Social media can be a huge time sap. You can end up down some dangerous rabbit holes when you only went on to post one link on one social media page. It’s time to find a way to manage your time better with social media.

Something I used to use a lot for social media time management was Excel sheets. I would have links to all my top blog posts so that I could share old content easily. I sometimes use Google Sheets instead now to collaborate with others, but the idea is still the same. I want to be able to easily grab links to share.

Keeping track of the time you spend on social media is essential. It’s easy for your own promotion to end up zapping a lot of time out of your day, and this can lead to you wondering where your hours have gone. If it takes too long, you can start to feel like it’s not really worth it.

Here are my three top social media time management tips.

Tracking every minute of your day

It’s easy to start procrastinating on social media. I found myself doing it today but quickly stopped myself. Excel timesheets help me manage procrastination.

When you do timesheets, you want to track the time that you start and stop a new task. It’s important to include when you procrastinate and how long you do that for. You’ll need to track how long you’re browsing on Facebook and when you have a cheeky check of a mom forum that you’re on…there’s always a parking thread nightmare that you just have to find out how it ends, right?

Well, tracking your time will help you see how long you spend on social media. This isn’t just about how much time you spend procrastinating, but also how much time you spend legitimately on social media. You may be building your social following or promoting some content.

Why is legitimate time tracking important? Well, for the next step.

Know how long it takes to promote

As a writer, you need to promote yourself. You need to get your content out there to show people what you can do. At the same time, you need to let people know you’re looking for clients—that you’re available for writing content.

When you know how long it will take, managing time on social media in the future is more effective. You’ll know just how much time out of your week it takes.

This will help you create an effective marketing plan. You make sure you have enough time to do all your tasks and you’ll be able to see just how much you make from your marketing efforts. This allows you to decide whether to spend more or less time on certain social media platforms.

Make sure you stick to your plan

Once you have your marketing plan, you need to make sure you stick to it. The Excel sheet helps you do that.

Say you need to spend an hour creating your social media schedule for the next week. Your time tracker will help you make sure you stick to that.

If you’re regularly going over your hour, then it means one of two things: one hour isn’t enough or you’re not using that hourly properly. If it’s the latter, you’ll need to see where you can streamline your processes more. If it’s the former, you’ll need to look at your plan again.

You won’t know this without the time tracker. And you won’t know how you spend your time on the social media channels. It’s really easy to start looking at what your friends are doing instead of scheduling content.

If you don’t do anything else today, please set up a time tracker. This is my number one tool for managing time on social media and elsewhere in my business.

MORE: 5 quick tips to improve your mental health as a WAHM

How do you manage your time? Are you struggling with this element of running a business? Feel free to share in the comments below.