RedAsh's Blog

July 27 th - August 2 th, 2009

You are soon going to be taking a good look at your life to see what new direction you wish to take. This is a rather sobering experience as you realize just how important your decisions over the next two years are going to affect you. Meanwhile new friends are important so get out of the house and meet them! The weekend should bring you into the orbit of someone exciting to accept all invitations and keep your eyes open.

This week lucky numbers are:
12, 22, 28, 42, 60,

July 30, 2009
Catch up today on domestic and business chores that have been left dangling. This is a fine day to approach difficult neighbors about a cooperative effort. Your popularity is highlighted this evening, and you can make good progress in social and travel plans.

~ Starved lice bite the hardest.

July 31, 2009
All of your best efforts to communicate clearly may not meet with success if the person you are addressing is invested in doing things his or her way no matter what. Allowing yourself to take a good chunk of this day for rest and reflection is important to your overall health and well-being.

July 27 th - August 2 th, 2009

You are soon going to be taking a good look at your life to see what new direction you wish to take. This is a rather sobering experience as you realize just how important your decisions over the next two years are going to affect you. Meanwhile new friends are important so get out of the house and meet them! The weekend should bring you into the orbit of someone exciting to accept all invitations and keep your eyes open.

This week lucky numbers are:
6, 12, 26, 44, 72,

July 28, 2009
Gains and rewards will come to you today. This is a fine period for seeking your fortune by increasing your investments of time, effort, and money. You could hear spectacular news now regarding something you have long wanted. You feel great, ready to take on the world.

~ Alas for the son whose father went to heaven

July 29, 2009
The conditions today support your motivation to gain prestige and a higher status in your career. Your health is somewhat dependent on your diet, so watch your intake. You have good support in personal grooming and in working up some glamour and charm for the upcoming days.

July 30, 2009
Catch up today on domestic and business chores that have been left dangling. This is a fine day to approach difficult neighbors about a cooperative effort. Your popularity is highlighted this evening, and you can make good progress in social and travel plans.

~ Starved lice bite the hardest.

July 31, 2009
All of your best efforts to communicate clearly may not meet with success if the person you are addressing is invested in doing things his or her way no matter what. Allowing yourself to take a good chunk of this day for rest and reflection is important to your overall health and well-being.

~ Tommy Edison once said: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

What I to be is to be a man,
who is gentle, kind, and knowledgeable where everybody seeks me out for help.

You act according to the image you have of yourself, the identity you’ve built in your mind. There are things you don’t do (like robbing banks, killing people, or stealing your best friend’s girl) not via willpower, but because you have a standard for yourself, tied to your identity, that you aren’t willing to violate.

Think about something you have trouble avoiding (like eating junk food) and something you have no trouble avoiding because you’d “never do it” (like scamming the elderly out of money) and you’ll understand. It’s not about willpower. It’s about raising your standards, about seeing yourself as a person who’d “never do” whatever it is you want to avoid. When it’s not who you are, you don’t think twice about it.

The road isn’t easy. It involves demanding change from yourself, rethinking some of the ways you’ve been doing things, and you’ll have internal resistance to that for sure.

The key is to decide what you won’t settle for anymore, and to drill that into your mind over and over again until it becomes ingrained in your personal identity. Until it’s not something you want to do, but something you are.

At the end of the day, it simply boils down to,
What have I done to become what I want to become?

So far, I know that it is my principle,
1> to not to talk about the bad beings of other people behind their back
2> to talk about my being of other people in my front

ack when I used to sit in traffic several hours a day, I had a LOT of time to think. During one of those excruciatingly boring hours, had an a-ha moment that has made a phenomenal impact on my life.

The concept was simple, and only involved removing one word from my vocabulary and replacing it with another. But actually removing this one word from my vocabulary was more difficult than I imagined and led me to discover all kinds of things that I was hiding from my own self.

What I discovered when I replaced this word was that I gained 100% control over my life. The other fun thing that I found is that by being keenly aware of how others use this word, you can instantly read through their own doubts and insecurities about themselves and immediately realize where their priorities lie.
The One Word

The word that I almost completely removed from my vocabulary was “CAN’T” and the word I replaced it with was “WON’T.”

I’m telling you, this sounds so simple and perhaps inconsequential until you actually try it yourself.

Look at the difference in these two sentences:

“I can’t get enough leads to make enough sales.”
“I won’t get enough leads to make enough sales.”

The second statement begs the question – Well Why Not? Why won’t you get enough leads to make the sales you want to make? Not motivated enough? Not willing to do what it takes to get those leads? Don’t believe you can really be successful? Plenty of people CAN get enough leads to make enough sales, so it’s not a REAL can’t.

