The Sunday before last, at about 7ish in the morning, my wife gave birth to (fraternal) twin boys. Willem and Winston join two year old Von to form a healthy all-boy family. My wife is now soundly outnumbered by us four dudes.

So, life has changed dramatically for our previously small family. We have blasted through the two kid ceiling to join the ranks of those who lead more vigorous lives simply by virtue of having to chase more offspring around.

During the two week self wife-imposed paternity leave I’ve been on, I’ve had a chance to reflect on what it is that I’m doing with my time and how I could better serve my family and, I’m not trying to be cheesey here, all of Creation.

In the weeks preceding the birth of the twins I moved my office back home. Even though she was mobile up until the morning she gave birth, she wasn’t exactly what you’d call spry. I wanted to be available to help her if necessary. (Chasing a two year old around in that condition can be a challenge at best.) Being back home and re-learning to work effectively in this environment has been good. Actually, thanks to the Pomodoro Technique, I’ve had some of my most productive days in years.

But what has been most excellent has been the chance to reconnect with my wife and son and just be in proximity to them throughout the day. That in turn has challenged me to start optimizing how I spend my work time. I’ve realized that, although I enjoy work and entrepreneuring things, I want and need to serve my family by being present in their lives and being an compassionate CEO of my family. There’s also so much need surrounding us every day. It’s just way to easy to have our “everyday” blinders on and breeze past it. I want to start being a better (and hopefully more selfless) friend and minister to those around me.

Here’s what I’ve already started to change.

Some of this stuff may be remedial to you but this is probably the first time I’ve earnestly practiced it.

• Plan my work and track how I perform. Wash, Rinse, Repeat: I’m not lazy, I just haven’t historically been good at focusing on important work. The Pomodoro Technique is the first time management system that really makes sense to me and is working.
• Focus on the good opportunities I have today. Stop wasting time wasting time: It’s soooo easy to get caught up in work for work’s sake. I’m talking about stuff that could easily be done away with or outsourced. Bookkeeping, hardware/server management, aimless net surfing – among things that should not occupy much of your time.
  In my opinion, the only work worth doing is the work that is adding a ton of value to the growth of your and your customer’s business/life. Interpret that for your own situation.
• Work fewer hours: It turns out that you can accomplish a lot more in fewer hours if you’re focused. Thank you once again Pomodoro Technique.

We’ll see how all this goes. My mother-in-law has been an AMAZING help by being here full-time since the boys were born. That all comes to an end soon and I’ll be sleeping even less while my wife will have one less set of hands available to her during the day.

I think I’m going to start sharing some of the things I work on during the day with you from here on out. Why not? I’ll start with my involvement in Rocketship in my next post.

Do you budget or need a budget? I’ve found that I spend way more than necessary and often experience cash flow problems if I don’t practice some basic financial planning. The issues with budgeting are twofold:

1. Based on what you’re going to earn in a given period, what are your expenses/investments and how are you going to allocate your money wisely and..
2. when you plan have you considered the time of month that you’ll need your money to meet your obligations? This is called cash flow.

There are a ton of budgeting programs available today for free or small fee but I’ve found myself time and time again referring back to my tried and true Excel budgeting tools. This version of my budgeting tool is the one I use for managing my personal and business financial projections. It’s especially useful if you get income from multiple sources.

If you are interested in getting a copy for yourself visit my blog post at RateState.com to learn more or view the YouTube.com video below to see how it works and download a copy for yourself by clicking on the link below.

Download the Zero-Based budgeting with Business Budget spreadsheet here

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: 3rdmartini

It’s very easy to spend a large percentage of your time working on projects that aren’t very important. It’s very difficult, but rewarding, to work on only the projects that add a lot of value to your life.

Not very important: Surfing the internet in lieu of getting something done. Answering emails/providing support for old clients who are no longer paying you. “Organizing” things (folders, directories, bookshelves) during normally productive hours. Facebook/MySpace/YouTube for pleasure. Unscheduled goofing off, and anything that isn’t an investment in worthwhile projects. (add your list here)

Important: Planning and reverse engineering your income/revenue for the next six months. Learning what you need to know to be successful and then practicing it until your good at it. Making sales calls. Writing content for your paying customers to read on your company blog. Finding places to advertise and then actually buying the advertising to grow your business. Focusing on one thing at a time. Ruthlessly pruning your activities to include only important stuff.

Etc., etc., etc…

I’m a very busy person. I’m a husband, father, and friend. I’m starting businesses, consulting with clients and advising business beginners – but I find that a lot of the work I do, when evaluated for how much “value” it contributes to my life, is a waste of time.

To be sure, I’m enjoying myself most of the time; I love hanging out with people, helping others succeed, and having fun learning new things and just goofing off. But if I don’t focus on what adds the most value to my life when I’m working then I’ll end with less time and resources to take care of my family, help others and enjoy life.

How do you manage your time to include mostly important things?

The most recent copy of Wired magazine has an article called Chaos Theory. It’s essentially a review of Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, due on June 7th. Here’s what I learned from reading this article…The Internet is shattering our ability to focus. It’s making us shallower thinkers and dimishing our intelligence.

