Saturday, July 9, 2011

Managing your time while turking

These aren't hard fast rules but more of a way to consider your time.  You may want to include things or not do certain things.  Also, percentages will change based on your daily/weekly goals, or simply changing things. 

1.  Main money maker - 80%.  That's my goal.  That means 80% of the time I'm turking I'm doing something that is my main money maker.  I know the requesters, I know what is expected, I know how much I'm making and I hope I'm focusing my efforts to turking and not not getting side tracked reading wikipedia or something.  During this time I might think about keyboard shortcuts or other methods to complete the hits faster.  In the short run I might lose some of my hourly wages, but I'm still looking at long term.  If I think of something today to improve my productivity I might be able to earn more tomorrow or next week, etc. 

2.  Researching new requesters - 15%.  Again, my goal.  I'm happy with the requesters I do work for, however, sometimes I find new requesters.  I might research them on TO or forums, or simply looking at hits available and seeing which ones I think I could make decent enough money on to do them.  This doesn't mean I find a new requester a day.  It may take a couple weeks or longer, and even then, it might just be a certain hit offered by the requester I think I could do.  These hits I'm not as concerned about hourly wages, though it's still important.  The theory simply is I can't find new requesters or hits if I don't take chances.  I've found several quality requesters this way by doing hits that didn't seem to pay at first but after doing a handful of them I realized they are well worth it.

3.  Improving stats - 5%.  My personal final goal.  Problem is, I'm happy with my stats.  The only stats I'm not happy with is my abandoned and returned rate.  But I can't improve these stats much since most of the hits I do is majority rules.

I can get 350 rejections without an approval to stay above 99%.  Amazon mTurk doesn't go by tenths so only reason to try to get higher than 99.3% is to have a bigger cushion.  A bigger cushion allows me to do more test hits for new requesters without worrying about my stats hurting.  My submitted rate is 86.32%, which I'm not happy with.  It doesn't prevent me from doing work, but I'd like to see that number go higher.  Problem is, since I do mostly majority rules hits I return any hits I'm not sure about.  I'd rather this stat not be great rather than not give the requester my best work I can do. 

No comments:

Post a Comment