Some other things I used to tell myself were:

* I can’t buy that car
* I can’t take a vacation
* I can’t find a mentor
* I can’t figure out what it takes to be rich

You may find that you can in fact “buy that car” but may “choose not to” buy that car. This is much more empowering than you going around thinking that you CAN’T buy that car.

I’ve studied this phenomenon over the past 4-5 years and I’ve found that the more successful a person is, the less often they say the word can’t. Unsuccessful people use the word can’t constantly.

The measure I used to determine if something is really a “can’t” is this. If my family were being held hostage and the only way I could set them free was by doing this action, could I do it? 99.9% of the time, you could.
X-Ray Vision Into The Psyche of Others

The most exciting thing about being aware of can’t and won’t is that most people don’t know about it. Because of this, you can see right through the lies they tell themselves and you.

Warning – you may not want to call people out on this – I’ve tried it. People tend to get very defensive.

For example, my mom was telling me about how she “can’t” get over this relationship that has ended. I told her, of course you can, you just won’t – you choose not to get over it. Why won’t you get over it and move on? She freaked out, started yelling, and insisted that it really was impossible to get over it.

When the boss or your client tells you that they can’t pay you more, what they are saying is that they won’t pay you more. Kind of irritating when you think of it that way huh?

If they really valued what you were doing enough, they could figure out a way to pay you more. If they don’t value what you are providing enough, you need to ask yourself why.
Try It

I really, really hope that you try this. Start being highly aware of when you or other’s use the word “can’t.” Then repeat the sentence in your mind by replacing the word “can’t” with the word “won’t” and analyze this sentence.

Please share what you hear out in the world! I LOVE to hear about what people say they can’t do. Believe me, I am by no means free of critical self-talk so am not above this. But I find that hearing what other people say they can’t do is very empowering.

“If I could start again / A million miles away / I would keep myself / I would find a way” – Trent Reznor (Though covered much more emotionally below by Johnny Cash)

You get to live this life exactly one time. You try to pack in as much achievement as you can in that life, to get as much done, to build your dream life.

But are you really sure that your actions are building the life you’re really after?

When The Ladder You’ve Climbed Is Against The Wrong Wall

When Johnny Cash covers Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” he’s sending a strong message: What I achieved wasn’t what I really wanted. The choices he made may have catapulted him to super-stardom, but he lost his way and let more important things in his life fall to the wayside. When he sings “You can have it all / my empire of dirt,” he makes it very clear how much his ’success’ compares to what it cost to achieve it.

It’s all to easy to do this with our businesses and our careers as well. We might be working 80-hour weeks to provide for our family, but failing to give them the time they so desperately need from us. We’re locked into thinking, “But I must do this, we need the money,” without necessarily thinking about the opportunity cost – the things we’re giving up in our pursuit of them. We think we’ll create that work-life balance later, that “this is only temporary,” but is it really?

Think about your own life. How many things that are important to you – truly important to you, long-term – how many of these things have been on the back burner for 6 months? A year? Five years? Forever? How many things do you tell yourself you’ll do later, “when you have the time,” “when the money finally comes in,” when things finally “slow down?”

I’ve got some uncomfortable news for you: Things will never slow down. You will simply force yourself to make the time to keep your life in balance, or you won’t. And if you don’t, you will regret it more than you know. The things you’re doing right now to ensure you and those you care about have “everything you need” might be sabotaging that very goal, if you’re not careful about it. This warning will not apply to all my readers, but for the ones who watched the video and felt the knife twisting inside, this is for you.
How To Guarantee You Don’t Screw It All Up

How do you create a work-life balance that gets you everything you want? The answer is simple, but not easy (in the same way that the solution for weight loss is ‘eat less and exercise’ – simple, yes. Easy, no). To start moving closer to work-life balance every day, you’ve got to do two important things:

1. Want Less / Scale Back.
2. Raise Your Standards.

These are not the answers you want to hear, but they’re the answers I have to give you. And if the things you’ve been keeping on the back burner for far too long are time sensitive (like relationships with people), this uncomfortable advice may just save your ass.
Step One: Want Less and/or Scale Back

Society rewards and glorifies superstars, and because of that we’re conditioned to think that we have to have it all, become millionaires and have everything “come together.” We set million-dollar goals or desire to become famous because we think that will make life easier, though it rarely does. But that’s the allure. We think that having more will make us happier, and make life easier, though that’s not guaranteed – and it becomes all to easy to postpone things for “just a little while longer” while we build out business.

It’s like the old story where the millionaire takes a beach vacation and discovers a fisherman on the shore, catching fish with ease and speed like he’s never seen before. He urges the humble fisherman to start a business, leverage his skills, and build a fishing empire that would give him a massive income stream for life. “What would I want to do that?” he asks the millionaire, who replies “So you can live a life of leisure at the beach.” The fisherman looks at him puzzled. “But I’m already doing that right now,” he answers, and goes back to fishing.

