photo credit: liquidnight

Something to seriously consider: If you find yourself not working productively – don’t do any work at all!

A rudderless speedboat at full throttle

It’s very easy to begin your day or week with a mental list of all the important things you want to accomplish; some of this work may should even qualify as contributing mightily to your actual success. But what happens if you don’t document your planned work and then conform to some sort of schedule to do the work? You’re like a speedboat without a rudder. You dash to and fro in the oceans of information and diversion called the internet without focus and end up being far less productive than planned.

Doing things that look like work is not a good replacement for actually accomplishing meaningful things. Have you ever heard yourself saying, “Arrgh! I’m sooooo busy!” when you’re really just being…well…busy?

There’s no deeper feeling of satisfaction planning an important and meaningful piece of work and then making a focused effort that leads to its completion. Conversely, knowing you need to get stuff done and then consistently frittering away your time feels like you’ve just kicked your best friend in the balls and cussed out your mom – you feel pretty lame.

Medicine for your troubled mind

So here’s an idea that serves as a kind of reset button for your work life: If you find yourself aimlessly working on mostly unimportant work, stop working and do something totally different and unrelated. Your productive work time will then contrast sharply with your unproductive work time.  And if you do something non-work related you’ll convert what would have been time wasted into time well spent. The hope is that you’ll serve a mild rejuvenating penance while clearing out the jumbled up backlog of unorganized and unprioritized tasks in your head.

There are three steps to the “No productivity = No work” experience:

1. Get away from your work – Run, don’t walk away from your computer/office/desk/shop/sewing machine/backhoe.

2. Do something unrelated to work – This is how you’re being “disciplined” by yourself into not making the same mistake twice!

• Go for a brisk walk around the block.
• Go home early and play with your kids.
• Visit a bookstore and read random magazines about random subjects to expand your knowledge.
• Watch an art film that’ll make you think.
• Pray.
• Exercise vigorously.
• Journal.

3. Plan your work for one hour per week – No hard science here, just basic planning advice. One hour of planning per week should give you a pretty solid outline of what’s important to do and when to do it. Try to group your niggling little tasks into bigger blocks of time.

Sure, your spouse may wonder what the heck you’re doing home at 11:45 am on a Monday but it’ll be better than wasting your time. (In my humble opinion.)

If you’re looking for some more on this subject read my post “How to plan your work quickly” from last August.

Thoughts or insights? Share them in the comments below.

photo credit: Christine & Eric

If you want to be good at something, practice it until you’re good at it.*

Haha! Isn’t that hilarious? But it’s true. Here’s a conversation I’ve had too many times to count…

“Hey Mark. I want to start my own business.”

“Really? That’s awesome! You know what I think of that! It’s the best way to financial prosperity – Kapow! And now let’s do a dance of celebration!”

“Yeah,  yeah. Anyways, I’m kind of stuck. How do I start?”

“Well, what do you want to do? Do you have a product or service you want to sell? A unique idea that you’re not sure how to capitalize on?”

“You see, that’s the thing. I want to sell X but I don’t know how to do it!!”

“Ok. Totally. But why don’t you start by looking at where you want to go with X and then reverse engineer your success?”

“What do you mean ‘reverse engineer’ my success?”

“What I mean is, what’s your goal? Define what that successful business would look like and then deconstruct the steps it’d take to achieve it. Figure out what you need to know that you don’t know yet and then learn those things as you take those steps.”

“Yeah…I should go back to business school I guess. Get an MBA or something. Then I could start.”

And from there the excuses for not starting pour in. And they’re all very credible excuses at first glance. I’ve had many versions of the above conversation ranging from  “I just can’t learn how to use this program therefore I can’t do X therefore I’m a failure.” to “I need to get my sub chapter S Delaware LLC set up with my iron clad operating agreement in place before I can get started.”

You don’t have to have a degree, pedigree, trust fund, bank loan, bank account, advisor, mentor, board of directors, letter from your mom or have “The Secret” memorized to get started down the path towards success. What you do need is a determination to learn and practice. All of the other stuff will happen as it needs to happen.

*I realize this whole post is an over simplification of a process that has a thousand sub-components but it’s the truest thing I’ve ever written.

There are many ways to make money without actually providing anything of value. Most commonly these “business” methods are known as get-rich-quick schemes but even the most reasonable business person will find their heart racing when someone outlines a sure fire way to make a quick buck by cutting corners using trickery of some sort. I know because I’ve been taken in a few times by the latest, greatest way to make a quick buck. (And it was usually when I was feeling the discouragement of the slow growth of more stable ventures.)

I participated in an interesting online scheme a few years ago. I bought a website that came pre-populated with a few thousand flash games. The games were free for anyone to play and consisted of driving games, sports games, and of course, the “rubber girl” game. Also, and I need to point this out to make this all a bit more relevant; there were a number of games that centered around the theme of popping zits, playing doctor, and general health related things. At one point my site was one of the most popular niche gaming sites of this type on the internet.

