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What are your best tips for getting started every morning and staying productive throughout the day? 3 days a week I work out in the morning with a class that ends at 9:30. I drop off packages at the post office straight from there, but otherwise for some reason I can’t seem to get started on my reselling business until around noon on those days. The other days I may get to my desk at 8 or 9 a.m. but I still seem to have trouble getting in gear. I need to take my reselling to the next level if I’m ever going to make enough to do more than just “get by.” My main distractions I guess are pets (how many times do they need to be let in, then out, then in, then out….), foraging for food in the kitchen, and I have no idea what else I’m wasting my time on because I don’t feel like I’m on social media that much. I need some tips for getting and staying focused on work.
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My pets did the same thing: in/out/in/out; and I wanted a pet door, but DH wasn’t keen because he was afraid we would have non-pets (e.g. raccoons) using it. Then I suggested we put the pet door in the kitchen leading into the garage. That way we close down the garage door in the evening and nothing can get into the pet door. During the day if we’re away from home, we close the garage to just a few inches above the ground, and the cats can get under it and still have freedom to come and go.
I’ve been working on the same problem. Everything else seems to get in the way of the business. (It doesn’t help I take care of multiple businesses.) I’ve realized I need to pretend this is a job, with a start time and end time. I worked with afternoons in the beginning, but I’m more productive in the mornings, so now I have set 10AM to 2PM as my daily work time. I “go to work” and I operate sort of like an employee. Close doors, make sure the cats are fed, etc. so that when I “commute” it’s a separation of my day from Home to Work. I treat this start time as I would if I were an employee at a job – arrive on time! There have been some false starts and the other businesses sometimes encroach (unavoidable nature of business) but it has been working to some extent. My listing numbers are better.
Hope you find a rhythm that works for you
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Log your activity for 2 weeks and tweak from there? I’m personally way too lazy to do that, but many many great business people say it.
Wear headphones so you don’t hear the distractions. Fall in love with listing because it is your peaceful music time. SILENCE YOUR PHONE and keep it away from you. Anything can wait an hour or two. Check it at a set time–perhaps 12 and 2.
I almost make it a contest to see how fast I can list because I do not enjoy it. Generally I get 20-25 done per hour.
It is perfectly fine to take breaks and get distracted sometimes. Just make sure you are fully optimizing the time you do spend. Do it now, Do it now, Do it now. If you start a task, finish it before you do anything else. Otherwise it turns into just another in the long line of unfinished work. Don’t open your mail, email, social if you don’t have time to deal with it all right away. Don’t even start on social media until after you’ve put in your necessary hours. For me–2 hours at the warehouse and 1 hour listing is plenty to progress quickly because I work as efficiently as possible. My goal is to work more, but I really have a hard time spending more than 3 hours per day at the warehouse cleaning, sorting, photographing. Right now I am reading this at 10am before I shower and go to the shop–and I have a hard end time of 2pm every day. But I promise when I work, I will work hard to make up for the wasted time.
Just make sure you make a little progress each day and the results will compound over time.
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20 to 25 items per hour?!! I bow to the Master! I would be happy with 20 to 25 consistently per day. Right now I’m at 40 to 60 per week and that needs to increase. I’ve taken your advice and I’m logging how I spend each minute. Just after one day I see that I bounce around like crazy. The longest chunk of time I spent doing just one thing before either being interrupted or switching to something else was a 43 minute period where I just took photos. And that was a rare chunk of time because most of the day was spent doing 1 task for 2 or 3 minutes, then doing another for a few minutes, etc.
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For us, the big motivation is THIS IS IT. For a long time, eBay was our only source of income. Do or die. No safety net. If we didn’t sell, we couldn’t pay bills.
And the only control we had was LISTING. This was our measure of success since the more we listed, the more we sold. The stress of financial insecurity was channeled into putting our heads down and photographing/listing every day.
I feel like sellers who just do it for part-time money are much less motivated. The productive ones seem to make their eBay income pay for kid’s college, vacations, car payments. Some concrete goal that gets them listing.
Julie, whats your motivation? If you dont sell, can you pay the bills?