So the question here is this: Do you really need to take your goals to the finish line to get the results you want? This is an important question. When I started my business, I wanted to make a million dollars so that I could have all the time I wanted to spend with my wife and kids. So I poured myself into building a business, only to discover that years went by without me spending enough time with them, and it’s costing me in big ways, ways I can’t fix with the money I’m making now. And that sucks.

If this message doesn’t apply to you, be thankful. But if it does, stay alert. Ask yourself if you really need to make $X amount of money before you can have what you want. Perhaps the better path is to set incremental goals, only pushing past them when you’ve satisfied the balance of other areas of your life. For example, I’ve cut back the time I spend building my business a lot in the last 12 weeks. I limit almost all my writing/blogging time to three slices of time: one hour before dawn, on my lunch hour, and an hour or so while I put the kids to bed at night. My coaching calls take place in my car on the way to and from work.

Does this put a limit cap on my billable time? Of course it does. But I’m playing with my kids more. I’m reading to them more. And I’m not telling them, “wait until I’m finished with this work” as much (today being an exception, since it’s a day off from the day job, and I woke up late :-) )

Can I make up for lost time? No. But I can take advantage of the time I have. And that’s the lesson for you – if building your business has forced you to put off spending time on things that you must spend time on because they are important, you need to consider scaling back. I’m not saying abandon your goals, not in the least, but I am saying you need to structure them in a way that doesn’t sacrifice family/personal priorities. You will never get that time back.

Here’s the funny thing, though – if you put personal priorities like family and health first and then demand that you “fit business in” rather than “fit family in,” you will become amazingly effective with your time. I can’t tell you how much more productive I am now that I’ve cut back my business-building hours. It forces you to become demanding and discerning with where you put your focus.

When I say “Want Less / Scale Back” I mean crank things back until you’ve balanced the time you spend on things that have lifelong, meaningful value, and work your business around that rather than the other way around. Will this cost you money and business opportunities? Of course it will (though you may actually grow faster and easier with your new, stronger focus). But you won’t regret it. Neither will the people you care about.

As you become more discerning with your time, you will become better at building your business without sacrificing time that can’t be replaced. Do things the right way, because you will not get a second chance.

But how do you do that when you’re overwhelmed, overburdened and overgoaled? Here’s how.
Step Two: Raise Your Standards

You act according to the image you have of yourself, the identity you’ve built in your mind. There are things you don’t do (like robbing banks, killing people, or stealing your best friend’s girl) not via willpower, but because you have a standard for yourself, tied to your identity, that you aren’t willing to violate. Think about something you have trouble avoiding (like eating junk food) and something you have no trouble avoiding because you’d “never do it” (like scamming the elderly out of money) and you’ll understand. It’s not about willpower. It’s about raising your standards, about seeing yourself as a person who’d “never do” whatever it is you want to avoid. When it’s not who you are, you don’t think twice about it.

I’ll be talking about this in upcoming posts, because I’ve been working through it these last few months, and the road isn’t easy. It involves demanding change from yourself, rethinking some of the ways you’ve been doing things, and you’ll have internal resistance to that for sure.

For today, though, the first step is raising your standards just a little bit by focusing on what you won’t settle for sacrificing in order to meet your goals. Maybe it’s time with your kids, your spouse, or some other important spirtiual/fitness/personal goal you’ve been neglecting. Whatever it is, it’s time to raise your standard by demanding you get balanced. It all starts with a statement like this:

I refuse to sacrifice ______ in order to build my business. I will do whatever it takes to balance the two, because that’s just how I roll.

Your statement will be different, since different phrasing will resonate with you better. This is the format that has been working for me. The key is to decide what you won’t settle for anymore, and to drill that into your mind over and over again until it becomes ingrained in your personal identity. Until it’s not something you want to do, but something you are.

I’m hitting the limit for the time I promised myself I’d spend on this post, so I’m stopping now. I’ll close with a small favor to ask of you – please pass this article along via email, or IM, or Twitter, or backlink … spread the word. There are too many people out there who are struggling to build their business so that they can hav more time with the people they care about, but are losing balance. This article won’t fix all of those problems, but it can be a powerful start.

When you comin’ home dad? / I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, son / You know we’ll have a good time then.” – Harry Chapin, Cats In The Cradle

I’m not the only one who has struggled with balancing family, relationship and personal goals while building a business. It’s not easy. The constant demands of business building and our social conditioning make it far too easy to neglect what’s truly important while we focus on “success” in the professional arena – and we can lose balance. But it doesn’t have to be.

