Don’t spend major time on minor things – a quote from Jim Rohn, one of the original personal development gurus. He was teaching this in the 70s and 80s but it is true today more than ever. Most of us spend way too much time on small things. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t spend as much time as I’d like to on LifeHQ, my target is 3 hours per day on weekdays, but I often miss the target and I’m not happy about it.
Self discipline when working remotely
The greatest benefit when working remotely, our freedom, can be our biggest detriment to productivity and accomplishment. There is no one to report to and no one is working besides us.
For paid gigs this is less of an issue because we do have clients who expect things to be delivered at certain deadlines, so we have that pressure.
But when working on side-projects it is so easy to fool ourselves that we’re hustling and being committed more than we actually are. There are a few reasons for this:
- There is really no one to report to
- We don’t depend on it to make a living
- We’re not making money from it (yet)
- There are no users depending on us (yet)
- The deadlines we set are just made-up by us
Now that we know the enemy here is how to conquer it.
Blog about your project
The best way to have users before you have a product. Blog about all your side projects and commit publicly to what you’re about to do. People who read your blog will like your projects and will push you to ship them as soon as possible.
Mastermind groups and Indie maker communities
There are many great communities in the area of indie makers, people building their products and helping each other solve common problems we all face.
Here are a few of them: IndieHackers, ProductHunt, Hashnode, MakersKitchen
Mastermind groups are smaller groups of people all in similar situations or industries who get together every week and talk about their wins, challenges and keep each other accountable. This looks difficult to set up but it’s really not. There are many people on these forums that are interested in masterminds but are not part of one.
What gets measured gets managed
Blogging and joining communities and masterminds are great for getting ideas and keeping yourself going, but when it comes to doing the actual work, you have to do it yourself.
If you want to make sure you invest enough time on your projects, the obvious thing to do is track the time spent per task and per project.
LifeHQ is one of the few apps that lets you organize your projects and track the time spent on them in one place.
Tracking time per task and project
Now you can select the tasks from your daily master list and track the time you worked on them.
This will allow you to see the time spent on every task per day and the total time spent per project.
Review your time spent every day
Review how much time you spent on every task every day of the week. Also edit and manually add time spent if you forgot to to track it.
Great way to keep yourself in check and make sure you are putting in enough time to achieve your goals.
Remember, concentrated effort every day is what moves things forward.
To your productivity,
Darko
