Hey guys, I’m Josh Buckley, a good friend of Adnan’s. He has asked me to do a guest post for him, my personal blog is joshbuckley.net and I run several large sites including Menewsha
Like many of you, I lead a double life. In the day I’m just your regular school kid hanging with my friends. However, by night I am managing multiple web businesses. I see it as very important to maintain a healthy balance between your websites and life. It is too easy to get consumed into your websites and forget about your outside life.
A good way to maintain this balance is to work more efficiently on your projects, get work done faster. Whenever I am on my computer I leave IM on, which distracts me from my projects. There always seems to be somebody that I talk to. I’m now trying to break out of this habit. Just have a go yourself. Don’t use im for the day, don’t use forums for the day. See the difference in your productivity! See the difference in your stress levels!
Most people are effected differently by these changes. To some of us, turning off your im isn’t a big change. You may play games in between managing your websites. I generally don’t play on the computer much these days, i use the computer to work and play offline 
a much healthier view on things. However, you may not see it as a sacrafice you may not want to make. For me, working on my projects is also leisure. I do not need to play games, working on my sites is fun for me. I’m sure it must be the same for a lot of you, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this business, am i right?
Another way which can help is to integrate both lives. Let everybody know about your internet business, in most cases they would be impressed and want to support you. With them knowing, people around you will understand and help you afford more time to work on your projects.
One problem that I definitely have is settling for nothing. When one of my sites go quiet, i’ll be launching a new project. This definitely has an effect on my free time, and really changes the balance between life and work.
I hope you have learned something in my post today, and you can get a healthy balance.
- Subscribe to our RSS feed for instant updates!
- Receive the latest posts by email
- Add me to your Technorati Favourites
4 responses so far ↓
1 Terra // Jul 2, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I cannot find the trackback link on here… but I linked this article on my blog as well. I loved it! Great job!
2 Rohit Malik // Jul 3, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Dear Josh,
I completely agree with you & it’s better to stay away from IM unless it’s very necessary.
Cheers, Rohit
3 derrick sorles-web 2.0 consultant // Jul 26, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Hey Josh - I enjoyed your post. I have to say, I have always lived my life with efficiency. I never use IM’s - way too distracting for someone who lives online! I run 6 blogs of my own plus 5 more for clients -with the help of my partner. We’re both online 8-10 hours a day. I cannot have people IM-ing me, distracting me from what I am doing. Same goes for text messaging me. If you text me - I will phone you back. I try to maximize my work time. And after reading THE 4 HOUR WORKWEEK I know only touch my emails (I have 4 different ones) only twice per day. - For me , my healthy balance is trying not to touch the computer in the evening, when my workday is done!
4 Blog updates // Aug 5, 2007 at 5:04 pm
[...] productivity seems to have gone up a lot more lately. In my post at blogtrepreneur, I touched on the subject of this - but I wasn’t doing it too well myself. Now, I seem to be [...]
Leave a Comment