Planning - Upping the Ante

My planning process is working pretty okay now.  I am keeping track of where I am spending time.  It isn't perfect but it is working.  I have lists of projects and activities and I am keeping on top of them.  And I am reducing the amount of time I waste.  So it is all good.  But I have to be realistic.  I have a pretty poor track record of keeping up with planning and every other planning system I have used has eventually, and always within six months, collapsed when it became too big an overhead.  Even when they work well they are hard to keep going on.

How To Make More Money By Talking

So I had an enquiry from a client.  They were working with another consultant who wasn't really doing what they wanted and had lost a lot of time on a project.  They outlined what they were looking for and I made a few guesses about their requirements and sent them a quote.  They were modestly interested but wanted to both lower the price and speed things up.  Sometimes it is best to just pull the plug on an unpromising opportunity and spend the time looking for a better one.  I tried to do this by turning down their request for a meeting at their premises.  That I thought would be the end of it.

Write A Blog Post In 15 Minutes

How Quickly Can You Write A Blog Post?

If there is anyone it is possible to fool, it is yourself.  I have just set out to write a blog post in 15 minutes.  In the event it took 40 minutes.  The interesting thing is that if I hadn't timed it I may well have continued to believe that it had only taken 15 minutes.  That is a planning error of 260% of which I would have been totally unaware.  No wonder time is such tricky stuff to manage and why none of us do it as well as we would like.

Making Money From Blogging

I don't make any money from this blog.  My total revenue since I started it is about a pound.  I don't really aspire to make any cash from it.  It is just a handy place to write down thoughts I might want to refer to again in future.  I did wonder when I started it if it would be a surprise money spinner.  But it has been going long enough that I know now that it won't.  But I have another blog that is producing a steady £100 plus a month from Google ad sense earnings.  It gets hundreds of visits a day and on current trends by some time this summer it will have chalked up a million page views since it started.