It’s been a while since I blogged about my time management system, so for a bit of background you may find it helpful to go back and read Time Management Project, Step 1 and Using Excel to Manage Your Weekly Schedule.

My new system was challenging at first, because I was busy planning for the launch of my new e-book, FoVA and my high school reunion, and I’d hoped that things would fall into place once I was back into a regular routine. They did for the most part, but I came to realize that my expectations of what I could achieve in a day (and consequently a week) were unrealistic.

I’ve identified my greatest priorities as:

• Client work (well duh…) and responding to client emails
• Blogging (aim for one post per day, somewhere)
• Not working evenings or Sundays (unless there’s a really pressing deadline or an event I want to attend)

That seems to be working just fine, but I’m having trouble finding time to develop and follow an effective and enjoyable social networking routine, including reading and commenting on blogs. I really want to do that as part of my Marketing Plan and Standard Operating Procedures, but when it comes to a choice of serving my existing clients and building relationships with people who may or may not become clients or refer business to me, it’s not a tough decision. For now, I guess I’ll have to settle for Twitter breaks between my other tasks, visiting Facebook once or twice a day, checking Tweepler once or twice a week, and staying on top of my LinkedIn messages. In the meantime, I’ve started a collection in Springpad of blog posts and other resources with suggested social media strategies and routines, so when I’m ready to devote a little time to this, I won’t have to spend a lot of time researching the topic.

I’ve also realized that, even though I’ve unsubscribed from practically every mailing list I was on, I still receive way too much email. I had created rules to move incoming newsletters and other informational items in a file to read later, and I used to do that on Saturdays, but lately I’ve had more interesting and/or important things to do with that time, so those emails have just been accumulating. Between the Internet, books, and other resources, there’s so much information out there that it just doesn’t make sense to try and maintain a personal collection of information that may or may not be of value some time. I’m now deleting most of the rules, and when an email arrives, I can make a snap decision to read it immediately, delete it or move it into my Read Later file. Unless it applies to one of my current objectives, I’ll just let it go. We’ll see how that goes…