Just inside the balcony, I have a setup with my recording equipment and my sound panels, so the audio is crisp. That’s where I work when it’s too hot, too bright, or I simply need the quiet of great sound. This is where I record every episode of my podcast. When I’m recording, my kids know to play downstairs and not disturb me, but otherwise having them visit throughout the day is a great joy.
You do not need to replicate my office setup. I have tried probably thirty configurations in the past. I kept trying until I found one with the right balance of productivity and joy.
Each of my work locations has different benefits and disadvantages, so don’t look at your situation and decide to do nothing just because something’s in the way.
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Are you focused?
This is a tough question, but the answer is “probably not”. Most people try to focus on tons of different goals at once. People told me to quit smoking, build my business and lose weight all at the same time. Those are all great goals, but doing them in series led to my great success. All the people who try to do everything at once talk a big game, but in the end, they fail at everything. Our brains are designed to focus on one task at a time until mastered.
Right now you’re probably thinking about ten things at once. You are thinking about starting your gig, but you are probably also thinking that a raise at work could be nice. You are thinking about your family, your body, and your spiritual happiness. Those are all great things to pursue. But you need to have a level of focus if you want to achieve success. There is a direct correlation between my level of focus and my income. Distraction always kicks my bank account in the butt.
And everybody thinks they’re the exception to that rule. People brag about their ability to multitask all the time. But what does it matter that you can do five things well, but nothing great? I seek greatness in my life, and I want to associate with great people. That’s where the real profit lies.
I’m going to talk a lot about habits in the next section. Defining a clear goal is the first step to habit success. I tried to break that down for you early on in this book when we talked about your financial goals. But let’s be honest with each other for a second. Did you write down those numbers? If not, you can probably only estimate them now. I doubt you can tell me exactly what all three numbers were. If you don’t write things down and bring them into the real world, then they don’t exist. It’s the physical that is the key to success. We live in a digital world, sure, but our brains aren’t designed that way.
You might not be a fan, but I think that vision boards are great when done correctly. Most people cover a vision board with pictures of models or expensive cars. That’s not a vision board. That’s a vice board. It’s a visual representation of your greed, your lust, your gluttony, and any other deadly sins you’re into. That type of focus will never get you anywhere.
Instead, you want a board with specific goals on it. I want to make this much money in six months. Instead of six months, you can put a specific date on the board. That’s what I’m talking about. Your goals should be written down, and then they should be in front of you. The pictures on the board should be symbols of freedom rather than consumerist trophies.
You should have pictures of your kids with their smiling faces. The sooner you succeed, the sooner you can spend more time with them. If you are single, you can have a map on the wall with the countries you want to visit marked on it. You can have pictures of a tropical island if that represents freedom to you. Freedom is a value worth pursuing, but stuff is something easy to settle for. Your brain isn’t going to focus on getting you a bigger TV; but are you going to compromise on your spiritual freedom? If you’re reading this, chances are you won’t.
That is what makes this type of vision board so powerful.
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To Internet or Not...
The greatest productivity killer of all time is the Internet. It can do a lot of good, but distraction is just a click away. Within a single second, I can be watching a movie, reading a blog, checking out the news, or looking at photos of my friends. That temptation can be overwhelming. It takes a LONG time to train yourself to resist those distractions. You might find that you are more productive without the Internet on. You can accomplish many tasks without an Internet connection. I don’t need to be online to write most of this book. I don’t give myself the temptation. I unplug the router until I need to look up something specific.
I only have the Internet on to hop back and forth with the book page on my website. I want to be sure that the chapters and sections sync up nicely. I’m also listening to some streaming background music. But I could just as easily play a CD on the stereo. The Internet mostly poisons my work, and I kept the Internet off for about ninety-percent of writing this book.
The best solution for you may be to simply have times of the day when the Internet is on and other times when it is off. This comes down to your personality and the way you learn. Creating a hard and fast rule won’t work for everyone. I only switched my Internet usage when the company changed their billing plan recently. They no longer offer an unlimited data option, so I have to pay for each fifteen-minute block I use. I thought it was a kick in the pants, but then my work improved. I’m writing almost twice as fast. Now I treat the Internet like a diminishing resource. I want to use it fast and efficiently and then unplug so those pennies don’t keep bleeding out of my wallet.
There is not a perfect answer here. Simply asking the question will cause you to look at your behavior. The best question is, “Does having the Internet on right now increase or decrease my productivity?” It’s funny because for most of the book I had the Internet off, but it’s on right now.