The True Cost Of Doing Business

While driving to the store yesterday I had a chance to talk to my oldest son about an economic term called “opportunity cost,” the technical way of referring to the sacrifice you make whenever you spend your time/resources on something. For example, if you spend 4 hours today redesigning your blog, you sacrifice 4 hours of writing additional posts. Or, if you spend three hours visiting yard sales (as we were doing at the time), you sacrifice 3 hours you could be having a yard sale.

It’s like the old expression goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Somebody’s got to pay for everything, whether in terms of actual payment (money) or some other sacrifice (resources get allocated elsewhere). Harry Chapin sings about this in the video above, when noting that “planes to catch / and bills to pay” forced him to pay a high opportunity cost in terms of his son (“He learned to walk while I was away”).

For a freelancer or entrepreneur, the opportunity costs we pay every day can be significant. The fact that one hour is billable and urgent can easily overshadow a non-billable event (like playing with our kids, spending time with our spouse, or hitting the damn gym already) that we can say we’ll “catch up on later.” If this has been an emotionally neutral article for you so far, you probably haven’t been paying too high an opportunity cost lately. But if you’ve been feeling the knife twisting (or avoiding watching the video because it tears you up), then it’s likely you’re paying more than you expected to to build your business.
How To Manage Your Opportunity Costs & Keep Balanced

The tricky thing about opportunity costs is that psychologically we tend to view them as mutually exclusive to one another. We think that one activity necessarily has to require we sacrifice the other. We’ll go to the gym when work calms down. We’ll spruce up our web site when we get more money. We’ll take that vacation with the family when we get ahead a little. But when we’re always putting one thing off to have another, we run the risk of losing oportunities that may never come again (such as time with the family or better health right now).

In the 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris brings up the concept of “mini-retirements” as a way to enjoy your life right now. Instead of waiting decades until you can finally retire and relax and travel the world, why not rearrange things so that you can do so in the present, every so often, for a few days at a time. You’ll get to taste a future goal now and add more enjoyment to your life. This idea isn’t limited to retirements – you can apply it almost everywhere – and it’s a key factor in creating a balanced life. I’m calling it the 80/20 Rule of Balance:

Devoting even a small amount of consistent focus to a goal can yield big results.

In other words, you don’t have to wait until you have 100% of the time/resources you think you need to start getting results – you can have them now. For example, I used to think that once I “made it” and started making a lot more money I’d finally have the flexibility to spend more time with my family. And so I’d put things off until “later” and leave a void in that area.

But now I realize that he 80/20 rule applies here. For example, yesterday, our family had an enormous amount of work to do in terms of cleaning up the house / tackling maintenance projects. The little ones wanted to go to the park, to go for bike rides, to play Lego for hours … but we didn’t have the time. In the past, I would have said, “there’s too much work to do … if we can get it all done, then we’ll have time to play.”

But yesterday I applied the 80/20 Rule of Balance and did this – every so often throughout the day I’d stop working and spend 15-30 minutes playing with the kids. It was rushed, I didn’t have the time I thought I needed to really “make it count,” but it didn’t matter. The kids were very happy. They didn’t need much – just a little time made a big difference. And I made some badass Lego spaceships. Really badass.

Did I get everything done around the house? No, but I got some stuff done. Did I spend as much time as I wanted to with the kids? No, but I spent some time making memories. I didn’t neglect either priority, and I created more balance because of it. Emotionally I feel like even though I spent only 10% of the time I wanted to with the kids, I created 50% of the result they wanted. More importantly, I created enough of the result they wanted for them to feel connected.

So that’s your lesson – you don’t have to wait until you can give 100% of your focus to finally tackle another priority area in your life. Give it some attention now – even if it’s a little bit, and it’s like watering a plant. It keeps it alive. And you’ll find that it also creates the hunger inside you to get more disciplined so that you can spend even more time on it later.

I’ll leave you with this thought. I never got to know my father. He worked 3 jobs to provide for us and I barely ever saw him, (my family basically fell apart when I was 9). I feel a sadness and a void that can’t be filled because the window of opportunity has passed. But I know he loved me, because he tapped into the 80/20 Rule of Balance.

Though I have very, very few memories of him at all, the strongest memory is how every once in a while when I was young (7 or 8), he would wake me up at 3am in between two of his jobs and take me out for ice cream for a half-hour or so. This tiny sliver of time didn’t close the gap between us, but it let me know I was loved, and it’s a strong memory even decades later. Perhaps if fate had played out differently, the gap may have even closed over time.

The message I want you to take from this – begin closing that balance gap now, not later. If you have no time to spend with your family, find a way to carve a slice now. If you have no time to take care of your health, find one small step you can take this week. Do something now, and get things going. It doesn’t take much to start getting significant value, so don’t miss this window of opportunity. It will never come again.

You won’t get a second chance to balance your life. You have to start right now. Wake up, and fight for it, and take whatever bit of ground you can today. You can’t count on the perfect opportunity to start balancing your life – you have to take the present opportunity and squeeze something out of it.

