People often view my life as glamourous.  When I say “people” I mean 9-5 desk workers whose eyes glass over within 5 minutes of entering their office, and who spend their day carrying out tasks that they neither care about nor enjoy, but are obliged to complete in exchange for a paycheck at the end of the month.  People who dream about starting their own business, following a dream, breaking free of the shackles of the rat race, yet never quite seem to go through with it.

Let me be clear about two things:

1. My life is far less glamourous, and much more mundane than most people envision.
2. Most people would balk at the reality of running your own online business once they saw the amount of time spent on “housekeeping”

What exactly do I mean by “housekeeping”, I hear you ask?  Here is an example from my day…

9 am – Check my calendar: 4 hours of client work scheduled – keyword reports, website copy, profile optimizing and the like.  Great! Short day.

10 am – I am still wading through my inbox, delegating follow ups to my PA, sending out interview questionaire’s, responding to enquiries, putting out fires

10.30 am – One of my emails was a notification that a domain needed it’s hosting renewed, so I headed over to pay, only to spend half an hour looking into a more effective hosting package that can deal with my growing needs for bandwidth and storage.

11 am – Start work on a client project.

12 pm – Try to install a plug in on my blog, but something’s not quite right.  I dive into the code, trying to spot the mistake, editing lines of code that make my eyes cross.

12.30 pm – After all that, it still won’t work.  I cut my losses and uninstall it, making a note to look into an alternative at some point in the near future.

1pm – Finish another client project.

2pm – I get a call from my PA to say that three clients accounts are overdue.  I quickly jump on the phone, log into Kashflow, update and resend invoices.

2.30pm – Try to update a Facebook page for a client, only to discover that Facebook have changed the goalposts, and that custom tabs are now a different width.  Must now go back and update all of my old client pages.

…I won’t bore you with the rest of the details, but you can see how quickly a 4 hour work day expands with fiddly jobs that crop up throughout the day.  They are inevitable, and they must be done or things begin to slip through the cracks, so time management is a vital element of being self-employed.

Time management and the humility of accepting that when you are your own boss at the end of the day you have to take out your own trash.