Actual, Theoretical, and Quasi Work

There was an interesting poll started at PokerAffiliatePrograms.com a while back asking, “How many hours per day do you work on your sites?”

The majority answered in the 1-8 hour range. There were a few who work more than that, which I find pretty impressive. The question I like to ask, however, is how much of that time is actually spent working? How much time do you spend checking stats, reading blogs, reading articles, reading forums etc.

I like to categorize work into 3 different categories.

Actual work that must be done.

Without this stuff you would be out of business.

• Writing content.
• Uploading content

Theoretical Work

In theory it is work because it is going to help you in the long run, but for the most part the stuff below has delayed results.

• Reading industry forums/blogs. This one skates on thin ice… Reading John Chow and Shoemoney doesn’t count as work… there I said it.
• Chatting with peers/networking on msn or skype. (Bouncing ideas off someone is one thing, but talking about American Idol does not count.)
• Researching and learning skills that could help your business. Examples: SEO, html, photoshop, etc.
• Studying traffic for various reasons. (Where is traffic coming from and where could more traffic come from)
• Analyzing the competition. (Looking at their source code, seeing who links to them, and other stalker tactics).

Quasi Work

This stuff resembles work, but it is not really work. It is part of the routine though… at least some of it.

• Checking Stats
• Playing with your stats in a spreadsheet saying, “Ok if I could send xx many players here and xx many players there I could possibly make xx,xxx this month.”
• Checking your position in the search engine results pages (serp’s).
• Checking your friend’s position in the serp’s.
• Writing long blog posts like this one.

While the above is not really work, it does seem to take up many affiliates time. Seriously, I find it hard to believe that someone could spend16 hours per day, every day, writing articles, link building and tweaking their site(unless they are learning at the same time). However, I do find it easy to spend all day on the computer if you are constantly researching something, starting a new project, checking stats, and reading forums and blogs.

Track your Work!

I initially drafted this post a few weeks ago (I think), and was almost going to scrap it when I discovered the Time Tracker add on for Firefox.  This little add on keeps track of how much time you spend browsing the web with firefox. You can reset it whenever you like, and keep track of how much time you spend working (or not working). You can set filters for site’s that you do not want tracked, and if you filter all of the sites that have to do with actual work you can see how much time you spend waste on gossip blogs, news sites, social networking sites, porn sites etc. I installed it late at night on March 31st and it will be keeping track of all browsing/working I do for 30 days.

I do the majority of my work through a browser with the exception of working in wordpad or frontpage, but even when doing this I have a browser open to refresh the pages to make sure they look right. I also write all of my content in Google docs (this keeps your work safe in case someone drops your laptop off the deck and ruins the hard drive…true story). At the end of the month I can figure up how much money I make per hour since I will know exactly how much time I spent at the computer… although I really don’t wanna know. After the first month I can cut down on the BS browsing and set the filter to block all sites that are not work related so I will know exactly how much time I spend actually working, and therefore I will know the real hourly rate of my work.