“Give a little bit / Give a little bit of your time to me” – Supertramp, Give a Little Bit

It’s been a gritty, no-hold-barred set of posts on Rock Your Day lately. I’ve asked you whether you’ll regret where your goals take you, and made you come to terms with the reality that you won’t get a second chance to make up for lost time. The time to balance your life is now, not some magical time later that you’ve been telling yourself is just around the corner for months/years/ohmygodhasitbeenthatlong.

But the challenge most of us face is that we feel like we’re already too damned busy to get balanced. What are we supposed to do? Don’t worry – I’ll give you the goods after the opening act. :-)


Getting Balanced Happens One Step At A Time

The trick to getting balanced is to take the pressure off. We tend to resist taking action to balance our life because the idea of getting balanced seems overwhelming, like climbing Mt. Everest in one hella-big jump. Even the phrase “getting balanced” carries the connotation that we’ve arrived, that everything is in order, and fundamentally we know that life just ain’t so. So why even bother to try conquering the mountain in one jump?

The simple answer is this: don’t try. Don’t saddle yourself with the tension that comes when you try to set too many goals at once, when you try to mold yourself into the perfect Superman/woman we know no one can never be (yet somehow still tell ourselves is a reasonable goal). Instead, focus on today. Right now. Specifically, a slice of time from 5 to 15 minutes.

You may not have time to balance your life today, but you cannot tell me that you can’t carve out 5 minutes to work on something. You can try, but you know that you’d just be bull$hitting yourself. I say that from a position of authority, because I’ve been doing it myself, telling myself that I’ll “get around” to a few things I’ve been slacking on but have resisted because I have so much on my plate. So for a moment I’ll have to stop kicking Brett’s a$$ and start kicking my own again.
15 Minutes = 3 Areas Of Increasing Balance

Here’s an example of what I mean by taking balance one step at a time. On a physical level, I know I need to get back into yoga (or my sister won’t stop bugging me). On an emotional level, I know I need to get back into focusing on gratitude daily. And on a spiritual level, I know that I’m not spending the time that I used to looking inward and asking the tough questions.

So here’s what I’m going to do over the next 7 days – I’m going to carve out 5 minutes for each of these things – no damned excuses allowed – everyday for the next week. Sure, 5 minutes of yoga a day doesn’t sound like much, but think about it – I can develop a mini-routine of a few nice stretches. 5 minutes of journaling what I’m grateful for? I know that will make a difference. And 5 minutes of introspection? It won’t necessarily change my life, but it will make me more conscious of what I’m doing and thinking … and that’s where momentum gets built.

5 minutes seems like too small a slice to be worthwhile, but from experience I know it’s incredibly worthwhile, for two reasons.

* First, it’s like tracking what you spend or what you eat – the very act of awareness begins to change your attitudes and habits automatically.

* Second, once you taste a little bit of balance, you crave more. You start getting more motivated to find more time, and 5 minutes turns to 10, then 20 … and an upward spiral begins.

It’s easy – so easy that you’ll be tempted to not try it yourself. But I challenge you not to shrug this off.
Dave’s 7-Day Challenge To You (Don’t Pass It Up!)

I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t try to kick your a$$ a bit too. You know the 3 things I’ll be spending 5 minutes each on for the next 7 days … what are yours? Tell me in the comments area below. Don’t be shy or make excuses – just pick 3 areas of your life that you want to get more balanced and “give a little bit of your time” to it.

You have 15 minutes. You know you do. Use it to change your life.

Work-life balance is an elusive thing; we all want to be more balanced, but most of us feel like it is just outside of our reach. As I’ve coached business owners from all walks of life over the last few years, I hear the same line over and over again – “When things settle down, I’ll have the time to work on balance.” I’ve even caught myself saying it (much more than once).

But what I’ve found interesting is that few people I’ve spoken to can actually tell me what the concept of “balance” means to them. They have a fuzzy idea of what a balanced life means – I hear things like “more time,” “better health,” “better relationships,” and so on … but nothing concrete. It’s kind of like when people say they want to “make more money” or “be happier” … it’s a vague phrase that doesn’t carry a lot of detail. And permitting a lack of detail on something you want is a great way to avoid approaching it. But we do this on purpose, and we do it for a reason.

Why Getting Into Detail Can Be Scary
For many goals – and especially for balance – we rarely move beyond the definition of “more” or “happier.” We may tell ourselves it’s just because we haven’t gotten around to it, but in reality it’s likely that there are fear-based factors that make us feel internal resistance to getting into detail (and building a battle plan) when it comes to achieving balance.

* Overwhelm. We tend to seek work-life balance when they we already overwhelmed, so the idea of carving out the time / effort to achieve it can often seem too complex – a huge project to add to their already maxed-out list of to-do items.