The author cites a study where experienced internet users were scanned by an MRI along side internet noobs while doing basic internet tasks. The experienced user’s prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain associated with problem-solving and decision making,  were alive with activity while the other group of first time surfers resembled a city in blackout.

The evidence suggested that the brains of the frequent Internet users had developed distinctive neural pathways because of their Internet use. At first glance there was much rejoicing, “Yeehah! The Internet is making us smarter through increased brain activity. We’re all turning into geniuses!” But as scientist began to study the effects of this neural rewiring some disturbing facts began to reveal themselves.

Here’s a excerpt that jumped out to me:

…Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise-and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

What are the implications of this? From what I can tell, if we are to accept Mr. Carr’s hypothesis, we are dumbing ourselves down by muting our ability to develop true intelligence; the ability to store data in our long term memory and recall it at will, when necessary. We are instead relying ever more on the Internet mind as our trusted source for answers instead of storing data on our “local hard drives”. Is this us moving our brains to the cloud?

I’ve reserved a copy of The Shallows. I want to learn more about what the Internet may be doing to my already focus-shattered brain.

I am very bad at focusing on things that matter. When it comes to completing a difficult task that requires focused effort I tend to auto-distract myself in a million different ways. I really hate this about myself but I take some perverse comfort in knowing that this is an epidemic problem.

It seems to be an altruism that anything worth doing is going to be difficult. The activities that create success in anything – business, music, friendship – do not tend to be simple. In short, it’s typically not the “low hanging fruit” that fills the plate. I find that when faced with a large problem that will require my brain’s maximum computing power I will downshift into a seemingly “important” task to find relief. In this way unimportant tasks are like crack to a junkie who’s trying to get sober.

Honestly, I can’t believe how easy it is for me to lose my focus and be distracted. It’s laughable. Yet I observe others around me struggling even more with how they conduct their lives of attention. So I’m reading a book that (haha) caught my attention – It’s called Rapt by Winifred Gallagher. Here’s an excerpt from my reading this morning:

WHATEVER YOUR TEMPERAMENT, living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time, which would be both futile and grotesque. Rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there. Your ability to function comfortably in a a dirty, germy world is just one illustration of your powerful capacity to put mind over matter and control your experience by shifting your focus from counterproductive to adpative thoughts and feelings. Rapt page 53

Of course, being able to focus your attention has benefits beyond being more successful in work. It can contribute to greater happiness in relationships and a greater sense of personal well-being.

If you’re like me and you can be best described as an attention scattered schizoid then you should pick up a copy of Rapt.

Image by laurenmarek via Flickr

If you’re promoting anything online it can help your sales massively to localize your offer or the data on the page to the visitor.

An example of this might be some copy on the page dynamically generated for the visitor’s area – “Expert house painting in Seattle, WA. Click here for an instant quote.”

The easiest way to do this is if you have the searcher’s location already. For example: If you have a geolocated search campaign where the advertising network is providing you with zip and/or city data you can pass it through as a URL variable like yourpage.php?city=Seattle&state=WA

But there’s a sure fire way to make sure you’re localizing your content and offer to your visitors area; you can run a GeoTargeting PHP script in conjunction with a free zip code database.

I do this for certain things I promote on the internet such as auto insurance offers and other services that aren’t location specific but where I want the visitor to feel like they’re getting a localized result. It’s always resulted in a higher conversion rate when I’ve done that.

Instead of rewriting tutorials that already exist I thought I’d point you to a couple of resources that I’ve used.

Eric Nagel’s Geo-Targeted PHP script

Free Zip Code Database from the Zip Code Guy

Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

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.

photo credit: amiefedora

One of my favorite blogs is Trizle. They have a unique and goofy way of communicating basic business truths. The topics they cover resonate with me because they are the foundational concepts that lead to success; just really good common sense stuff. Today’s post caught my eye though. It’s about failure and why it works in making a person successful.

I’ve pondered failure a lot in my career as an aspiring entreprenuer. I’ve gone from avoiding it all costs to embracing the eventuality of it because I know failure leads to success. I even have a saying that I foist on anyone who’ll stick around long enough for it to make it out of my mouth when the topic of failure or success comes up. Ready for it?

“Fear of failure will cause you to fail before you can fail from trying”

Get it? You know, being afraid will cause you to fail before you can…aww, whatever. I’m sure you get the point.

Anyways, here’s the post from Trizle. Check it out, join Trizle’s mailing list, tell me what you think about their post and Trizle in the comments, and most of all, have a Rocking day!

Say X has an 80% chance of failing.

• So, X has a 20% chance of succeeding.

That means, you succeed 1 time for 5 tries (on average); or even better:

1. You succeed 2 times for 10 tries.
2. You suceed 5 times for 25 tries.
3. You succeed 20 times for 100 tries.
4. You succeed 100 times for 500 tries.
5. Etc., etc., etc.

That is, the more times you try/experiment/test, the
more successes you’ll find.

Why Failure Works from Trizle – Full Article here

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.