What I’d do is buy traffic from Google Adwords at an average of 5 to 8 cents per click. These clicks were cheap because I was bidding on terms like “free flash games, play games for free, free video games” etc. Traditionally these terms don’t tend to cost much because there’s not a traditional way to monetize the traffic. (Unless you’re building a mailing list by offering something free in exchange for contact info but that’s pretty difficult for someone who’s just looking to waste time on a free game.)

As people came to my site and subsequently played the games they’d be presented with ads from the Yahoo Publisher Network literally “stuffed” around the games. What made me money – lots of it – was the fact that clicks I bought from Google were so cheap in comparison to the revenue I got from my ad placements with Yahoo. You see, what I’d do is tell Yahoo to optimize the ads I got for the health sector. Inevitably Yahoo ads would serve up acne medication, teeth whitening, and other high cost (to the advertiser) ads around my health related games. Remember, I had a lot of those on the site. Even if I hadn’t optimized for health related ads and their higher payouts I’d probably still have done quite well. Yahoo’s system isn’t as efficient as Google’s Adsense and those inefficiences tended, I believe, to work in the favor of the publisher.

So I’d pay 5 cents for 100 clicks totalling $5 and approximately 5- 10% of my visitors would click on an ad that paid me an average of $1.50-$2. Within 10 days of starting this up I was making $300 to $500 per day in profits and doing almost nothing! I thought I had it made.

But, alas, here’s what happened. Yahoo figured out what I was doing and chose not to pay me any of my commissions. So I was immediately out the cost of all the Google ads I had run with no revenue from Yahoo to reimburse my costs. I had violated the terms of service as a publisher in various ways and they had a legal right to their actions.

The basis of what I was doing was sound – to a degree. I was practicing a certain type of arbitrage, just with clicks instead of stocks. What went wrong was that I was doing something for which there is no future – using a system that was meant to provide advertisers and searchers value and manipulating outside of its approved uses for personal gain.

This wasn’t the first and only time I’ve tried to cut corners. I’m sorry to say I’m probably not the quickest learner. But at this point in my life I’ve finally come to understand that if you want to be truly successful you have to offer real value to your customers and partners; not just trick them in some way that’s profitable for you.

There are unlimited ways to game the system but those methods ultimately fail. Sure, a few of us may know someone who’s making a killing with some scammy business model but I wholeheartedly believe that one day the ride ends. Just look at the recent FTC crackdown on rebill offers and fake blogs. And even if you do get away with it forever do you really want to be a part of something you’re not proud of?

These days I focus on products and services for which I have a degree of passion and that fill real needs with existing demand. I do this because I want to be successful at adding value to people’s lives. By doing so I know I’ll be successful in the long run.

Anyone else have a similar experience you’d like to share or an opinion? Let me hear about it in the comments.

I have a few Google Voice invites to give away to anyone who’d like them. I really dig Google Voice for a few different reasons. First and foremost is the ability to hand out a number that’s neither my cell phone or my business 800 number. This is convenient when you have a contact who doesn’t quite fit into a prescribed and trusted relationship. Maybe it’s a temporary vendor or someone you met at a networking function that you want to keeps at arms length, so to speak. If they become a nuisance or someone that you’d rather not deal with in the future you can “redirect” their call when it comes in.

You can also work the system a bit. For example, I was able to drastically lower my cell bill by downgrading the minutes on my cell plan by making my Google Voice number one of my free numbers on my account. Most carriers have some version of this. For AT&T it’s called the “A-List”. When someone calls my GV number it automatically connects to my cell phone but caller id comes in as my GV number. Therefore I’m not charged against my minutes for that call. Yes, I know that I give up the ability to know who’s calling me but it’s not worth the $700 a year I save to go back. There’s even a GV app for some phones on some carriers. I believe you can get it for Android and Blackberries on T-Mobile and Verizon.

Here’s a more complete review from Lifehacker.com

So if you want one of my invites just be one of the first to comment. I’ll send an invite to the email address you use when you comment until I’m out.

I start my day with the best of intentions. I know what matters to my bottom line, what I need to delegate, and what I want to accomplish. I’m locked, loaded and ready to go!

I march into my office eager to get started on all my predefined and important work and then…A fuzzy haze washes over me. I find myself staring with unfocused eyes at my computer screen and all that focus has just flown out the window. What happened?!

Even though I know what I need to do – my to do list is evidence of this – I often suffer from some sort of productivity paralysis. It’s a fantastic disappointment to me to look back on my day/week and see what I have not done. Things that should have been reasonably completed within the hours I allot to work.

There’s a deeper significance to my lack of productivity. Time I could be spending with my family and friends is instead filled with make-up work. Being productive in my work is a passion I’m cultivating. I simply don’t want to be defined by the amount of work I do. I’d rather be defined as someone who chooses the right things to do that make a huge difference to the bottom line.

Via LifeHacker.com I found a great article entitled “An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day” by Peter Bregman that gives me hope. I’m going to read and re-read this article a few times and try implementing it this week.

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.

Even though I’ll probably always struggle with scheduling out my work throughout the day it really makes sense. I’m going to work on whipping my planning and resulting work into shape.

Let me know how you plan and stay productive in the comments below.

Full Article by Peter Bregman here. (via LifeHacker )