* Insecurity. When balance seems a far-away ideal, it’s easy to feel like it will simply never happen. Though we don’t want to admit it, one part of us simply resigns itself to accepting that we’ll never have it while another part continues to yearn for it. We feel like we just don’t have what it takes.

* Pressure. The word “balance” carries a strong emotional connection to the word “everything.” It’s hard to imagine something being “kind of” balanced – it’s all or nothing in our minds. And getting control of everything creates a huge amount of pressure – one that we frequently deal with by avoidance.

* Fear of Failure. We’ve tried to get “more balanced” before. We’ve fallen flat on our face. It hurts. We don’t want it to hurt again. Whether our fear is a conscious one or simply a behind-the-scenes emotion, it acts as a protection mechanism, helping to steer our thoughts away from getting more definition on what we really want.

* Fear of Success. What if you really had it all, and could have that magic work-life balance as early as tomorrow? What new responsibilities would you have, and what new commitments would you be obligated to? Even though you want to be balanced, your mind can easily push back against adding “more” to your plate.

* Fear of Loss. Imagine having everything. Now imagine losing it. If you’ve enjoyed the bliss of feeling “more balanced” in the past, you know how painful it is to have circumstances take that away from you. Perhaps part of you is feeling that right now, and holding you back from taking more concrete action defining what you really want.

* Confusion & Embarrassment. When it all comes down to it, maybe you just don’t know where the hell to start. Having a destination in mind – but not having a map – can cause a level of fear all by itself … the fear of admitting you don’t know something. Sucks, don’t it?

The Way To Face Your Fear & Do It Anyway
A simple way to take the “big deal” out of work-life balance is to stop making it such a big deal in the first place. Regardless of what television, magazines, or your “has it all together” neighbor imply to you, HEAR THIS: You don’t have to “have it all” to “have it.” Even just a small sip can begin to quench your balance thirst.

Take the pressure off. Instead of focusing on how big a thing “total work-life balance” can be, set your mind towards doing one small thing today to get you on the path to getting “more balanced.” It’s just like losing weight – if you focus on “losing 50 pounds,” good luck with dealing with the stress that brings. If you focus on “replace one soda a day with a glass of water,” you’re on your way. As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” (Note to self: Don’t mention “weight loss” and “eating elephants” in the same paragraph ever again.)

Taking small actions can help you fly under the fear radar and give you a massive confidence / emotional boost at the same time. You can begin getting balanced, even if you’re too damned busy. Start with something manageable, something small and achievable enough that doesn’t activate one of those make-or-break triggers, and start feeling like you have more control over getting your life in balance than you do today.

And I’d love to her what your next “small step” is going to be in the comments below.

Question for you … what’s one thing you’re not taking action on that’s bugging you? If you don’t find out why, you’ll never turn it around.

Stop (really, do this) – Stop and take a moment and think about it before reading any further.

…

…

Maybe it’s one of these simple reasons:

* Overwhelm - You just don’t see how you can handle committing the time and resources to tackling it.
* Fear - Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of work, fear of “the spotlight” … all these are tensions based on “what if” scenarios.
* Apathy - You simply don’t care enough to do anything about it. Go ahead, keep shrugging those shoulders.


Maybe it’s one of these reasons … or maybe it’s something else. I don’t know what your particular deal is … but I can tell you why it’s an obstacle you haven’t overcome:

You haven’t decided to do it.

Decision Is Everything, Baby
The fact is, you can say that you “want” something all day long … but if you’re not taking action, you don’t really want it. You just like the idea of it.

When you want something, I mean, really want it, you do whatever it takes to schedule it in, to make arrangements, to make it happen.

So if you’re not taking action, you need to make a decision. Not later, not tomorrow, now. You want to get in shape? Get up and go for a walk, right now, and bring your calendar. Schedule in some workouts while you’re walking.

You want to start a business? Take some level of action immediately, and schedule in the time to work on it this month.

Want = opinion/desire that will likely never be acted upon.

Decision = Scheduled commitment.

Schedule something today >:^)

If you’re dissatisfied with an area of your life, what are you going to do about it today?

On any given day you wake up, rub the sleep from your eyes, and make a decision to do one of two things:

* You decide to live passively, doing the things that keep you exactly in the same place you are now, reinforce a victim mentality, and leave you wishing for more, or,

* You decide to live purposefully, taking multiple actions during the day that make you a stronger person, advance your goals, and make you happier.

Every day, you choose one of these options, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously (in which case you’ve chosen the first option by default). You don’t get “not to choose” – you’re part of the game whether you like it or not.

The only question is, whose rules have you decided to play by? Rules someone else is making you follow, simply because you think there aren’t any options, or that you don’t have the power to do more, be more, and experience more? Or have you decided that you’re going to make your own rules, live life on your own terms, and create the circumstances that you want in your life?

