daily Schedule
  • If you have several websites (or just one), creat a schedule. Force yourself to be productive. If you want to create 5 posts on your forum a day, do it from 9:00 am - 9:30 am everyday. Don’t stray from your task at hand. Make a schedule like this for every task you do and stick to it. If your daily website work takes 1.5 hours, then you should not be working on them for 5 hours everyday.
• Limit R&D Time
  • Research and development is very important, but it cannot be done all the time. Give yourself 15 to 20 minutes a day to brainstorm. Surfing the net is not always the best way to do this. Think out of the box, get off your computer. Most likely you are just rehashing other peoples ideas if you find something online. Go sit on the beach with piece of paper and pen. THINK! The most unique and successful ideas are born in peoples imaginations and transfered to the net.
• Go to Bed
  • As soon as you feel tired, be done with the computer. This is a no brainer, you’re not productive when you’re tired. If you’ve had a coffee, 4 Mountain Dews, a Snickers, and you’re eyes are bugging out…it’s time to go to bed (or run around the block 6 times and then go to bed). Make sure you have regular sleep patterns.
• Leave Time for Your Real Life
  • I’m starting all these sites for a purpose, to live with less stress and have more time for my life. Everything takes work, but don’t kill yourself everyday to create average websites. Good sites take time. People don’t work 24 hours just because you do. Write quality content, stick to your schedule, and give the net some time to work while you’re at the beach. What?!?…that’s right go to the beach, by the time you get back you may just have a backlink.

I have to budget my time again. I’ll be back tomorrow with Part 3, “Create Sites You Know & Love”.