It seems like there’s never enough time to do everything we want.

So many things are competing for our attention that something has to give.

And often it’s the important stuff that gets put to one side, even though we know deep down it shouldn’t.

But there are some steps you can take to get more done in less time…

1. Cut down on the time wasters

You know what they are for you.

Things like:

• Constantly checking emails
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Watching videos
• Or even just staring at the screen, telling yourself that you’re going to start soon (honest!)

Unless you’re super-human it’s unlikely that you’ll manage to eliminate the time wasters from your life completely but there are ways you can wean yourself off them without having too many withdrawal symptoms.

One way is to give yourself some alotted time.

If you’re running a business from your computer (even a part time one) then you could do what a lot of people do and just check your emails once or twice a day.

There’s a school of thought that fighting the urge to check emails as soon as you wake up and giving them a time slot later in the day boosts your focus a lot and doesn’t bug people. There are so many different time zones that it’s perfectly normal to wait half a day before the person you’re corresponding with is awake anyway.

For instance, here in the UK there’s usually a 5 hour gap between our time and the time in New York, which means a 7 hour gap between us and Los Angeles.

So if someone in Los Angeles replies to an email I sent at 5pm their time, it’s 1am here. Since I get up early I’ll be fast asleep when it arrives.

And if I reply at 7am it’s 11pm on the West coast. So delaying my reply and setting aside a time window later in the day won’t actually make much difference anyway.

Even sending emails UK to UK doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be read the same day.

So consider setting aside one or two time slots each day to go through your emails and answer any that need answering, delete the ones that need deleting and – before you do that second step – unsubscribe from the lists that you never read in the first place.

The same kind of logic works for Facebook.

If it’s something more important that what your friend’s cat ate for breakfast or some cute/funny video that everyone in their circle absolutely must see, you’ll find out.

Phones work for that. Although if yours is constantly interrupting you, it’s probably time to switch it to silent and let the important messages go to answering machine.

Anyone who doesn’t leave a message, don’t worry about.

Answering machines have been around long enough (I’ve had one since 1981) that people know what to do with them.

And if it’s not important enough to leave a message then it obviously wasn’t an important call in the first place.

That cuts down maybe half the calls I get to deal with.

2. Make a (Short) To-Do List

There’s no point in having a to-do list that would rival War and Peace for length.

You know it won’t all get done.

Figure out what works best for you – maybe a master to-do list (a bit like a bucket list) that you go back to on a regular basis. That’s OK so long as it doesn’t get forgotten and important things missed. So if you choose that route, revisit your master list on a regular basis.

Another option with to-do lists is to prioritise them,

The Important/Urgent matrix works nicely for that.

Most things fall into one of 4 categories:

• Important and urgent
• Important but not urgent
• Not important but urgent
• Not important and not urgent

If you can quickly “box” a task into one of those headings then you’re well on your way to getting more done in less time.

At first it can be a bit difficult to figure out some of the differences between those.

For instance, is the phone call from your mother saying the television isn’t working important and urgent (it’s definitely important to her) or not important but urgent (you know you’re going to be in the dog house if you don’t respond fast).

That choice actually doesn’t really matter – if you’re close by, you’re probably going to treat is as urgent and important. And if you’re further away, you’re probably going to stop what you’re doing now and call someone to get it fixed.

Don’t sweat about it.

Just get most of the things mostly right.

You’ll get better at it over time.

Then deal with things in something close to priority order.

If everything on your to-do list falls into the urgent and important category then it could be time to rethink what you’re doing unless you enjoy fire fighting and it’s part of your work.

But for internet marketing it’s unlikely that much falls into the urgent and important category – contacting your website host if your site goes down but not much else.

The precise order doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’ve got an approximate priority order.

Your first instinct on this is probably right – it’s that time before you have chance to “think about it” and change your mind or dither.

Then work out an approximate amount of time each of the top 3 (or 4 or maybe 5 at a stretch) things will take.

