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I want to talk with you about what I feel is one of the most overlooked obstacles in creating and promoting your web business. I call it the Internet Time Monster. Watch out or it will sneak up on you and eat you alive. We all read the ridiculous hype about how one can make a living from the internet in a few hours a day. How I wish this was true. In all of my business ventures I have never run into anything that can devour time the way the internet does. I have come up with simple rule of
thumb regarding anything internet or web site related. Figure out how long you think it
will take. Take that number and multiply by 10. You may then come close to the time it
will actually take. The internet is so full of variables that it can be virtually impossible to judge exactly how much time a specific project will take. Computers lock up and must be rebooted, modems disconnect, servers get slow and cranky, routers go crazy, FTP sessions cut off half way, file downloads disconnect, phone lines act up and on and on. Email adds a whole other aspect. When you run several sites as I do email comes in by the hundreds. Even with all of my filters I still check most every email in case it is important. Perhaps it ended up in the wrong box when it was a personal message or an order. It is not unusual for my first email check in the morning to take an hour to go through and answer the important ones. I am sure many of you are facing the same. The reason I am writing this is to emphasize a few things I have learned the hard way. You must be very focused in your web
projects. Don't sign up for every affiliate program that comes along. Don't try to update
your site with every little gizmo or you come across. Each one is going to feed the Time
Monster and there is only so much to go around. Stay focused on your primary goal and
audience and don't let yourself get distracted. I used to have a set of things I would do every day on the web. They were habits. I had a site I would visit for the weather report, a site I would visit for the latest technology news, a sport site and a movie review site. Every day I would try to visit them all for the latest gossip and news. But they were fun to visit and kept me informed. Then one day used the simple method below to time these recreational actions and learned the ugly truth. What I was really doing was wasting 55 to 60 minutes of
my valuable time every single day while I did this. Time I wasn't spending promoting my
projects and dealing with my business. Wasted time. Time I can never get back. I now save that valuable time by
subscribing to plain text email lists that give me the same information in a fraction of
the time. It is very easy to form many time
wasting habits on the web. Mostly, you won't even notice the time going by. Since you are
online and using your keyboard, it is easy to fool yourself into believing you are
working. Try this experiment. Start the stopwatch only when you are doing an actual promotion, order filling or answering an email for your business. Stop it when you aren't. Do that for a day to see how much time you accumulated that was spent on actual business correspondence and promotion. I was very surprised at the results when I did this. If the web is something you do for fun that is another
story. But if you do it for business than you need to know how much time is spent on
productive and unproductive tasks. Ed Osworth The Success Professor PS: If you would like to receive my
occasional newsletter"Ed's TipSheet and Update" Click
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