Someone is messaging me on Skype right now, trying to get on board as an intern. I keep forgetting to check the messages because this book is my top priority. I have to manually train myself to only focus on this book. I keep checking my word count because that is the only goal I want to think about. As long as I’m focused on that single, super tight goal, I can block out distractions and work well even with the Internet turned on.
If you need to be online, try leaving off Skype and all your social media and anything else that sends out beeps, alerts, and push notifications. One little beep and twenty minutes can disappear. You always want to drive yourself toward maximum efficiency. If you can get three hours of work done in just two hours, then you’ve gotten a piece of your life back.
You don’t want to be the person who spends twice as long working just because you’re easily distracted. There is an overwhelming temptation to click away and do something fun. The more time you can work without the Internet on at all, the better.
108
The 80/20 Rule
Not all distractions are entertainment based. Have you ever been driving and you notice a fly stuck to your windshield in the corner? All you can think about is getting rid of that little fly. It causes total distraction.
The same kind of thing can happen with a business project. Here’s a good example. For some reason, the Goodreads logo on my social media links for one of my pen names looks too big to me. My computer swears that the circles are all the same size but that one looks bigger. It’s freaking me out – and it would take hours to figure it out. It’s a tempting path to go down.
In business, we seek perfection. But you’ll notice in a few months that most of what you worked on didn’t matter. Twenty percent of your effort will generate eighty percent of your income. It’s hard to know which twenty percent at the time. Eventually, you will get better at noticing what the most efficient uses of your time are. At work, you have a boss or manager who is in charge of noticing when you're inefficient. I know that most of them don’t do that very well, but at least there’s oversight.
In the real world, all the ideas have to come from you – and a lot of those ideas are going to lead you into brick walls. Sometimes, you spend time trying to chase or recover time you already lost. There isn’t a magic fo
rmula to predict when an idea is a bad one. It takes time and experience to figure that out. You can reach out to me for some guidance if you feel like you’re hitting a wall. Just reply to any of my emails; I‘ll be the one who replies. I don’t have an assistant who manages my email or anything. I like to keep my finger on the pulse.
The secret to success is to notice when you are doing things that don’t make you money and then adapt. A lot of guys that try and replicate one of my local consulting businesses spend all their time making the perfect website. That’s great. Too bad they all end up going out of business. They dedicate all their time to looking great when clients show up rather than trying to find clients. When I got my first client, my website was pure garbage. But it didn’t matter. I made the sale. The sooner you see money in your pocket, the happier you are going to be entering this lifestyle.
You always want to look at a task and think about your bottom line. Will doing this task make me money? How much will it affect my bottom line? How long until I feel that effect?
I have two main types of projects that I invest time in. I take a lot of ghostwriting and contract jobs. I get paid fast for a few days work. If I take two ghostwriting jobs a month, which take me four to six days to complete, I can take the rest of the month off. Those two projects will cover all of my family’s expenses for the month. I also work on projects, which are long-term revenue earners. Ghostwriting a book can earn me a few thousand dollars now or a few hundred bucks a month over the next few years. There is the balance between short and long-term income. Each task I work on throughout the day factors in that balance.
As you work for yourself, you will begin to sense which type of project you are working on. Many times we “work” our twenty just to fund our passion, which takes up the other eighty percent of the time. Be careful that you don’t let the passion for your project suck away all the benefits of the twenty percent that is paying your bills.
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The Dangers of Rabbit Holes
Distraction is a pain, but it becomes a cancer when it becomes your primary focus. You start off looking at that fly in the corner of the windshield, and it just gets more and more annoying. Pretty soon you are leaning outside your window to try and reach that monster. You aren’t paying any attention to the road, and you flip your car. And what do you say when the cops show up? “Don’t blame me! It was the fly!”
I have seen people spend days working on something that won’t make them any money.
This has even happened to me. I already told you some stories about my friends screwing up, so I now it’s my turn. A few years ago, I wanted to get into the royalty free photo business. I had a ton of photos and a few photographers working for me. I invested lots of time and money into that idea. My friends warned me that it was a bad idea; one had tried it already and failed. But I was stubborn - I kept telling myself that I was different, and my angle would work. Of course, that rabbit hole led to nowhere except broken hearts and broken dreams.
If you watch those television shows where people beg investors for money, you get to see rabbits sometimes. These people have spent years designing their product. They are in massive debt. But they have never sold a single unit. They haven’t even tried to sell anything. They wanted the product to be perfect. They focused on an aspect of the business that doesn’t generate any income.
Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in my office scanning one of the local classified ads. Suddenly, someone posts a link in there to an interesting blog post. I don’t notice it, but I burn up an hour doing nothing. If my work is done for the day, I need to shut down and go spend time with my kids. That’s a much better use of my time. Part of that is that I like my kids. I never thought I would be a kids guy, but hanging out with mine is pretty fun. Who knew?
