Organizing your content creation business

Organizing your content creation business

When you have a business, especially when you are a self employed content creator, you actually need to engage with others, to chat, to send twitter messages, to comment... This is great and all but it can become a time trap that we can easily stumble into...
If we want to work efficiently, it is necessary to get organized. It's important to allocate time to everything we need to do and not only to the things that we want to do!

There are no clear rules how to get organized because our lives look all differently. Let me show you how I managed to bring some order into my business.

The importance of getting organized

Since I consider my content creation activity as a business, what I do needs to be organized. It's so easy to get lost online. I have a certain time budget that I can allocate to this online business. Next to it, I have my offline business, my family and my leisure activities that all require a certain amount of time.

How I get organized for my content creation business

I have to admit that for a long time I was doing stuff quite randomly and only later did I manage to get somewhat organized. I was simply losing too much time and I wanted to find a solution to get organized. I sat down and started to write down everything that I was doing.

Defining the tasks

I wrote down everything that I could remember and believe me there was quite a list. In a second step I took this list and marked the things that were needed to make my business progress.

I had now on this list a big amount of things that were actually not helping me or very little for my business. There were some old habits from my former activities. Habits that I had never managed to shake off and that were simply a loss of time. There were a couple of things that I didn't want to let go and I kept them. However thanks to this sorting of activities, I managed to free a lot of time.

Bringing in a certain structure

My day job and my family require a very flexible scheduling. Every day looks different for me and I have to adapt. My time management has to take this into consideration and I've come up with a very flexible work plan for my content creation business.

Four separate Time Slots

I've defined time slots that I push around during the days. I have 4 slots that I manage quite freely. To each of these slots I assign the things I want and need to do for my business.

The first slot comprehends the remaining activity of my old faucet based business. I often do this early in the morning because it doesn't require much brainwork and it's a good way to start the day.

Whenever possible I immediately add the second slot following the first. In this slot I read and answer comments to my posts and I also try to read as many posts of other people as fits in my time budget. This is my engagement slot and it's where I try to keep my readers happy and where I try to increase my influence.

For the third slot, I always close all my windows on the computer and I take a blank page of my editor. This is my creative slot. Before this slot, I often try to do some physical activity like running or walking because it frees my mind. That is when I write my posts or record my videos. Sometimes it takes me several days to finish a post. I realized that when I work on a post for several days, the result is often better because I get ideas in between and when I look at something twice, I avoid many mistakes.

I have a fourth slot that I take most of the time in the evening and it's the funny part of the day because it's when I play splinterlands. How great is it to be able to include playing games in your work schedule? But hey it's Hive, everything is possible here :-).

These Time Slots are part of my daily organization

To get organized, I enter these different slots for every day in my calendar and I consider them like normal work slots. Sometimes a slot can be in the morning, another day it's in the afternoon. Each slot however always contains the same tasks.

My trick in order not to get lost in time

Once in a book that I've read, they presented some scientific research that showed that our attention span is about 25 minutes. After this time we get tired and we should change activities. I found out that this was quite true for me. That is why I structure my day in 25 minute periods. Between each period, I make a small 5 minute break. In this break I leave my desk and do something else.

I have a timer that gives me the rhythm with an alarm clock. This timer is on a website called tomato.es. After 25 minutes, it rings like at school, when a lesson was over. After 5 minutes it rings again and I go back to work.

It may look a bit silly but like that I delegate the time management to this website and it works quite well for me.

Integrating new habits

When I want to get used to something new, I simply allocate the new task to one of my time slots. I probably first need to weed out something else to free the necessary time but I almost always find a place for something that I want to do. Once this new task has it's place in my daily schedule it becomes a habit quickly.

Getting organized in a professional way makes my content creation business as a whole much more professional in my own perception. If I see it this way, it become much easier to sell to others.

My time budget for my content creation, splinterlands gaming included, is about 4 hours per day. How much time do you invest every day in your business?

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This post is part of a series in which I want to rise the awareness that content creation is a business. The previous posts:

• Content Creation is a Business and you are the CEO
• The most important part of your content creation business: YOU
• Your content – The core of your business
• Why your Content needs a nice Packaging
• How to Market your Content Creation Business
• How to keep your Readers Happy
• Your Hive Power is your Business Card
• How to launch your content creation start up

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