Too Many Baskets and Eggs, Not Enough Time

You know how everyone is always saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? While that may be true, it can actually prevent you from reaching your full potential if you have too many eggs in too many baskets.

Information overload is quite common in the online world. It’s also very common to get overwhelmed with all the tasks that come with working online. There are so many options! Which ones do you choose?

Time is money, right folks? No matter how good you are, Santa isn’t going to bring you more hours in the day for Christmas.

If this is you, here’s a little exercise you can try to help you determine which things you should focus on and which things you should drop.

You’ll need to think about everything you do that you consider part of your business building methods and compile them all into a list.

The items that may be on your list could include but are not limited to:

• buying advertising
• article marketing
• social media marketing
• affiliate marketing
• selling your own products or services
• blogging
• posting in forums
• recording podcasts, interviews, etc.
• offline marketing
• email marketing
• building membership sites
• setting up squeeze pages
• cost per click advertising like Adsense, Chitika, etc.

For this to work, you’ll need to know how much money each task brings in. This may be hard to monitor in some cases so just do your best and “guestimate”.

Now, take everything that currently makes you money or will be bringing money in soon. Write each thing down on a piece of paper with plenty of space between each item. (Some things may overlap a bit since certain tasks will directly and indirectly affect other tasks, but that’s OK for now.)

Beside each one, write down how much money it makes per day, per month, per year. Then write down how much you think it can potentially make you per day/month/year.

Once that part is done, go back through each item and list how much time and effort each thing needs to keep bringing in that money. For example, blogging may take you 1 hour a day whereas buying advertising may only take a few hours a month.

Now rate each item on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is “I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than do this.” and 10 is “This is so freaking fun!”

After you have everything written down, take some time to decide what your top 5 items are. If you didn’t have many to begin with, choose the top 3. Those are the money-making methods you should be focusing on.

That doesn’t mean you need to stop doing the other ones, just don’t spend a lot of time or effort on them right now. You can outsource those tasks to someone else, or wait until your top items are on auto-pilot and you have more time to spend on them.

If they really don’t help your business at all, cut ‘em loose.

Ultimately, you want to be focusing on things that not only help improve your business but are also things you can see yourself continuing to do without them becoming chores you despise doing.

The whole point of working at home is to have freedom. You want the freedom to be able to spend time with your family, and also financial freedom so you’re not always tied to your desk.

To get to that point, you need to periodically analyze your business plan as well as your daily routine and update it accordingly. This exercise will help you do that.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "Too Many Baskets and Eggs, Not Enough Time"