I tried getting to the point where I read zero news a day. That’s my goal but for now, I only spend twenty minutes a day on the news. That’s my limit. I mostly just need to scan the headlines to get a feel for what’s going on. The thing about the news is that it doesn’t matter. The only two things in the newspaper today that will affect you are the weather and the movie listings. The movie listings will tell you when the new Star Wars is out, and the weather tells you if you need to take an umbrella there. The rest of the “information” there won’t affect what you do today.
So you want to set up a system that causes you to check on your efficiency. Some people use time-based systems such as Pomodoro. They pre-allocate their entire day into twenty-minute blocks. I’m a hard creative type, so to me, that feels too restrictive. I have a friend down the street living on the same island in my old apartment who swears by that method. I don’t dislike it; I just don’t use it. I tried, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I recommend trying to find the right tool that fits the way your mind works. Unlike the education industry, I realize that people think, learn and work in different ways. It’s the beautiful rainbow of our minds.
My writing method is to allocate a word count per day. That unit of measurement works better for me than a time block. It’s hard to stop writing when I have a rhythm going just because an alarm is going off. Once I hit my daily goal for writing, I can start to wind down. Writing this book I have my baseline goal and my stretch goal, which is twice as many words. Some days I am just on fire, and I hit my stretch goal. A little flexibility works for me because most of my work is creative in nature.
You want to be sure that you invest your time wisely. I’ve done my best to set up a system for you that will protect you from chasing rabbits for too long. Just check with yourself at the end of every day, and ask if you wasted any time.
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Effort versus Perfection
There are two driving forces as we work on projects. The first is effort. How much time, energy and thought do you put into a project? There comes a point where more effort doesn’t lead to very much more payoff. Let’s say you build your website and it’s ninety percent of where it needs to be. If you keep it that way, you will generate $1000 a month. If you put in another week, you can get your website up to 100%, and you will bump that monthly income to a whopping $1,001. Does it seem like all that extra effort is worth it?
We attach a psychological value to that extra percent, and we fail to make these calculations all the time. We don’t notice when we hit that moment of diminishing returns, the time where more effort stops paying off. I’m not claiming to be better than anyone else here. This is something that I struggled with for a very long time. I don’t want to say something is done until I get that last percentage point. It took me a lot of work to learn that some effort is simply wasted. There are things that I’ll spend hours on that no client ever notices. It’s work that made me feel good (at least once I was finished) but didn’t affect my bottom line.
This is one of the killers for writers. I know writers who agonize and keep telling me that their book isn’t done. They leave a book on the shelf for years because it’s not quite perfect yet. If you stand on a street corner in Los Angeles and throw a rock, you will hit someone with a script. When you ask them if it’s completed, they all say no. For some reason, starting scripts is very popular but finishing them hasn’t quite caught on yet. They have a load of excuses, but it usually boils down to seeking perfection. People are afraid to let something out into the world unless it’s perfect.
I can’t stand grammar mistakes – they make me break out in hives. I’m terrified that I’ll make a mistake in this book and get two dozen snarky reviews pointing them out and calling me a hack. Which sounds unreasonable, but sometimes people do that on projects of mine. Some reviewers are just mean for no reason. Maybe it’s an attractive gimmick, or they like venting.
I just spoke to my friend about doing a punch up on this book. I wanted him to hop in and add a little jazz, a little eloquence. He would be focused on increasing your enjoyment rather than the educational aspect. He told me that he normally handles about a thousand words a week. I don’t want to delay the release of my book f
or two years!
Finding the perfect balance between effort and perfection is hard. You don’t want to put garbage out into the wild, but you also don’t want to go broke because you’re scared to press send.
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Clear Goals Provide Focus
In the next section, I’m going to show you how to create goals that make winning and getting to those goals easier. There are tons of steps and systems people teach in goal creation, but I’ve narrowed it down to two things.
First, you have to start out with a very clear and specific goal in mind. Many people set the goal of “losing weight.” That is way too vague. If you cut back on Burger King and lose 1 pound, have you hit your goal? You must have an exact target weight. That’s one of the reasons I have been so successful with weight loss this year. I finally made it a priority goal, and I know my target weight.
Most people start losing weight and get around halfway to their goal. They exercise a little and stick to their diet for a couple of weeks and lost that initial water weight. They never wrote a goal down, so they just decide they meant to lose ten pounds, not twenty. This is the opposite of mission creep. Instead of going too far, people quit too soon. Before you can start building a habit strategy, you need specific goals.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 20