Start with the one that will likely take longest first.

Which brings us on to the next item to get more done:

3. Actually start doing something!

Scary as it may sound – especially if you seem to procrastinate for a living – starting is good.

You may even find that you get carried away and spend more time than you originally intended. Which can be good or it can be bad – I’ll cover that more in the next tip.

The quiz show Mastermind here in the UK has a timer for each round but if it goes off part way through a question the question master says “I’ve started so I’ll finish” and carries on with asking the question they started asking.

There’s a good chance you’ll do something similar.

But you need to start.

There’s actually a bonus to starting.

Our minds don’t like things being left incomplete.

That’s why some of the best sales letters leave open “loops” early on in the letter so that your mind is pushing you to find out what happens.

The same formula applies to television shows like 24, which is very similar to the cliff hanger that used to be a part of Saturday morning cinema and is used on almost all shows just before the commercial breaks. Some even trail “coming up after the break” to do their best to make sure that you stay tuned.

It’s kind of weird watching those shows on a non-commercial channel or on catch-up TV where there are sometimes no adverts or even just fast forwarding through the ads. It’s not until you do those kind of exercises that you realise just how much on television is “filler” material.

And, incidentally, that’s another tip for getting more time in the day – don’t watch live television. Catch up later and you can normally cut an hour’s program down to around 42 minutes at most.

Starting is probably the single most important thing you can do.

Of course, you also need to finish the things you start.

Which is where deadlines and other nasty things come in.

You definitely need to avoid being the kind of person who leaves a trail of unfinished websites and products and other things behind them.

So don’t simply start something for the sake of starting something new, otherwise it will join that pile of books with the corner of pages turned over that you know you’re never going to finish. Or those PDFs and MP3s and MP4s on your hard drive that were so essential to purchase but now you can’t even remember what was in that file helpfully named “call-18062013_data” (yup, I’ve got one called that, the name probably made sense back in June 2013).

Have a spring clean every now and then – archive stuff off to an external hard drive if you can’t bear to delete it – but don’t use that as an excuse to not start something that you really need to start. Unless that “something” was spring clean your hard drive.

4. Use the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro technique is a deceptively simple time management technique.

Break down your work into 25 minute intervals followed by a short break.

Repeat.

After 4 “cycles” of the technique, have a longer break.

I told you it was deceptively simple.

Sure, you could buy a book about it on Amazon or purchase a tomato shaped timer.

But in reality you’ve got all the equipment you need already:

• Some kind of timer – there’s almost certainly one on your phone or you can download one for whatever device you’re using

That’s it.

Apart from remembering to set the timer at the start of each 25 minute period.

And if occasionally you don’t remember to do that, no worries. If your first few sessions are shorter or longer than 25 minutes that’s not going to harm anything.

And if the 25 minute session length doesn’t work well for you, no probs either. I’ll often spend a hour or so focused on a post like this one with no breaks but that’s a routine I’ve done before and I’m happy with.

Once you get in a routine you’ll find it becomes almost automatic anyway.

5. Regular routines work best

We’re creatures of habit.

Chances are that you go to sleep at roughly the same time most evenings and wake up approximately the same time most mornings.

Maybe with some variation at weekends.

The same goes for most other things.

So make your internet marketing part of your daily or weekly routine.

If you only get time evenings or weekends, that’s fine.

But do commit the time.

Even an hour a day works well because it mounts up fast.

Most people in a job don’t spend all of their 8 hours a day working hard.

There are meetings, interruptions, all sorts of things that conspire against them.

So if you can spend a concentrated hour, you’re probably doing as much as a regular desk-bound person will do in half a day, maybe longer.

And if you do that on a regular basis you’ll find that things start to go in your favour and you get much closer to the internet way of life that was pitched when you first thought this was what you wanted to do.

Let me know your thoughts – drop me a message or use the comments box below.

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