Making Money Online: How to Professionally Unplug to Get Things Done

In yesterday’s post, Making Money Online: Unplugging to Get Things Done, I talked about how I’d basically shut myself off for about a week from email, social media and blogging to finish a book I was co-authoring.

My co-author and I were finishing up the last few chapters of the book, which we’d been working on for about four weeks. I was just ready to be done with the thing and decided one day to just push everything else to the side and get it out.

I say all this to say, I didn’t intentionally unplug – it just kind of happened. And, when I looked back I thought, “You shouldn’t do that again. You should structure it if/when it happens again.” So, following are a few rules I think one should follow if they decide to unplug to get things done.

Steps to Take to Unplug, Get Things Done, Then Plug Back In

Timeline: Decide how much time you think you’re going to need. Be realistic about it and build in some “what if” time. “What if” time is time set aside to handle all those things that pop up no matter how hard you wish they wouldn’t. It’s life; it happens.

Blog Update: Leave a note on your blog letting your readers/subscribers know how long you’re going to be away. OR, you can write and preschedule posts to go out in your absence. The only thing about this though is that you won’t be interacting with subscribers, so I’d still leave a note letting readers know that while posts will be distributed, that you won’t be responding to comments, questions, etc.

Social Media Marketing: Do the same as with your blog.

Emails: Use auto responders where possible. This gives you room to let non-emergency requests wait — without recipients panicking or constantly calling/emailing wondering why the heck you you haven’t gotten back to them.

Coming Back Early/Late: If you set a specific date to return and you do so earlier or later, alert your readers/subscribers to that fact. It’s all about consistency.

For me, unplugging to get things done was an eye opener. I loved it and will definitely be doing more of it in the future as I have quite a few personal projects I’m working on that require intense focus.

Many times I think we get so used to being plugged in – consistently – that we forget that, “Hey, we’re really not that important.” The world is not going to fall apart because we don’t Twitter every hour, or check email 100 times a day.

Being unplugged made me appreciate all the tools at my disposal that make my job so much easier – when I choose to use them.

Written by Yuwanda Black from Inkwell Editorial
Posted on March 3rd, 2009 and filed under Personal
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