One of the keys to success is knowing how to adequately manage your time. How are you going to manage your business (online or off) without being at least proficient in managing your time. Running One Man’s Goal is a true exercise in managing my time. I want to give you a few tips on what helps me.

Mastering time management relies on effectively using your most creative and productive hours wisely. I am a key advocate on scheduling everything. From blogging time, checking email, answering comments and viewing your site stats… it should all fall into a time frame. I’m not the typical up at the crack of dawn businessman. I find my most productive hours are late at night when it’s dark and quiet. At first I tried to fight it, but now I’ve come to accept that this is just the time when I’m productive… so I take advantage of it. I’ve come a lot closer to mastering time management. And I’ve become more productive because of it.

Effective use of targeting “productive time” and “wasted time” has drastically reduced my working day, therefore decreasing the time I spend in front of the computer everyday. The first month of blogging I might spend 6 hours or more blogging, answering email, commenting on other blogs, and tweaking my site. In the second month of blogging I limited myself to about 2 hours a day to see if I could deliver the same results… I exceeded my own expectations. The key is to make time work for you, instead of the other way around.

You’d be surprised to find out that most people (whether they believe it or not) work well under pressure. They NEED a deadline in order to achieve their goals. Why not set time management deadlines? For example. I spend five hours a day blogging, next week I’m going to see if I can get the same amount done in two.

It’s like Timothy Ferris mentions in “The 4 Hour Work Week” - If you can target the ten things you HAVE to do everyday, and then cut it down to two… you’d be surprised to know that usually the effect of this isn’t at all negative. You are essentially just cutting out the filler which makes you feel productive while not actually producing results. There is a difference in being busy and being productive. Most people think that they have to be busy to get results, the truth is… you just have to be productive.

I cut my hours by 1/3, which in effect left me to focus my remaining time on being productive rather than wasting time. I might have spent 6 hours blogging before, but in essence, the 2 hours that I spend now was the only highly productive time. The rest was spent checking stats every 30 minutes, reading email, hitting the stumble button, etc. I was BUSY for 6 hours a day, but only highly productive for about 2.

So, to experiment… I gave myself two hours a day, and I’ve been much more productive. Some days I don’t even spend 2 hours blogging. My traffic continues to grow at a pretty alarming rate and I’m regularly hitting the 1,500 pageviews a day mark now. Am I working harder? NO! Working smarter? ABSOLUTELY!

I’ll get into how to schedule effectively in a future post, but until then - I want all of you to target what your highly productive hours are and use them. You’ll be surprised to see that you can cut hours off your day and still get just as much done. It’s amazing. I realize that most of you work outside jobs where this might not mean much, but it can also be used at home.

For example, when you are cleaning the house… do you really spend 4 hours cleaning the whole house, or are you squeezing other tasks in like answering the phone, going through old magazines you find, taking frequent breaks, etc.? I would be willing to bet that only 1/2 to 1/4 of that time is actually spent cleaning. Focus on that time and use it. Clean for an hour… come back and do another one hour cleaning tomorrow. It’s a productive way to get things done without wasting an entire day. Plus it’s great for breaking big jobs into smaller, more manageable tasks. This is just one example. This method can be used on anything.

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