Time Management as a Spicy Creator

There are a multitude of strategies you can put into place to optimize your time management through the work day, and even into your personal life. These strategies can all be modified to fit your individual lives and businesses, and all of them can help streamline your work flow, and increase your productivity. Lets look through some of those time management strategies together and how we can apply them to adult content creation.

Strategies:

Set Goals: Think both long term and short term. Everyone has daily goals through all the tasks we have to complete every month, but we also need to think monthly, yearly, five years from now. Consider using the SMART method of setting goals.

• Specific- Set goals that are detailed and easily identifiable. If there are multiple steps to achieving that goal, have those specified as well. Setting specific goals helps to identify completion of goals as well, which we will discuss further next. A specific goal of mine is to make more new ads and increase my promotional content. That means I know I need to increase my content creation time, including the steps of shooting, editing, and scheduling.
• Measurable- Your goals should be measurable or quantifiable. Lets continue with my goal to make more content than the previous month. I make that goal quantifiable by defining, lets say, 500 media of content created this month. Having a defined number to attempt to accomplish will help you know how much time to delegate per day, and what level of prioritization this is. In this example I now know that if I work 23 days this month that I need to create around 22 pieces of content per work day. Broken down like that just feels less daunting. This will also help you know when you have achieved your goal, and will help when tracking the progression of the goal.
• Achievable- Make sure your goals are something you physically and mentally can achieve in the time frame given. Setting goals that are ambitious is admirable. Setting goals that are impossible is going to cause more stress and can lead to burn out from the constant feeling of disappointment. Looking at the same example, 22 pieces of content per day is beyond doable. I take a makeup pic, two selfies, two outfit pics, then spend around an hour creating a minimum of one to two ads, then the rest promotional and lockable content. Another half hour editing and a half scheduling and I am one day closer. I know with my time constraints that I can reasonably crank that out.
• Relevant- Really think through if this goal will benefit you in the long term. Being able to get in the habit of 500 media once a month will give me a huge padding in the case of emergencies or vacations. What will your set goals do for you later down the road? If it is a negligent impact, it's probably best not to focus on it. If a goal you set will do no more than bring you joy though, that is absolutely a relevant goal.
• Time Bound- Set deadlines for yourself. If you have no deadline you are significantly more likely to procrastinate. For example, I gave myself a set deadline of a month for this goal. It is set out long enough to be achievable, but not so far out to allow for procrastination.

Prioritization: Figure out what needs done when, and what needs to come before other tasks. One method of looking at this is the A-B-C method. This is a way of organizing your tasks through the day in the most efficient way with the most important tasks getting done first. The A-B-C method is broken down as such:

• A Level- These are tasks that must be done today or there will be a shit storm later. An example of this is if I have a custom due on Thursday, and today is Wednesday, that custom is A level. These need to be your first priority.
• B Level- These are tasks that will have consequences later if not accomplished, but more like a hassle rather than a full shit storm. If we pull from the increased content goal, I would classify it at this level. It is not the end of the world in the slightest if this is not done. But, it does mean I have to do more tomorrow, which categorizes it as a hassle. These are the second priority tasks.
• C Level- These are tasks that will have no impact on the future if not done. These tasks should be worked on only once the above level tasks have been completed. These are not a priority

Time Blocking: To reinforce the work you just did by assigning prioritization to your tasks, consider time blocking. Time blocking is a method of organizing your day into time blocks. You set a specific amount of time, an hour, half hour, etc, and dedicate that time to a single task or set of tasks. Some do this by scheduling out their day in a specific order, task by task. My neuro-spicy brain could in no way handle that level of structure so I break up my day into quarters. I set a certain amount of tasks to each quarter and I make it my goal to accomplish them within that time. If I am unable to, I will sneak in what ever I missed either in free time that day, or at the end of the day when sales have slowed down. To track my progress through the day, I simply keep a notepad with my quarterly to do list and cross them off as I go. Let me tell you, crossing off a big one, huge surge of dopamine. A great free app to help organize the more structured form of time blocking is.... google calendar!

• A great tip when setting up time blocks is to learn when you are most productive in the day. This way you can optimize your work load. To analyze when this is, I detailed exactly what time I did everything in my day for about three to four days and based my findings on that.

Batch Creation: Use batch creation to get ahead of your content posting and create more breathing room for later. Batch creation is the method of dedicating either a day or a significant block of time to creating, editing and scheduling as much content as you can. This provides more padding for later when things are busy in other areas, or you are in need of a break. An example of batch creation would be if I spent a good solid eight or so hours and dedicated myself to cranking out those 500 content pieces in one sitting.

• A great tool for batch creation is a solid scheduler to load up the content you just created. For twitter and reddit I am a long time and permanent user of Fangrowth.io. Click here to use my referral link and support CST!

Multi OR Mono Task: If you are an expert multitask-er and don't believe the hullabaloo that multitasking lowers productivity, then do it smartly. Multitasking is when you are balancing two or more tasks at the same time. An example of multitasking I do on an almost daily basis is balance video and photo editing at once. I will bounce to photos while my video is exported and then back to videos while photos export. If you are not the best at handling two or more tasks at once, you may flourish with mono-tasking. Mono-tasking is the process of dedicating a certain amount of time to one single task and not stepping away until you are finished, or your time is up. This has been shown to help people reach their flow state by digging deeper into their work.

Avoid Distractions: Distractions surround us. From the phone buzzing to the music blaring to the TV playing... they are almost unavoidable. It is highly suggested when you are on a level A or B task that you consider unplugging, disconnecting, and listening to nothing that can break your focus.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS: Do not take on so much work that you find yourself drowning and unable to tread water. Learn to say no to more work to protect yourself, and maintain good, quality work.

In the spicy realm of adult content creation, effective time management is your secret ingredient for success. Embrace these strategies, and see if one of them are what you need to propel your creativity and efficiency to new heights. Cheers to a spicy and productive journey!