I've just sorted out my monthly work schedule for June, and a technique I use to prioritise tasks is to calculate the return I'm going to get on my time investments per hour.
Generally speaking, the higher long term return I'm going to get, the higher up the priority-list the task, as long as I can get that task done promptly.
There are some tasks which are just no-brainers to do immediately - a classic example would be a bank/ loan or interest card transfer deal to take advantage of a better percentage rate - if it takes you 15 minutes to earn an additional 1% interest on 10K over the next year, that's a $400 an hour rate right there.
Also high up the priority list comes anything I have to do to maintain my passive-ish income - I earn most of my money ATM selling resources online, and if I'm producing a new resource for sale that takes 10 hours, and that gets me $10 of sales every month for over the next five years - that's a $60 an hour rate, so that's worth prioritizing for me.
At the other end of the scale there is the essay marking I do - easy money, but at around $20 an hour, well, that's only $20 an hour!
I also have to do SEO work to maintain my resource sales, and that's a little more difficult to work out the return on, given the black box that is the hideous and extremely unfun world of SEO. I've had a go below though!
A comparison of the long term returns on my income generating tasks...
What I've done below is selected a number of tasks from my June tasks lists and tried to estimate the likely long-term returns, I've ordered it by total 5-year return per hour.
Link to spread sheet in case you can't read it
Ordering the potential long-term returns is a nice reminder of what I need to focus on. NB I won't necessarily do things in this exact order - for example, selling records is something that needs to be done now, and I may as well tweak my curation returns first as that's a quick task.
Also, I'll be spending longer than hour on some tasks, they are just there for comparative purposes.
Crypto-account security
I need to reset my Ledger and back up a few things, shift a few things of exchanges, change a few passwords, I've been putting this off - the figure I've included is what I could lose if I don't pay attention to this - a stark reminder. I say five hours, it's a hassle - co-ordinating and then un-co-ordinating everything in different secure locations!
Setting up a Blockfi account
I need to KYC and get some LTC/ ETC on that exchange - if I bung in £1K that's a $50 return at 5% over 5 years, another no-brainer for high up the priority list. Should have done this months ago!
Moving house
I plan to move to Portugal and live in a field from summer - renting my house out, I figure I'll save about £350/ month (figures in pounds on Spreadsheet, my bad!) once I've factored in short term rentals in Portugal while I transition. Lots of work to move still to do - 80 hours worth at least, but still a decent return over time!
Updating high traffic blogs
I had to do a bit of guestimated stats magic here - based on $1K average income a month from my Revisesociology.com blog, and 500K hits traffic, with my biggest page hits being around 5K per page (I've got LOTS of pages!), then those high traffic pages bring me in around 1% of my income, which is how I got the figures in the spread sheet.
TBH I was surprised how high up these came out - it takes me about 30 mins to update a page/ post. Note how the lower ranked pages which don't get as many hits are much less worth my while - although if I made them a bit more special, it would count more, but that takes more time!
Tweaking curation returns (on Hive)
This is an experiment I'm running - tweaking my autovote timings on Hivevoter, just by a decimal fraction, and monitoring the change in returns - it's changed from around 11 to 13% recently. So 1% is a conservative estimate. This is high priority - little effort for a decent return!
The figures are based on my current curation returns with 35K active HIVE.
BIG MIND MAP - WTF?
I produce mind maps for sale, for A-level sociology - it's long been my intention to do a 'mega mind map' of everything - a kind of super-resource - it'll take me a long time, but it should do well in sale, and a good driver to my web site.
Selling records on Ebay
This is something I've been doing as part of moving house and I've made a decent amount of money on some of them, but it takes some time taking the photos, listing, posting, but I reckon my hourly rate is about £50 an hour.
NB note how this is a really 'big earner' for a one off, but compared to the passive returns I earn from other activities, this is lower down - hence why I included it!
Hive blogs
I spend about an hour a day per post - and earn about $6 per post in author rewards - which sounds a bit crap - BUT I enjoy it, and when Hive Moons, that's $60 an hour, right?
Writing new blogs
I have to do this for SEO purpose - and I also enjoy it, over at my main blog, but I've now written most of the heavy hitting topic posts, so I've not a lot to add, it's just something that must be done! I've used the same return calculation as for the hits on the updating posts - I just figure none of the new stuff I write is likely to climb up the ladder significantly.
Final thoughts
Returns aren't the only thing I use to prioritise tasks, mental health counts too - I enjoy Hive more than SEO updating, and there's only a limited amount of the later I can usefully do, so it's not as if I'm going to spend ALL of my time just doing the highest return task.
But this kind of time-investment analysis is something I do from time to time, it does help keep me on track, and I do unravel some surprises and I usually change the order of what I do based on it.
Posted Using LeoFinance
"I spend about an hour a day per post - and earn about $6 per post in author rewards - which sounds a bit crap - BUT I enjoy it, and when Hive Moons, that's $60 an hour, right?"
And now imagine both Hive and Leo mooning like crazy! You will be a pretty well paid writer haha.
I didn't even factor in my LEO earnings, early days!
I probably will going forwards.
@tarazkp used to love banging on about this topic - what your writing would be worth when Hive moons, seems to do less of it these days!
If people haven't learned by now :D
I think you're kind of preaching to the converted!
Not necessarily. I still get asked often enough why and how things work. I take it as a good sign that at least some are interested. Wouldn't mind some 2 dollar Hive though :)
Maybe when BTC does it's thing? I wouldn't say no to $2 Hive either!
Posted Using LeoFinance
Yep, the next 1.5-2 years should include a large run on BTC and then the wash over all alts
@tipu curate
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