TypeCarl

Balancing Short and Long Term Efforts

I haven’t been completely satisfied with what I have been doing in the last couple of weeks. This is because I feel like I’m much too focused in the short term. It’s the best way to make income now, but I feel that there isn’t too much long term potential. In addition, I don’t feel like I’m adding that much value to society. I feel like I’m just being a dirty sales person trying to push people to buy a product. Huh?

Isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Yeah I guess so, but it’s more of it not fitting into my ideals. I shouldn’t be too picky at the moment because I need to make money fast, so I can focus on what I really care about. However, I feel like it would be healthy to start a long term project to balance out my mind.

I’m losing focus because I don’t care too much about the profitable markets I’m finding. I really want to create something really cool that people can use, and it will have a genuine positive effect on them.

This is why I think I will need to setup a new structure for my time. A structure that will balance out my short and long term efforts. In other words, work an equal amount of time on quick profits as well as projects that may not pay off until months down the line.

I do have an idea for a Web 2.0ish kind of site, which I think is really cool. I’ve been searching around to see if anyone has done it already. It doesn’t look like it, so I think I’m going to start working on it. I don’t think there is an open source project that suits exactly what I need, so I will have to learn how code AJAX or whatever those new age coders use.

Pardon my French.

I’m going to break my time up in 3 hour intervals. I will have a 1 hour timer set for each of those 3 hours to keep myself on pace. I will work on my long term project first thing in the morning as my mind is clearest then. I will then focus on writing on my blog or blogs for another 3 hour block. Next comes the 3 hour block of short term projects. I will top it off with 3 hours of focused reading or studying of interesting books, audio books, and videos.

That’s a good 12 hours of solid work. It’s really not work to me as I do enjoy being independent. However, keeping focused is a challenge in itself.

I’m not really sure if this idea of mine will work out, but I’ll see how it goes and make adjustments as needed.

My goal is to cut down all the time wasting I currently do. We can be so unbelievably inefficient without truly realizing it.

I hope you’re doing well, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Carl Zetterlund