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An awful lot has been written and discussed about time management strategies for those running an online business. The one constant seems to be the importance of focus. Without a doubt, that is key to getting anything done and moving forward in the growth of your online business.

But focus and its importance have pretty much been beaten to death.

There are tons of strategies for dealing with focus and its elusive nature. It’s been reported that a significant number of online marketers suffer from ADD. This is both a curse and a blessing. A blessing in that many of these people are high energy, highly creative individuals. The curse is self-evident.

I’m definitely not what you would call “Type A”, but I do come down from time to time with a touch of ADD. I’ve got a plate full of projects and ideas that are in various stages of completion, with many not actually at the final stage otherwise known as “completion”.

Besides being much more aggressive about paring down my project list to those projects that have the greatest chance of making me some money, I’ve also adopted a time management strategy that is more complementary to my daily creative cycle.

It’s really quite simple.

I segment my day into quadrants. Each quadrant takes advantage of where I’m at both creativity-wise and energy-wise throughout the course of my day.  These quadrants are described below:

First Quadrant - Early Morning: 

During the early part of the morning I basically need to wake up. I check email and forum PMs and respond to the ones needing a response. Many people say not to check your email first thing, but I like to make sure there is nothing urgent that requires my attention. I then shutdown my email client and don’t check it again until lunch time.

I also check my stats — commission reports as well as PPC campaigns. This is just to make sure things are basically on track.

Once I’m fully awake, I then take advantage of my energy level during this period since it’s about as high as it will get for the day. At my advanced age, my energy gets sapped rapidly as my day progresses. If I’m lucky, I may catch a second wind later in the evening and work until the wee hours, but that doesn’t happen every day.

I finish out my morning by writing blog posts and any articles that are on my article writing list. I just get them cranked out so much faster before lunch.

Second Quadrant - Early Afternoon: 

The period immediately after lunch and prior to my mid-afternoon coffee break is pretty much dedicated to website building. I’ll either do some niche research or having completed that previously, will add content, do link-building, etc. As my energy and concentration begins to drop off during this period I can perform tasks that don’t require as much creativity and focus as writing.

Third Quadrant - Late Afternoon:

I refer to this quadrant as the “dangerous period“. That’s because this is when my energy and focus level takes a severe hit. Sometimes, I don’t even bother fighting it and just take a short nap of about 30 mins. I find it’s better to give in to the urge to rest and then come back refreshed and renewed. I also take a coffee break between 3-4pm. I really need this!

I find late afternoon is the perfect time to manage my PPC campaigns since this is repetitive work that doesn’t take a whole lot of brain power.

I’ll then take a long break for dinner and TV news watching.

Fourth Quadrant - Late Evening

Since I’ve taken up writing software again, I leave what for me, is a very enjoyable pursuit, to the final portion of my day. It really is a complete shifting of gears from IMing and actually recharges my mind. My backlog of software projects is rapidly growing and I’m trying to make better use of the evening hours to make progress on them.

I’ll also spend some time during the evening browsing the forums and checking the more interesting emails in my inbox.

By separating my day into 4 parts, I’m always generally aware of what I should be accomplishing. The actual details about what needs to be accomplished I leave for To Do Lists, which sounds like a topic for another post.