Monthly Update August 2012
by Chance Smith
Well, August is here! I am rather excited! Besides the burning desire to end my summer class I am ready to embark on a few more business ventures, while I continue what I have. I have a few clients that I need to tie up loose ends with on website development. But I have been trying to reach out to a few older clients and help them on further developing the webspace they I helped them construct. So lets start with a few things I started in July and still working on.
July 2012 I am fitting well into the work and school life from home. The remote work I am doing is very very educational. In case you are wondering, I do not work in my pajamas. I wake up and take a shower as usual. I feel I need to get up and get ready like I always did. There is still a great feeling of success when you are dressed for comfort and professionalism. I make a effort to not wear anything too casual though. Something I would workout in or lay out on the couch, if I was even consdered good at that, is not appropriate in my eye. So, here is where my time has been lately.
Wolfgang Computer Service (Link) I still take on clients and have been working on websites primarily. My design is still simple and to be less graphic intensive as possible. Minimalistic is a great way to describe what I try to implement. I am still hashing out the major parts of the new website and hope to finish it this month. I am wanting to make the website as helpful as possible by giving instructions to fix common technology issues. I also aim to reduce the amount of calls I receive by placing my hourly rate on the home page. Calls asking my rate and what I do are the larget time wasters and I want to give my time to my customers that value their own time as well.
Better Job Landing (Link) This has been one of the most exciting ventures thus far! Ideas are constant on how to develop this business but blogging for it has been more difficult. I still enjoy the information and still let leadership material consumes the majority of my education outside of school. I am working on more resources for the growing traffic and subscribers here, for this is my fastest following growth so far.
Extra Projects I have created this blog and my wife’s, but there are two other domains that I have done as well. I don’t want to skew the traffic results by revealing their domains but will give you the idea. These two sites are “niche sites.” Their main purpose is the gather a crowd of people that are interested in that topic and products and give them the best. The results aren’t staggering at all. The primary goal right now is to try this out. My wife has joined me in on this and we have built her own for experimental use. If you wanted to count traffic, she is beating me so far. This has been fun and very educational.
Education Speaking of education, I absolutely love to learn. My wife and I always have three books on our nightstands and I always have a slue of podcasts and audio books to listen to. I have been learning and tackling Keyword Research and Search Engin Optimization (SEO) mostly. These skills are important to my customers and for my own sites. I need to be better in what I am doing and this has been huge lately. Again…blah blah…I have have been working on this summer class and it has taken a good chuck of my mind lately. I will say I learned a lot about my research topic that I had for school, haha. Riveting, I know!
Productivity This has ben a focus for me and wanted to push it to the blog. I have had so much trouble of staying focused and having all this time at home. It can sometimes be hard to keep your mind on the project at hand. I have been active in the area of how I can produce the most in the smallest amount of time (speaking of minimalist). Spending time with my wife is important and and building my income at home is the challenge. I am trying to tackle both with great intensity. For the majority of my time I feel I am not in the groove when the best opportunity arises to work or be with my wife. I am much like my mother and hate a regular routine. In my attempts to be productive I have done the following:
- eat something for breakfast every morning (within the first 30mins) There is much need in stock piling your morning with high protein food for the body and mind. I know how I run on empty, thumbs down! Be productive by giving yourself the right fuel.
- check email only twice a day It drove me up the wall to look back on my day and notice all I had been doing is responding to email after email. I treat all my emails as urgent and now I do it two times a day. Once right before lunch and once before my wife comes home from work. Try this for two days. Really! Set up two reminders on your phone to check the your emails then. Notice how much time you spend on your email and use your extra time on your current projects. It is too cool! Wait... It's even better when you are doing what you love!
- silence my phone in all ways except for calls, my ringer is sudden and not something that is going to jolt me. There is so much interruption of my mind every time my phone goes off. I still place a importance to returning texts and calls as fast as possible. I want to make sure that anyone that calls me knows that I take a large effort to get back with them fast. I was very bad about this in the past. I promise if I see it on my phone you are the next thing on my list. A missed message or missed call is a priority pusher.
- write down the 2 things I need to accomplish today and do them first You could have 20 things that you need to do but let us not overwhelm ourselves. Take the two most important, the oldest, the biggest and do them today! I was horrible at this the first three weeks of this past month. This comes with practiced discipline and so does productivity.
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