Abundant Freedom

At the end of the day are you satisfied with what you accomplished in your business?  Do you ever say “Where did the day go, I hardly got anything accomplished?“.

I know when I first started working on my own full-time from home, I thought my days would be long and I’d have plenty of time to get a lot more accomplished than I did when I worked a full-time job.  What’s funny though is my days go by so quickly now that I can’t possibly comprehend where the time goes.  Does that mean that I love what I do and it’s fun and not work which makes the time go more quickly?  I’m sure that’s a very big part of it.  But the fact remains that at the end of many days, I look back and see that too much of my time was wasted on non-income producing activities.

The first step to fixing a problem is realizing that you have a problem.  At least then you know what needs fixed.  Once I realized I had a problem, I started researching ways to solve my productivity dilemma.  The first thing I learned is that I needed to get good at figuring out what activities were income generating and which were not.  With some activities, it’s very easy to tell.  With others, as you’ll see, it’s not easy at all.

To help give you some guidelines, here are some classic examples of non-income generating activities.  Ask yourself if you’re guilty of any of these?

• Surfing the web
• Getting ready to get ready (aka “Saddling Up” which is not riding)
• Reorganizing something that doesn’t need reorganized
• Chatting with business partners about non-critical things
• Reviewing company material
• Checking email
• Cleaning up your desk or your office
• Attending conference calls or webinars
• Growing your social network on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. (disclaimer-this can be income generating but it’s longer term income, not much short-term income potential)
• Reading a self-development book (this activity, like the last one, will definitely have an impact on your income but it’s just hard to measure since it will be much longer term)

What are income producing activities?:

• Calling prospects to set appointments or send them info to review
• Doing 3-way calls with your ME’s
• Prospecting / Generating leads
• Presenting the opportunity to prospects in person, on the phone or in a webinar
• Following up with a prospect
• Following up with a new customer or ME
• Training a new ME so he gets moving out of the gate quickly duplicating proper activities

80% of your time should be spent on the above types of activities

Dramatically Increase Income-Producing Activities — Alex Lopez with Sydney-based Quantify Corporation uses a simple technique to double his income-producing activities.  He divides his to-do list into two columns.  Column one is labeled “Non-income Producing Activities” (Red) and Column two is labeled “Income Producing Activities” (Green).  He then forces himself to place a to-do item in one of the two columns.  When he first started, his non-income producing activities outnumbered his income-producing activities by a two to one ratio.  Over time, he’s been able to flip that ratio.  This is an excellent exercise for ALL of us to follow.  As Quantify Corporation’s tagline says “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”

The trick is to create your task list for tomorrow as the last thing you do today.  When you get up tomorrow, you can charge head-on immediately into the tasks that you need to accomplish for the day without even thinking about them.  Try it, it REALLY works!!

Some thoughts from others on the importance of their daily agenda…

“The secret of a person’s success is discovered in his daily agenda.” — John C. Maxwell

“The whole purpose of time management is to enable you to have more time to spend with the people you love, doing the things you enjoy.”  — Brian Tracy

“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.” –  Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)

“Every morning when the alarm goes off, we have a totally new opportunity to do what we want with the hours we have been gifted. And we are gifted with that clean slate every day for the rest of our lives.”  –  Hyrum Smith, Originator of the Franklin Planner, 2000

So what are you going to do tomorrow?  Make it count!

Get that info where you can use it!

Have you ever gone to an event like a convention or a large training meeting and come home and forgot most of what you learned there?  That happens to many people, myself included.  So I’ve done a little research on how to combat that problem.

The most effective thing you can do when you come home is to spend a few hours and type up your notes into a document.  During this process, you will cut out the unnecessary fluff in your notes, organize them much better and commit much more of the information to memory.  There’s something about this process, this re-input of the information into your brain so you can pretty it up and type it out into a neat clean document, that causes your brain to absorb much more of it than it was able to the first time around.

So this exercise serves three purposes:

1. Helps you to commit more of the information to memory
2. Makes the information computer searchable
3. Makes the information worthy of filing for future more logical reference (a nice 3 ring binder perhaps?)

Once the info is in your brain, all sorts of new ideas and possible applications to your exact situation will automatically start to form.  That’s when the magic happens and when the true value of the time you invested in the original event is realized.

