At first glance, you may have been taken aback by the title of this post.  What, you may ask, does a pay per click tool have to do with time management?  Well, that depends on how you look at it.  But pay per click and other tools aimed at managing and increasing your business can overwhelm you if you let them.

When you decided to start your own online business, you probably expected to put a lot of time into it.  But with all the various tools and tasks involved, you may feel like you are perpetually starting your business and never settling into just running it.  You can be quite deluged.

What is a pay per click tool, anyway?  What is an affiliate?  What is a web site host?  What are any of the other in the endless stream of tools and techniques you need to use, and how do you use them?  You need to manage your time to find all this out.

Unfortunately, if you’re not careful, learning about time management can use up all your time as well.  You need to find a few simple things you can do to manage your time effectively so that you start to see a benefit right away.  You don’t need a long involved course in time management or a 600-page book to read on the subject.

This is complicated by the fact that different time management techniques work for different people.  What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for the next.  It can be very frustrating.

In the past, whenever I got overwhelmed, I took the advice of a friend and started organizing and scheduling all my tasks in Microsoft Outlook.  It took a couple of hours in the beginning, but it was very rewarding.

I could see at a glance how everything I would need to get done in the following week was laid out for me in reasonably scheduled blocks of time.  Everything would get done on time or before, and I would even have time to take some breaks and relax.

It was a complete disaster.  Nothing got done as scheduled, and I learned some things the hard way.  Mainly, I learned that I can’t work efficiently on a task unless I feel like it at the time.  I may be scheduled to email clients at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, but, if that’s not what I’m ready to do, the emails are going to drag and I’m going to be distracted and unfocussed.  If, however, I email my clients when my internal clock tells me it’s time, I bang the emails out in a very short time and move quickly on to the next task.

My friend, for whom scheduling works well, doesn’t know what to do with me.

Instead, I tried journaling.  I spent a week writing down when I did particular tasks, how long it took me to do them, and how I felt.  I let my natural rhythms put my schedule together for me, instead of trying to impose one from the outside.

This works very well for me, but it may not for you.  The point is to pick a simple time management strategy, like scheduling, or ranking your priorities, or something else you find that looks interesting.  Give it a try and see if it works.  If it does, you should notice your work getting done faster and your general stress level going down right away, which will leave you ready to add another time management strategy to your repertoire when you’re ready.

You may even find the time to add new tools to your business and increase your profits!

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