The internet is a fascinating but distracting medium. It is very easy to fritter away hours of your precious time if you are not fully aware of how you are spending every minute.

One of the essentials of time management is to make a list of exactly how you spend your time over a period of about a week. If you cannot bear to do this for a week, do it for a day or even just a few hours!

It is just as enlightening to see what you are not doing as what you are doing.

I waste a lot of time reading emails and then I waste a lot of money buying what the emails suggest that I buy. I must have been born with the word ’sucker’ imprinted on my forehead.

I cannot resist a well crafted email or sales page and the internet is flooded with them. Each one promises solutions to every kind of problem imaginable and, even though I may not be currently experiencing the problem, I can easily think of a time or situation when I will be desperate for the solution on offer.

The time I waste reading the email escalates to reading the sales page and then to buying the product and then to downloading. However, I seldom spend time on actually doing anything useful with the product once I have it on my hard disk.

I now have two hard disks with huge capacity to make room for all the products I download but do not use. Do not follow my example!

A more recent timewaster is the huge number of giveaways now available on the internet. These giveaways are a cunning way for shrewd marketers to build their email opt in lists by giving away products to those who sign up to their lists.

As you might guess, I spend hours at these giveaway sites signing up and downloading vast amounts of products. Then even more emails start pouring in.

However, I am now becoming more ruthless with my emails. I rapidly delete large numbers of them without reading them. I don’t have the heart to unsubscribe from too many of them. After all, they have just given me a free ebook or useful piece of software. Deleting emails can be done very quickly so unsubscribing is not essential.

If I do not have time to read what looks like an informative and useful email, I file it where it can be consulted later. I even have the will power to file away the sales pages of products that I am very keen to buy. Almost always, I forget about these products after a few days and don’t seem to miss them at all.

The sales page of most products warn you that the price will be going up but almost always the price eventually goes down or a cheaper and even a better alternative emerges or you realize that you don’t really need that product after all.

My advice, born of bitter experience, is not to read your emails for at least an hour at the start of the day. It might even be a wise move not to read them until the evening when you have finished the important work.

Instead, work on something that will make you money rather than cost you money. Write an article with a resource box or an ad or an email for your list instead. You could spend an hour improving your html or your knowledge of what your autoresponder can do for you.

You will then feel a sense of energy and power that will permeate the rest of your activities and help you have a far more productive day.

Time management is all about priorities. Decide before you go to bed what your priorities are for tomorrow and make a list of 3-6 things you need to do in order of importance.

Make sure you start on the first thing next day even if you only work on it for five minutes. The five minutes will usually escalate into an hour or two. Try to stay with that task until you finish it.

Great marketers are quite often great time managers. They believe that consistent, relevant action to achieve their goals is far more important than pursuing the latest smart strategy or reading the emails and chatting on the forums.

Most marketers agree that building your list should be a priority. You could spend the first hour of the day working on an email or ezine to send to your list.

As you may, like me, have more than one list, you may need to spend several hours crafting messages to each list. Sometimes the subject matter will overlap and you can send the same email to all your lists.

Occasionally you will get a grateful comment from someone on your list which will make you realize that your efforts are being appreciated and you are not wasting your time. Even better, someone will actually buy something you have recommended

Remember these key points:

Don’t follow my bad example of reading too many persuasive emails and, as a result wasting too much time and money on products which you don’t really need.

Make a list of priorities and work on them first thing in the morning even before you have your early morning cup of tea or coffee or your first glass of fruit juice.

Make building your opt in list one of your key priorities and do something daily to build it or maintain it.

If you are not sure what your priorities should be, it might just be time to sign up with a mentor who will give you assignments which allow you to follow the steps they took when they achieved success. I definitely recommend doing this. You are almost certain to learn and achieve something.

Above all, don’t give up even if there are no apparent results. Results may be on their way.

It is easy to be discouraged especially in the summer months when the harvest you are expecting has not arrived.

A good time management plan will keep you working and sowing the seed through the bad times until the blackberries begin to show up on the brambles and you begin to reap the rewards of your efforts.

John Watson runs a website about internet marketing which provides information about affiliate marketing, reseller marketing and selling your own products. His website is http://www.johnwatsonpublishing.com

You can also read about all these aspects of internet marketing at his blog at http://www.johnwatsonpublishing.com/wordpress

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