Tricking Yourself into Being More Productive

Dabble in the affiliate marketing world for very long and you’ll realize that the ability to juggle is definitely very, very valuable. For all of those of us with a day job (not to mention a spouse, family, or life in general), there’s only so much time in the day and only so many things one person can do.

If you take a generalist approach and have many affiliate sites up and running, prioritizing and working efficiently gets even harder, as you’re always facing a mountain of work, always neglecting whatever site you’re not currently working on. No matter how motivated you may be, sometimes the mountain overwhelms you, and the end result is that you do absolutely nothing, saying any number of variations of a phrase like “Ugh, too much, not today.”

I’ve been doing this stuff for years and years and that last one still bites me in the ass. I can preach all day about the value of writing something, anything, each and every day, but I still come up empty occasionally, usually at the worst time, as far as having many, many things that need doing.

One thing that helps me get out of that rut is kind of bass-ackwards, but it works. Lists tend to paralyze me, and while a routine is good (when your workload is manageable and everything is clicking along), sometimes that routine itself becomes an excuse not to get work done.

If you tend to get work done early in the morning but, due to feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of stuff to do, put off doing work that morning, odds are you aren’t going to carve out time later in the day. Ditto if you work later in the evening, as delaying doing anything has a tendency to result in later saying “Hey, look, now it’s bedtime, I’ll work on that affiliate crap tomorrow.”

So how do I get out of that nasty feedback loop when I find myself stuck in it? As backwards as it sounds, I try not to obsess on what needs to be done and surprise myself by suddenly sitting down and cranking out some content, just doing the first thing that comes to my mind.

My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I’ll be in the middle of yardwork and stop, come in, and write for 15 minutes or so. Or putting away laundry, when I suddenly disappear and bang on the keyboard for awhile. Or watching television.

It’s not that I’m some mad scientist and suddenly inspired, but more that I’m tricking myself into just doing work, without the whole internal monologue that normally accompanies it, as far as telling myself I need to get work done, making up elaborate reasons why I don’t want or need to, promising myself I’ll do twice as much tomorrow to catch up, yada yada yada.

Once you have a number of affiliate sites up, the nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to bang out content here and there, as you’re typically talking about fairly short, concise pages. I keep a list of potentially profitable keywords for all my sites geared towards search engine traffic so it’s simply a matter of sitting down, pulling up a list, and writing a couple of pages.

While it’s kind of dumb, tricking myself into working usually gets me over whatever hump of malaise I’m stuck on, and back into my normal routine of slowly and steadily generating content on a variety of sites.

Tricking Yourself into Being More Productive and related information can be found in Getting Started