That’s the question you need to ask yourself right now. How are you going to live out the rest of your day?

* Passively, crying “I’m a victim,” and staying right where you are? Or

* Purposefully, declaring “I’m worth more than this,” and taking action today to move even one step forward, no matter the odds?

What are you going to do today? I hope you’ve decided. Otherwise, you get the default choice of letting life, the world in general, and people who don’t have your best interests at heart decide just how much life you’re allowed to have today (and it’s unlikely to be a generous portion).

What are you going to do today? If you haven’t made a decision for today, you need to do it now.
Living Passively Leads To Depression

We’ve all experienced what it’s like to live passively, to tread water and feel like there’s no clawing our way out of the hole we’re in. Maybe you’re feeling that way right now, and it makes you feel weak or stupid or somehow “less than.” It’s important to be aware of how living passively feeds those feelings of inadequacy, and how it’s actually making you depressed.

If you honestly feel that life isn’t going to get any better and that you have no real power to change your situation, it’s perfectly natural to feel depressed. It’s the logical progression. It’s not something to feel stupid about any more than you should feel emotionally responsible for the house getting cold in winter if the fireplace is neglected. If there’s no fuel being added to the fire, those warm embers will turn to cold ash.

You’re not stupid or weak because the fire’s going out. It’s just happening, because on some level, you’re allowing it to happen either from inaction or taking actions that aren’t the right ones to get that fire going. You may be putting in 100% of your best effort hauling the heavy, wet logs you have around you into the fire, but that damp tinder isn’t going to burn. You’re not stupid or weak, you’re just in a spot where what you’re doing isn’t working.

Maybe that’s how you’re feeling. Let’s talk about adding the right kind of fuel to that fire.
Living Purposefully Leads To Relief

Living purposefully is like adding fresh, dry wood onto the fire and watching it burn. It takes some work, but you get to enjoy the results of that flame, warming your sense of self and having your eyes reflect each satisfying spark.

When you live purposefully, you decide to rise above what life seems to be giving you and you decide you’re going to take more out of it, either from stepping out and simply experiencing more or by beginning to build the circumstances you want. And both of those actions begin feeding your sense of personal power, of self-worth, and of hope for the future. Even if you’re only taking the smallest of actions to change things, if you’re taking them on a daily basis it’s like adding kindling to the fire and keeping it active.

Taking action creates a massive power shift where control shifts to your hands, and when you’re in control, you feel better about your situation. You feel that blessed relief you’ve been looking for. You know what you want in life, what you want to be all about, and you have a clear finish line to start working from. Having a purpose – a true, motivating, energizing purpose – is a game-changing advantage which opens the door to the richly satisfying life you’re really after.

So the question is, what do you have worth living for? What is it that you’ve consciously decided will drive you on a daily basis to shake off the shackles, fight against the habits that hold you back and demand more out of this life you’ve been given?

I don’t expect you to answer that now. Most of us don’t think about purpose much – or maybe we do, but we think about what we wish our purpose was, “if only things were different.” Instead, we should be focusing on how we’re not willing to settle for less than living that purpose, that meaningful life, no matter how much internal or external resistance we’re facing.
What To Do When You Decide To Stop Settling

When you’ve made the decision to live a life that’s more than what you’re experiencing now, you’ve got an uphill climb ahead of you – but the view from up there is nothing short of amazing. I’m going to lay out some ideas that will help make that climb easier and help make sure you’re going in the right direction, but you’ve got to pay attention if you want to come along for the ride.

Society wants you to be a goal addict, because it’s good for the economy.

It’s a cycle. Spend money on those motivational tapes and seminars now. Spend money on antacid later when you’re not getting the results you want. Blame yourself for sucking. Spend even more money on booze, drugs, and mindless entertainment to take your mind off of your failure to achieve everything now (or, for the more sophisticated, buy the technological gadgets which will finally help you get more organized). Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s a cycle. It’s a game. And the house always wins, and though you may be a high roller today, you will always lose in the long run. ~ one never wins ALL the time... that's life

Goal addiction is great for the economy – but not so great for you. And you’re in deeper than you think.

“I Can Stop Anytime I Want To” And Other Bullshit You Say To Yourself

How do you know if you’re a goal addict? It’s just like other addictions – there’s a pattern of destructive behavior and stuff you rationalize to yourself. Here are a few warning signs:

* Your default answer is “YES” when presented with a new commitment to sign up for – because you just know you can do it.
* You’re falling behind in the things that matter (your physical health, your emotional health, and your family, for example), but you’re still cranking on things that have temporary value at best.
* A significant amount of your daily stress comes from being behind on things
* You think technology is going to solve your time management problems.
* You are working your ass off, but not moving much farther ahead on your many goals.
* You don’t actually have clear “finish lines” for your goals, so any success never feels like enough
* You think of “juggling” your goals rather than focusing on them.

