The Cycle of Consulting and Moving Forward with my Goals

As some of you may know I work as an Engineer in the consulting field.  The way the consulting world works is that there is huge ups and downs.  When there are downs I am working like a crazy person on my sites since i have the time, however like now when I am working upwards to 60hours a week I simply don’t have the time to do any work on my sites.  Actually there are a couple that I don’t even have time to maintain. 

So that is where my time management comes in to play.  I am here sitting at work doing an Arc Flash study but while I am inputting all of the data, I am thinking about what I am going to do with some of my sites, how I am going to start up my new ideas and basically how I am going to set everything up into some form of passive income. 

To keep all of my ideas in line I have a small notebook that I have on me at all times.  I have this so that if I come up with an idea, no matter where I am at, I will be able to write it down (don’t forget the pen too).  I have the notebook not just for my personal business, but if someone on site tells me something I will be able to write it down so that I don’t forget. 

I am sure that a lot of you do something similar too, however this is what I try to do differently.  Every night before I hit the hay I have a binder that is divided into categories.  The categories include my current “sites”, new ideas, improvements, changes, etc.  Then on a seperate piece of paper I take 10 minutes to elaborate on the idea I jotted down earlier in the day.  This both gives me a second look to decide if it is worth proceeding and usually after thinking about it a second time I can come up with more to add to the idea.  Then when I have time again, and I am not sure where to go with my time I grab the binder and spend some time going through the ideas, I pick the ones that I think are the best and work on them, as they are “complete” I take them out of the binder.

This is how I ensure that even though I may not have the time at the moment to work on my personal business I still keep moving forward and improving my sites.