Can you juggle online and offline?

One thing that I find more and more in my online marketing career is that time is so darned precious and hard to come by.

It’s a constant struggle to juggle family and online work commitments on a daily basis.

And I’m quite a workaholic with my online business so find myself constantly trying to squeeze more time out of each day.

The birth of my daughter almost a year ago now has helped me greatly to get a bit better life-work balance.

But I’m still a bit rubbish at it if truth be told!

The thing is though that working harder and harder is a bad trap to fall into.

You end up exhausted and actually you can become less productive.

I can remember numerous occasions where I’ve worked on a project tired – made mistakes and it’s actually taken twice as long.

And wasted so much precious time that could be spent with my family or doing other “fun” stuff.

In the long run constant “work, work, work” online can make you pretty unhappy and can mess up your whole life balance.

I know I’m not alone in this as I started a thread in the Warrior Forum asking other marketers if they ever uttered those fatal words to their family members “I’ll just check my emails for a minute…” and I got a big response.

You can read the thread at: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=249473

The key to beating this is to give yourself at least 1 whole day off the computer per week as it really refreshes you – something I try to stick to (but am not always successful).

Also outsourcing is a great way to cut down on the tasks you have to do – I have just begun to outsource the writing of one of my niche newsletters and my number crunching stats work (which I hate!)

So far the results have been good and for about $70 I have bought back about 3-4 hours of my life each month – which feels great.

Now I wouldn’t outsource my online marketing stuff as that’s my own know-how and another writer couldn’t replicate it.

Plus it’s my real passion and so writing it comes naturally.

But my other niche stuff – sure I outsource and plan to do more of it.

If you’re not in a position to outsource yet – at least do yourself a favour and tackle your most important tasks.

Spending hours messing around with email, Facebook, buying e-books and reading forum posts will not build your online business.

Writing sales copy, researching niches, developing products, making web pages etc. is what will drive you forward.

So try to do something today to get a bit of your time back and make your online business more effective.

Happy Marketing

John Hillage