212 The Extra Degree

If you haven’t seen 212 The Extra Degree yet, you need to take 3 minutes and watch it right now.  It’s very short and worth every second of your time.  The concept is amazingly simple, yet amazingly powerful and applicable to everything we do as entrepreneurs.

Click on the image to watch it now.

Can you see exactly what you want your future to look like?  In a short sentence, I believe if you can’t see it, you can’t have it.

I don’t know if you’re a student of self-development or not (I encourage you to become one if you’re not), but many of the great business leaders of our time have talked about being able to visualize success before you can attain success.

“You can bring into your life more power, more wealth, more health, more happiness, and more joy by learning to contact and release the hidden power of your subconscious mind.”
- Dr. Joseph Murphy

“What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”
- Napoleon Hill

The subconscious mind is an incredible thing and you’ll learn that you can actually program your subconscious mind for success.  Yes, it’s like a computer, it can be programmed to give you whatever you want.  Learning how to program it isn’t something that everyone knows how to do, but the good news is that anyone can learn how to do it, and it’s not hard to do.

If you haven’t yet read or watched The Secret, you should.  Some people might think it’s a little out there, but I have to tell you when you start to think about it, it really makes total sense.  Check it out if you haven’t.

Once you’ve read “The Secret”, another book I would recommend is Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, M.D.. (Here’s a link to the Audio-book version version). This book provides even more scientific proof that your subconcious mind controls just about everything about you and your success in life. John Chickness studied with Dr. Maltz himself in the sixties. John will tell you…this works!

Where do you create?  Where do you do your best thinking?  Why is this important?  Well…you’re an entrepreneur, right?

Idea Generator

For me, believe it or not, I have always done my most creative thinking in the shower.  For some reason, when I’m in there showering away, my mind sets itself free and the most creative ideas just show up that don’t come to me as freely any other time of the day.  There’s no other activity I’ve ever found that releases my mind’s creative power like a taking a shower. I know it sounds a little strange, but it’s true.  That’s what works for me, but I know everyone is different.

Digital Recorder

So what often times happens when you have a great idea?  You forget it very quickly don’t you?  I know that’s what used to happen to me.  I’d have all of these great ideas, and then by the time I got out of the shower, they were gone.  I’d remember that I had a great idea but I couldn’t remember the specifics of the idea itself.  So I solved that problem by investing in a very small, inexpensive digital recorder.  Now as soon as I get out of the shower, I can dump those ideas down to my recorder so they’re saved.  Then every so often, I’ll press play on the recorder and jot those ideas down in a document in my computer…saved forever.

I bet you have a time, place or activity that sets your mind free.  Maybe it’s while you’re driving?  Perhaps when you’re playing golf and walking down the fairway to your chip-shot, your mind is racing with great ideas.  Whenever or whatever it is, I know you have it.

So why am I talking about this?  As entrepreneurs, the most powerful thing we posses is the ability to create.  Create systems.  Create ways to improve existing systems.  Create products.  Create businesses.  Create relationships.  Create a better way to explain something.  Create anything imaginable.  If that’s our most powerful gift, doesn’t it make sense to allow that gift to work it’s magic as effectively as it can?

I think so.  So my challenge to you is to determine where your mind is best set free to create.  Then, devise a system to capture those ideas so you don’t lose them.  Then of course, the last step is to review those ideas and see which ones are worth implementing and actually implement them, but that discussion is for another day.

Keep those ideas flowing!

I spent Saturday and Sunday this past weekend attending Podcamp Pittsburgh 3 held at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.  It was an incredible event.  I probably learned more there in two days than I’ve learned in any 2-day period in the last 20 years.

Me sitting front and center at PodCamp Pittsburgh 3

It was an “Un-conference” revolving around Social Media.  I learned about the many different uses for sites like Twitter.com, Plurk.com, LinkedIn.com, Facebook.com, Talkshoe.com, Libsyn.com, Blip.tv, Viddler.com, as well as blogging and podcasting technologies and best practices, video compression tips & techniques, SEO optimization of blogs, got to meet some real celebrities of the blogging and podcasting worlds and many other cool sites, tools and people too numerous to mention.  It was also a fantastic opportunity to network with some very sharp creative people.  My brain is spinning with ideas on how to apply many of the things I learned to both my business and personal life.

This is an event that I would recommend to anyone that enjoys communicating and interacting with others.  They are held all over the world so check one out if you ever get a chance.  Podcamp.org