The time that you dedicate to learning can be as little or as much as you like. There is only one sort of need that i figure should be placed on this time. That is to ensure that you are learning something that is going to be worth the time to you. So you may be thinking what is worth learning and what is not worth learning. A lot of this decision comes back to What your most valuable task is. Because in reality what is the point in learning something that is not really worth your time.

A good example of this may be the manager of a reasonable size company, wanting to learn how to create websites, so that he can create one for the company, and save money. In reality this is not the most important thing that he could be learning. The first point is that his motivation to learn this is misplaced. The reality is the time he may dedicate to learning this and the final result is very likely to not show the value for what his time is normally worth. As a thing to learn, it would be a good start, but not really the best use of time.

Making the best use of your time is also a big consideration when you are learning. Using your time a little more effectively can not only increase the potential value of your time, but it can also potentially save you time dependant on what the task is.

This can be a good lesson that any one can learn, is that most email’s are not so urgent that they must be replied to minutes after they are received. While some people may make the messages seem urgent, and in need of a reply right now, this is really not what you want to be using email for. Email is that convenience thing, where you can send someone a message for them to reply to when they are able to. For those urgent need a reply now things, there is the Telephone.

In some cases you could potentially find that you are wasting anything up to 1 or 2 hours a day just checking email, reading and then replying to email as needed. What a majority of this time is spent on is the changing of tasks, stopping what you are doing, opening email waiting for the send and receive, then reading what you receive and deciding to to reply or not and then writing your replies.

You could save a lot of this time by simply forgetting email until 4.30 or 4.45 in the afternoon, downloading it once, check and reply as needed and be done with it. If you must maybe check it first thing in the morning as well, but otherwise you could potentially save a lot of the wasted time by getting rid of the wasted time opening email and hitting send and recieve and potentially replying to messages from one person multiple times per day.

In reality it is not that hard to create a to do list that gets done. All it takes is actually making yourself accountable to the to do list. Not really that the to do list it self will start talking to you and pushing you along, but start to score your to do list. I started doing this about 3 weeks ago, taking item’s on my to do list and giving them a point score value if i get them done.

So the basic idea is easy enough, but the full way i will do this comes down to making it more essential to do the big things i don’t really want to do to avoid a bad score. For example i decided a few days ago i wanted to move my Business website (http://www.orionnetworks.com.au) onto WordPress. As with anything you want to time the change of a website, but you also want to make sure that you don’t mess it up. Anyway i put it on the to do list on Saturday, and didn’t get it done. So again listed Sunday, and i did get it done.

Changing my website, i gave 6 pts, which does make a decent impact to your score if you miss, and it sure does motivate you the next time you list something as such to actually look to make sure it happens.

Where to start, well i started by defining an absolute base these are the minimum things i would like to get done each day, which includes things like status updates, commenting on blogs, forum posts, creating new content for my sites, and creating new blog posts, along with checking stats and such. All up my base score without any other to do items is 33 pts. However on average i have anything from 2 to 10 other items, adding on average 10 pts per day. At the present time my average completed points comes in at just 15 pts on average per day. Which works out to about a 33% achievement of items completed to possible total points.

What i ahve found my creating a to do list that i actually score for myself is that i do really need to improve my ability to get things done and not to continue with time wasters, and seeing low scores without really being able to explain them is the thing that i dislike the most.