How to Use Time to Stop Making a Mountain of Your Online Marketing Tasks (Getting it Done Well and Faster With Less Stress)
A big stopper to success in marketing is resistance – when you resist doing your marketing activities. There are blockers like procrastination, perfectionism, and a host of other fears. I’m sure you can name some of your own demons.
Here’s a great tool for hacking away at these action-frictions to increase traffic, grow a following, and build your expert image.
The tool: Limit time.
Limit the time you spend on the activity. Drastically.
For example, if you’re publishing a monthly newsletter and dread doing it each month due to over-thinking, or too many ideas of what to put in it, or how to format it, or what picture to use in it, etc, then try limiting time.
Here are a few approaches – you’ll need to see what feels good to you to try …
Tell yourself you will do it in 3 hours or less on the first Monday and be done with it – good, bad or ugly. Set a timer. Put it on your calendar. Revel in the freedom from the stress it will give you knowing it’s done in one shot and won’t consume you for a week.
Draft day and polish day. Tell yourself you’ll draft it on one day for 60 minutes, then put it down. The next day you’ll polish and send it in another 60 minutes, then be done with it.
The same can go for blogging, tweeting, search engine optimization, article marketing, etc.
This approach keeps you honed in on the important elements of your work – and it gets thing done.
A short time-frame will force you to focus and stop “finding new ideas to add”, stop “perfecting your wording”, stop you from “thinking you have all week to do it”. You want to make the molehill and not build the mountain!
The lack of a deadline or time frame gives you the excuse to add more to it – again making it a bigger deal than it should be.
As you apply this approach, you’ll find gems. Here’s one I found.
In time, as you get used to your schedule, you’ll start discovering new ways to
For example, even though I’m a web designer, very skilled at updating web pages, in my one-hour blogging effort, I discovered how much time posting my own stuff was taking. It took over an hour to simply post content.
I was a bit shocked. The reason is that I didn’t have a time limit on posting the content to my site. So, I’d perfect things, look for new ideas to enhance the blog, and often run off on other tangents as I worked.
A time limit – a stopping point, forces you to stay focused.
A few other tricks to get “time limiting” to work:
- Have something else (in stone) to do at the end of your time frame – like lunch with a friend or a gym class.
- Get an accountability buddy like your coach or better, another coach who wants to overcome the same – nothing like being in the same boat.
- Post a comment below stating what you are going to do. I’ll be watching. 😉
In summary, limit the time on important marketing tasks you know you need to do.
Doing so will be a little bit of work at the start. Just realize that this is healthy work that stretches your abilities. It’s better than the unhealthy stress of dreading marketing tasks.
What marketing efforts are sucking up your time?
How can you limit the time to get it done with less fuss? Or, have you done something similar? What would you love to try out? What’s stopping you from even considering this? I’d love to hear about your experience.
Comment below.