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I definitely have to list to pay the bills – and that has motivated me. I’m listing around 50ish items a week but I see other people who can list 20 items an hour! I need to get up to where I’m listing at least 20 per day. I’ve been able to pay most of my bills with what I’m listing but no enough as I have had to dip into savings already and I would rather be building savings instead of using it to cover my monthly cash shortfalls.
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I’d recommend reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear if you haven’t. I listened to the audiobook while listing and it opened my eyes to the importance of small daily habits.
How I apply the book’s teachings to eBay is I have a set goal of daily listings I want to hit each weekday. It’s not a very hard number to hit and it has enabled me to be way more consistent than I used to be. I’ve listed over 3,000 patches since June because of the daily goal.
Not sure what your eBay numbers are, but find out how many items you list on average per day. Let’s say it’s 3. List 3 items every weekday for a month and it will start to become part of your everyday routine as long as you tell yourself you HAVE to hit that number at a minimum.
Now all you have to do is add to that daily number and you will start listing more every day. 2 more items a day is 10 items a week or 40 a month. If you keep at this indefinitely, you may find you’re listing double the amount you used to on average and it won’t feel like a lot more work because it will have become a daily habit.
Another thing you can do is make some of your distractions treats for hitting your daily goal. Make a rule that you can’t go into the kitchen until you have listed 3 items or something like that. Whatever you can do to make listing more attractive. You’ll likely sell more items if you list more consistently so that will be a positive reinforcement in itself.
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Thanks everyone for your comments. I spent Friday logging everything I did by the minute. I’ll probably continue that for awhile to see where I can improve. I also listened to Pandora on Friday (Hair Bands from the 80s/90s) instead of podcasts/YouTube resellers, which seemed to help.
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Don’t get bogged down in the details. “good enough” is good enough.
Skip things that require intense research unless you have a bunch of similar items or it is worth a ton of money. Research should take a couple minutes at most.
When you feel unmotivated to get started, force yourself to do the task you least want to do right in that moment.
My philosophy for success is that if I mentally tell myself “I don’t want to do this” for anything, then I MUST do it. Now.
Work in batches. Group like items together so you can get in a groove. Only do the listing stage – everything but photos. Then in the next session just do the photos for all of those draft listings. Then lastly get them stored away in inventory all at once. It is more efficient for a single person doing everything to work in batch assembly line style.
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So many great tips in this thread. I am curious about one thing, Julie.
I need to take my reselling to the next level if I’m ever going to make enough to do more than just “get by.”
Are you just “getting by” because you’re not listing enough? Or is there a different problem? In other words, if you have a ton of unlisted inventory that you know sells fairly quickly but you can’t bring yourself to get it listed, that’s one problem. But not having enough inventory to make $xx a week is a different problem.
I bring this up because I struggled with this for a while. I was constantly just getting by, especially when I had to purchase new inventory. That would just eat up so much of my profits! What actually got me to the “next level” wasn’t any particular productivity hack, but becoming a better scavenger. Buying smarter, using my inventory space better, etc. I’m not selling many more items per week than I used to, but my average sales price is higher because I’ve stopped messing around with so many listings that are <$20, even if they are easy to buy, store and list.
I try and keep Retro Treasures WV’s first suggestion in mind as much as I can.
Don’t get bogged down in the details. “good enough” is good enough.
If it’s sheer quantity of listings that you are after, then apply this tip pretty judiciously. Don’t worry about taking 12 pictures or making every pictures perfect — just take enough pictures to show the item and get it listed. Same goes for the description, research, etc. I’m not suggesting to cut corners, but you have to keep in mind that when your item sells (whenever that eventually is), it’s possible your buyer may not even read the description or look at the pictures!
eBay also has a helpful ‘notes’ feature underneath items, so if you skip a needed photo for example, you can make a note and then go back to it.
A few other tips that might be helpful:
1. My productivity has increased significantly since I’ve started bullet journaling, and specifically using habit trackers to keep up on ‘regular’ eBay tasks.
2. Take care of your mental health! I know all too well the pressure of feeling like you need to list, list, list all the time, especially when your profits aren’t there. But taking a night or two off to recharge can do wonders.
I am going to try to apply these tips myself and I hope you (and everyone) has a great and productive week!
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