I had an epiphany recently that made me rethink a lot of what I consider with my home based Internet businesses and my life in general: While I am very good at setting goals within my businesses, I am not good at setting goals in my personal life.
In fact, in the last two years, I have lost sight of the importance of setting non-business related goals.
What did this do to me? For starters, I became more apathetic about aspects of life. I did less activity outside of work. I spent time with my family but I never made it a priority to do a lot of special things with them, such as days at the park, family time outside, or time outside of the normal routine.
In fact, I was noticing my life becoming rather boring, I was getting more and more out of shape, and I although I was having a good time with my family, I found myself having less “fun” with them. I also found myself not enjoying the “work” with my home based Internet businesses as much.
I was thinking about all of this recently and asked myself a serious question: Why not do it all? Why not manage my time, exercise, do more things with the family, and still get plenty of work done for my home based Internet businesses?
I took the first step in figuring out how to do this: I took a true evaluation of my time. What I learned was that although I said I was “working” my home based internet businesses a lot, I was not accomplishing something each day. I found that I was staying up late without doing anything and, when I woke up in the mornings, wasting a lot of time that could be used for something else. It was time to reorganize my life and do set some personal goals inside and outside my home based Internet businesses.
My first personal goal was to begin exercising again. I knew that I could not afford the time to do a long routine in either the mornings or the evenings so I had to break it up. Instead of wasting thirty minutes of every morning goofing around online, I started going for a brisk walk for that time. What is amazing is what it began doing for my day: I became more energetic and willing to tackle the day. The effect this simple act had on the work of my home based internet businesses was amazing!
With the goal of exercising comes the goal of losing weight and toning muscle. Since I spent my mornings working, I decided to set aside a little bit of time in the evenings, multiple times a week, to do some strength training on a piece of exercise equipment. To aide in the weight loss, I found it best to do these exercises prior to eating supper which has led to eating smaller portions. Not being so full at night also allowed me a little extra non-drowsy time to work with my home based Internet businesses.
I also organized my time to where I could do that little bit extra with my family. I knew that spending time with my two young daughters had to become a priority. I also knew that letting them have “fun” experiences would make the attention I was giving them more special. I have enjoyed making this change, and my wife appreciates it as well.
I also knew it was time to revamp and reorganize what I did with my home based Internet businesses. Although I do not work these full-time, I wanted to put forth a full-time effort. The first goal here was to make sure I was doing something productive every day.
This did not include browsing “forums” or other major time wasting activities but rather the basics of my Internet marketing training. I cut back on the number of websites I was working to drive traffic to and increased the amount of work I did for the domains I was focusing on. In the short time doing this I have seen an increase in Google rankings and an increase in prospects.
Doing these acts and making these goals and changes has increased my happiness in my personal life as well as made me more productive in my home based internet businesses.
