45-Hour Week Challenge: Day 3
July 24, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzHere’s an update on my progress with the challenge so far:
July 21 5:00pm – July 28th 5:00pm
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July 21st: 1 hour
July 22nd: 8 hours
July 23rd: 2 hours
Total: 11 hours
I only managed 1 hour on July 21st because I was at a wedding and then just relaxed, but I managed 8 hours yesterday so that helped make up for it. If I can average the same amount of work I did yesterday, I should make my 45-hours.. otherwise I’ll have to fork up the cash to those 5-commentors.
Somebody asked me in a comment to talk about what I do during my work sessions, so here’s a brief account of what I’ve been doing so far:
The majority of yesterday, believe it or not, was spent writing two blog posts. One was for yesterday’s DeskShot.com Review post, and the other was for another paid review which will be posted tomorrow. It may seem strange how long it takes me to write blog posts, but it makes sense if you think about it. Blog posts such as paid reviews and long articles such as my Backing Up posts take an incredible amount of time because I first have to research the topic, then I have to gather resources such as related links, stats, information, and screenshots. Then there’s formatting the post correctly which in WordPress can be frustrating and time consuming at times, and of course, writing the actual post.
Some people may think that spending so much time working on a paid review is not worth it, but I always look to the future. I’ve already increased my price by PPP Direct price by $5 and have had 2 new offers come in since then. $65 per post may not seem like a lot, and it really isn’t, but I’m building up to something much bigger. If, in one year, I’m charging $125 per post, people may start to rethink things.
Other than the blog posts I went through a lot of e-mail. I’m all caught up on my Hotmail e-mail now, and cut my Gmail e-mail down by 60%, so I got a lot done. What comprises those e-mails? Well, about 25% are from advertisers, 10% spam (only counting the ones that make it to my Inbox), 15% from people reading my blog who ask me questions, 30% from services and notifications such as PayPal/Neteller payments, Cellphone bills, Blog sign-ups/comments/linkbacks, Reported spam from my forums, etc., 20% Miscellaneous.
Yesterday I also phoned my programmer for PublisherSpot to ask him where he disappeared to again, and he caught a virus which led to him resetting the firmware on his motherboard… he should be back to work today hopefully.
Other things I did was isolate and then fix a bug that prevented certain people from accessing the chatroom on PokerForums.org, look for some PHP programmers on Undernet, Efnet, and Dalnet, look at some expired/available domains, add a poker site review on PokerForums.org, etc.
Oh, and I also worked on the negotiations for that large site I’ve been trying to get for 6-weeks or so now. The beginning of yesterday gave me great news by the owner, saying he’d probably have a final decision for me within a few days, but then I spoke to some of the ‘underlings’ who surpringsly said that they were going to receive ownership but that they’d ‘allow me to volunteer my help and services’ (not quoted) which totally surprised me and insulted me at the same time. So.. I’ll have to wait from the owner to see what’s up with that… so the transaction may not go through after all… if it does go through though, it will be the largest acquisition I’ve ever undertaken, surpassing even my $10,000 DomainForums.com purchase. I’ll only diclose what it is though if the transaction goes through and it’s in my hands.
Anyhow, 11 hours down, 34 to go. And I still have 5 days left, so things are looking good so far… I’ll keep you guys posted.
(P.S. I wrote this at 2pm on July 23rd but won’t be posting it until it midnight tonight, making it the 24th. Thus, I should have done more hours when you end up reading this.)
Well said. Actually it is always better to write one or two excellent articles of great value than to write
many more with little value. Also did you domain purchase of US$10K reap its benefits ?
How are your StarCraft sites doing, or do you have a website progress post in the works?
I appreciate you listening to my comment. I enjoy reading about the more day-to-day basis of your webpreneuring. – It’s why I come here. 🙂
I have the same question as BottomUpSites — How’s Starcraft2.net coming along? I guess you just sort of do some posting from time to time to keep things moving. Any update on that?
Thanks!
I visit for the same reason – webpreneuring (very cool word).
Hey Tyler – I know how it is about the formatting, etc. when getting a blog post together. I was just playing around today with “Windows Live Writer” from Microsoft and it looks pretty good. It lets you do everythig on your desktop first, and usually in an easier and more stable way than working online.
There aren’t a lot of plugins at the moment, but hopefully more will come soon. It works with wordpress. You might check it out.
I’ve indeed heard a lot about Windows Live Writer, but just can’t imagine it being much better than the WYSIWYG.. I’ll have to try it out one of these days though.
The only time I can work more than 20 hours in a week is if I include my poker playing as work! As a webmaster I strongly believe that 10 hours of smart work is more effective than 40 hours of “regular work”.
Greg
Mac Poker
Well said. Actually it is always better to write one or two excellent articles of great value than to write
many more with little value. Also did you domain purchase of US$10K reap its benefits ?