Storebuilder Blog - Productivity

As affiliates we work extremely hard. Harder than Fat Pat's arteries as they so delicately put it in "the thick of it".

But it's not neccessarily the right thing to do.

About five years ago when I was working from home and didn't have the luxury of an office I was always taking on way too much work for clients. I didn't want the hassle of doing the work but of course the money came in very handy whilst I built the business.

The trouble was I almost always underestimated the amount of time that it would take to do a job and it always came back to bite me in the ass.

One summer in 2004 the kids wanted to go off fishing on a gloriously hot evening and as I was totally immersed in the job I was doing I couldn't let it go and so the missus ended up taking them. In fact over that summer I ended up slaving over the computer and progressively producing less output per hour as the time went by.

The problem wasn't the amount of work I had to get through. It was the type of work I was trying to do and it just wasn't right.

For example one of the projects called for a javascript based calendar for a holiday company. Instead of paying someone to get it done and factoring it into the budget I stupidly decided to do it myself and spent ages poring over code that was on the limit of my ability level. Result: Hours and hours of wasted time.

Now, I appreciate that you can't always just dip into your pocket and start paying coders to code for you, especially when you are just starting out, but it doesn't make sense to take on the type of work that means you have to spend a lot of time just figuring out how it works. If you don't know how it works it's much better to do it in an easier method so that you can make it work more quickly even if functionality may suffer for it.

Working too hard often means you don't see the wood for the trees and it's nearly always more productive to take a break and head off to the gym or do some exercise than it is to keep sitting there trying to force square pegs into round holes.

If you break off for a bit and do something else you'll always return to the problem with a fresh perspective and more often than not have it cracked within a few minutes of sitting down again.

Working hard is a good feature to have in your personal make up. But working too hard can damage your output seriously. As well as putting a strain on your relationships.

Strive to get as much serious output done as you can in the time you spend at the computer. Checking stats or viewing competitors sites is all non productive work. When you sit down to work on a site - write that article! Contribute more content, improve your graphics or implement better tracking. But don't sit there idly browsing the web or chatting on MSN. Those hours don't count as work time and you can use them to much better effect in your personal life.

Most affiliates claim they work hard when in fact they just sit at their computer "doing stuff" like posting on forums or chatting to mates, all this makes them "work hard" when they didn't need to.

You don't need to work too hard in this industry. Sure there is always the next job to be done, the next site to be built. But spending quality time at the computer is what it is all about. Take a break and you'll be surprised at how much more you can get done in so much less time!