At what time is writing content easiest? For me it’s between 7–9am every morning.
At what time is your client work or customer work easiest? I generally get the bulk of this done after 9 before 1pm every day. Depending on how busy I am, this might take all day some days.
Are you more productive if you get up at specific times? I hate mornings, but unfortunately, I’m super productive if I get up and start work by 7.30am. I’ve tried various schedules, including getting up and starting later, but nothing seems to beat this for me.
Make a note of when you are best at certain tasks. There are things you’ll have to do at certain times regardless, but this is the path to getting twice as much done.

Schedule everything

I’ve always hated planning and scheduling.

I don’t know why. Maybe it comes from childhood, hating the school experience where you are told at what time to do everything and how to do it.

My to do list has always been my best friend.

Using the Bucket Method & Next Actions method advocated by David Allen.

Beyond that I’ve hated the idea of scheduling everything in advance.

Over the past year though, I’ve seen the value in automation and scheduling more and more.

Recently, I scheduled my next 90 pieces of content in advance.

It didn’t take long, I jotted down the titles and in some instances 1 small bullet point summary.

For my website blog articles I matched them up with a long tail keyword.

As I become busier this scheduling in advance allows me to be ultra productive with my time.

I also created a daily schedule (subject to anything changing urgently with a client, or anything out of my control) where each day I’ve blocked out my time accordingly, on the tasks I need to work on.

Only work on what you absolutely have to

First time entrepreneurs or new business owners are notorious for wasting time on unnecessary tasks (believe me, I was one of them 6 years ago).

Only work on anything that will grow your business or improve the customer experience.

The rest is junk. Until you are at the point you can comfortably start hiring people or outsourcing major tasks.

For example, your time split should look something like this:

25% of your day should be spent on sales & marketing
25% should be spent on servicing your clients/customers
25% should be spent on scheduling, research, processes and improving your business
25% of the time should be ‘floating free time’ that can be allocated to one of the above 3 areas, depending on whatever needs most attention that particular day.

The trick is analysing everything you do.

Pinpoint what specifically gets you new business. Then just do that, drop the things that don’t work.

And figure out what makes your customers love you.

If you’re able to figure out the specific tasks that generate you new business and how to keep your existing customers happy, that is the winning formula for a small business with longevity and that can be scaled comfortably in the future.

It will also allow you to do focused work for 8 hours a day and enjoy a healthy work life balance, while getting twice as much done.