What is really worth your time?
Is it SEO, networking, network marketing, plain old marketing, advertising, directory submissions, blog carnivals, or building back links?
Or is it being able to go outside and witness the rain with your kids, taking photographs of moments that would might go unnoticed, developing otherwise impossible friendships with people states or even countries away, voicing your opinion honestly and having a real discussion, sharing your hobbies and interests, or showing off your work and experience?
Obviously this is not an either or question, but I see a lot of bloggers become absolutely obsessed with promoting their blogs and lose touch with what made them love blogging in the first place. We all lose our perspective from time to time, and not everyone recovers from it as gracefully as others. Some don’t recover at all.
I like to think since I have made a metric ass-ton of mistakes this gives me a unique vantage point. I also have a freaky talent for quadratic graphs and applying them to cost benefit analysis.
Time is a commodity, actually a metered commodity.
Everyone has 24 hours a day. Some of those reasonably should be spent sleeping, eating, taking care of personal hygiene and eliminating bodily wastes, we can call those the physical necessity hours. The rest of your hours could be spent a variety of other ways; earning an income, socializing, rearing a family, bonding with your children, sex, pursuing an interest, self improvement, and so on– but no matter what you choose to do with your time during the day, you neither gain nor lose time, it simply continues.
Which means that if you’re business minded then you’ll have to triage your greatest resource, which is time. To do that successfully, you’ll need to be able to discern the difference between time well invested and time poorly spent.
This doesn’t mean shunning all things not work related, or being sleep deprived, or eating fast food to grab a few extra minutes. But do you really need to spend three hours a day checking forums and clicking links, or filling out surveys only to earn a few pennies here or there? Would you be better off hiring a web designer to create a new theme for your site or struggling 10-20 hours (or more) trying to do the work yourself?
Are you spending more in time than you are earning in other ways?