HostEntrepreneur

Just a quick warning to others…  There’s a Linux magazine out there called Linux+  and while not a bad magazine… I have had a heck of time with this company. On July 31st I ordered and paid for 2 years from a special offer for a Tux ‘droid promotion they were having. I got a ‘order confirmation’ email that specified it was “not a confirmation of payment” up at the top. So I waited a few days to get the follow up payment confirmation message. That never came. On Aug 17, I emailed telling them about it and got back an answer the following day.  Anna Padzik said they did get the payment, apologized for the delay, and that the “We are sending you the missing issues of your subscription and Tux Droid at the moment.”

Sept 7, still no magazine nor Tux… so I email again… next day I get another apology and that “I ve just checked the informations in the data basis and  the magazines have been sent exactely on 1.09.2009. You should get the order in maximum 1 week.”  I respond back the same day asking about Tux… Only to be ignored.

Well it’s approaching a week since they emailed (and 2 since supposedly it was shipped – this last time), so I emailed again today… We’ll see what they do.

Just a quick update but an important one at that… Buy.com and Godaddy.com are offering a special on .COM domain names… See http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx?sssdmh=dm5.157776&isc=299buycom  and click the yellow box on the left for details. There are some restrictions (no paypal, new or transfer only, etc.)

HostEntrepreneur.com has been getting a pretty decent response and we want to keep the drive alive. The past several days have been very busy for me – new ad coming out in Ping! magazine with the next issue, lots of work to do, as well as some personal development plans all underway.

I’ve mentioned this before and had several people express interest but not follow through, so I’m putting it back out there… if you would like to write for http://HostEntrepreneur.com/  we would love to hear from you. We’re looking for business and technical writers who love to share with and teach others about the industry.  There is a bit of small monetary compensation as we do require exclusive content. Plus you also get an “About the author” section, where you can also put a link back to your site (even if it competes with one of ours … this site is about teaching and helping others, all are welcome).  So if you’re interested register here, so you can send me a message…

And rest assured we’ll be returning to our “regularly scheduled programming” shortly.

One of the things you may need to develop, and we probably all stand to improve it some, is time management. This is true even more so for small business owners. There are many methods or techniques to explore, and I plan on going through some of them with you, but today I want to show you the method I like best. It’s commonly referred to as the “Eisenhower method” after the President who used this technique.

It’s a simple method, and works well for managing many aspects. Divide everything up based on the above table into 1 of the 4 quadrants.

1:  Important and Urgent – These are the fires! Put them out right away!
2:  Important but Not Urgent – These are important, but don’t need addressing now. Schedule them for later.
3:  Not Important but Urgent – Delegate these to someone else. Have them do them now.
4:  Not Important and Not Important – Iif you can’t do everything, these are the ones not to do.

Your attention as a small business owner should be on the tasks in boxes 1 and 2 primarily, and sometimes on 3. The 4′s are the ones to ignore for now. They may be “nice to haves” or “nice to dos”, but the time they take is taking away from the more important and/or more urgent matters. Leave them on the list for a while, but don’t be afraid to let them go if need be.

Also realize that items can move from one quadrant to another, especially between 2 to 1, 4 to 3, and 4 to 2 . But they almost never go from a 4 to 1 directly. They almost always go over only 1 direction at a time, either between Urgent and Not, or between Important and Not. Often things move from one to the other because of being neglected, at which time they become either more important or more urgent, and rarely both.

So you may ask yourself, if I’m focusing on the 1s, why not just ignore the rest? Because almost no task can be completed in 1 session. Often you will find yourself blocked by some outside force that limits what you can work on and actually make progress.  Don’t work on something that you’re not going to be able to move forward on, just because it’s a 1.  If you can take care of a 2 or a few of them, you’ve moved forward more than working on a 1 and not going anyway with it.