Photo by Aidan Jones

It’s been almost a month since I launched blog #2, Anywired. Having never maintained two blogs at once before, the last month taught me a lot about managing multiple commitments: more than one blog, freelancing and the negotiation of even more projects.

In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about successfully managing multiple projects (for you, this might be running more than one blog, more than one business, or more than one freelance project), from the planning to the execution stage. I’ll talk about time-splitting, leveraging, batching focus and my new favorite word, elimination.

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Photo by (Bill & Mavis) B&M Photography

True productivity is not about doing more in less time. It’s about doing less in less time. It’s about defining what is truly worth doing and sticking to that alone.

Bloggers often tell me that there’s not enough time available to do everything they truly want to do: to start that dream project, to write that value-packed post, to guest-post on a popular blog. If I said to them: “You can have that, but you need to stop reading feeds and outsource comment moderation,” most people would respond: “It’s not that simple.”

But it is. If you can eliminate three hours of the inessential from your week, and doing your dream takes three hours a week, you can have it.

I’m not suggesting that you do all the below, but I’d like you to ask yourself each question and consider the pros and cons of your answer. How much time would you save? What’s the trade-off? A mental exercise rather than a prescriptive list, I want you to start thinking about where elimination fits in your blogging routine.

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One question I get a lot is: “Where do you find the time?” It’s a good question, but it’s the wrong one. Few of us have vast reserves of free time lying around, waiting to be found. If you want to do something, you have to make the time.

Making time is like budgeting money. You need to work out we’re you’re spending your time and cut out unnecessary expenses.

One hour less television a week is one extra hour to work on your magnum opus: whatever that may be.

(This post is an attempt to practice the Little Words, Big Meaning principle.) 

Photography: ground on down by WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot

The word ’success’ is a troublesome one. A self-criticism I would make is that, reading back on previous posts, I’ve sometimes used it like its meaning is obvious, and agreed upon by all. Nothing could be further from the truth: I can’t think of a word that is more vague and subjective than ’success’.

Success, for one person, could mean keeping a record of interesting daily events. For another, it could mean breaking into the Technorati 100. For another, it could mean making a full-time income online.

What’s your definition of success? Could you encapsulate it in a sentence? Most importantly, is it concrete and attainable, or is it a moving target?

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Photography by fabbio

I doubt there are any dedicated bloggers, webmasters, or web 2.0 users who feel they have enough time to do everything they want to do online.

The recent proliferation of lifehacks and productivity tips reflect this. It’s a reaction to a climate where web users have more tasks and less time than ever before.

These tasks can be divided into two types: proactive and reactive.

Proactive tasks involve action that originates from you. Reactive tasks are actions in response to the actions of another.

In this post, I’m going to discuss why web 2.0 marks the ascendancy of reactive tasks, how this is damaging our productivity, and what we can do about it.

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