Be honest. How many of you sit down every day and get right to work, reviewing galleries, building pages or whatever? How many, after you have put in your 10 or 12 hours of coding, traffic trading and the rest, save your files and get straight into whatever it is you do with your spare time?

There’s no doubt that adult webmasters on the whole are a hard-working bunch of people. We are pretty good at making use of lots of scripts and other tools to help us be productive. But while we play the role of laborer very effectively, we aren’t nearly as good at being bosses. Most of us are action driven: we work long and hard, learning as much as we can about the practical aspects of our business. We are happy if we earn more this month than last and when that doesn’t happen, we work a bit harder, hope for better days, and if all else fails, there is always the latest bandwagon to try out.

Think about it. Who is usually paid more: the CEO or the worker on the production line? Who earns more for their business? Now ask yourself if it really makes sense to spend all your time on the production line.

To be successful, you must be results driven. You should not spend a moment on anything without knowing why you are doing it, what you expect from it, and how long it will take you to produce the desired results. You need goals. In this context “I want to be rich” is not a goal: a 5% earnings increase over the next month is a goal.

Here’s a challenge. Finish work a couple of hours early today and try this:

• Write the names of the next 12 months as headlines across a wide sheet of paper.
• Ignore the two best and two worst months of the last 6 months, average your income for the 2 months which remain and write that number under each month. Total the 12 months.
• Now put some thought into adjusting those figures, to account for any seasonal variations you perceive in this business. You might possibly show increases in October and November, decreases in January, February, June, July and August. Juggle the numbers until they reflect your experience, but the total for the year should be the same as in the first line.
• More thought next, combined with a healthy dose of realism and a good measure of ambition. Knowing everything you do about the market, its competitiveness and opportunities, and about yourself, your skills and drive, how challenged you are currently, adjust the monthly numbers further to reflect what you feel is an attainable growth rate through the next year.
• Take a hard look at the numbers you have produced. A 5% month-on-month increase may seem very modest but it represents more than 70% over the year. If you honestly believe you can achieve that (or even more), go for it. But be realistic, because the next job is to figure out how to achieve the targets you have just set.

The first reason for having specific targets related to specific timelines is so that you do not sit down on the 1st of the month and beaver away for the next 4 weeks, hoping for the best. What are you going to do to ensure you meet your targets?

The answer depends on your situation. Maybe you need to monitor your sponsors more carefully and find some new ones. Maybe some of your promotions are weak and need tightening up or replacing. Maybe you need more traffic. New sites. There are lots of possibilities. The point is that in an increasingly competitive market you must drive your results, not expect them to happen simply because you put in a lot of hours.

Once you have targets and you have figured out how to achieve them, it should be easy to produce a to-do list. At least for the upcoming month, better two, note down the broad steps you will have to take to see your plans through. Then, working a week or two in advance in more detail, fit that work into your daily schedule.

Where are we so far?

• We have financial targets set for each month of the next year.
• We have broad plans for the whole year as to how to reach those targets.
• We have a lot of the practical details worked out for the next month or two.
• We have specific tasks to complete during this week and next, and we have fitted those tasks into our daily schedules.

All that sounds easy enough. The snag is that if you take this seriously and you are already working your ass off, it is probably difficult, maybe impossible to commit yourself to more work. If you have come to that conclusion, this exercise is already paying off, because in real life you can only get a pint into a pint glass. Instead of working without a plan, introducing new things often more in hope than expectation and - perhaps without realizing it - letting proven revenue producers slip, this exercise is forcing you to think. What shall I have to spend less time on to free up the time for these new tasks? What will that cost me? Since I shall have to increase the targets for the new projects to make up for such losses, are those targets still reasonable?

If you took up this challenge and got this far, the final benefit is that you will be able to review each day, each week, each month, and see whether you accomplished everything and if the money is pouring in as you hoped. If yes, pat yourself on the back. If not, what are you going to do about it? Either way, now you are the boss, actually in charge of your business. Get it right and you will be paid the big bucks :)