These are just a few of the signs of goal addiction, and if you’re seeing them in yourself, you need to seriously take notice.

Because if you don’t, a bunch of bad things will happen.

* By trying to do more and more, you’ll also accomplish less and less.
* By trying to please everyone, you’ll please no one.
* Your stress level will continue to spiral upward.
* Your life satisfaction will start to spiral downward.
* Ten years will pass, and you’ll be really disappointed with where you are.

Goal addiction is a life killer – and it’s a sneaky one at that, because the goal addicted lifestyle sounds so attractive when it’s glamorized by …

The CULT Of PRODUCTIVITY

I’m not going to describe the ins and outs of the productivity-industrial complex today, but chances are you have been wooed by them for a while now. They’re the ones pushing the latest productivity gadgets or web apps or life hacks under the guise of “things that make your life easier.”

But all of these edgy solutions almost never, never designed to make your life easier. They are designed to sell products. They are designed to push trendy web services. They are designed to make catchy, “blog candy” top ten posts. They are designed to get you focused on something other than doing work on your goals, because “something other” is sexy and “work” is not.

Because “doing a million things” is impressive. “Doing less” smacks of weakness.

Because “optimizing” sounds intellectual. “Simplifying” sounds like you’re copping out.

If you’re not “too busy” these days, you must be doing something wrong - and while that’s bullshit, that’s still the way our culture sees things.

And the worst part of it is, you can be working for the productivity-industrial complex and not even know it - even your best intentioned work may be destined to help people run faster on their treadmill rather than helping them get off the damned treadmill that’s exhausting them in the first place.

God knows I’ve contributed my fair share. But I’m slightly older and slightly wiser now.

And I’m ringing this bell to get you to ask yourself the question too – Are you so addicted to achieving as much as you can that you sacrifice hitting home runs in the areas that really matter?

Chew on that.

It’s ok to say “Oh shit, why am I doing this with my life?” No one will think you’re weak. ~ Ok, that’s a lie. Many people will think you’re weak, that you can’t hack it in this fast moving society.

But just ignore them. They’ll go back to their tools, their stress and their antacids, and wonder why you look a little happier than you did before.

That’s all for today. Chew on what I’ve said so far. Ask yourself if you’re living the goal addicted lifestyle, and if that’s really where you want to be.

It wasn’t easy for me to admit goal addiction to myself, or my role in the productivity-industrial complex, but I had to face up to it.

Still working through it. Making some progress, one day at a time.

Maybe we’ll throw together an AA meeting for the goal addicted. Holla back in the comments if you want in. :-p

Ego and Productivity: Don’t Let Your Default Answer Be “Yes”

So a lot of people are on board when it comes to running like hell from the Cult of Productivity – the mindset that says if you’re not hacking your life 24/7 and taking everything “to the next level,” then you just must not be a very committed person after all.

Of course, we know better (now), and we’re calling bullshit on this. Running at maximum capacity does NOT equal a better life any more than redlining your car’s engine makes it last longer. “Zoom zoom,” indeed.

So let’s talk about one of the many tools the Cult of Productivity – The Default “Yes.”
Just Say No (Where Have We Heard This Before)?

Somewhere along the line we’ve made the false connection between being busy and being cool. It became a little high-schoolesque game to see who had the most gadgets, the most projects, the most emails on a daily basis. Productivity became, in a sense, a pissing contest.

The more stressed for time you were, the more you had “arrived.” The more you could impress people with being everywhere at once. The more things you could jam on your personal and professional resume.

The problem with this is, when you spread yourself out like that, you’re spreading yourself thin. Your circle of influence may have stretched to miles wide, but eventually it’s only a quarter-inch deep. Not a good place to be.

But – gasp – you can’t slow down … that would be admitting weakness. That would betray a lack of “real” priorities. And so when a new project, a new idea, a new commitment of time and energy comes by … how can you say no?

After all, it’s a really cool project. And it’ll be a great networking opportunity. And I’m sure I could squeeze it in.

And then you end up like those trains in Japan, where they literally have to have a “spotter” to help push people into the train because they are packed so tightly.

Because saying “no” to a new commitment becomes equivalent to failure.

And we all know how unacceptable failure is in our society. It’s like a non-airbrushed photo of a supermodel – it’s something to be shunned and attacked (eek! It’s reality – run!!!).

And so time and again, we get tricked into saying “yes,” because we’re afraid of the fallout of “no.”
But if you don’t say no – relentlessly – the Cult captures you.

You know, having certain people view you as a failure isn’t so bad. After all, if someone is going to be so shallow as to shun you because you aren’t willing to settle for burning your soul out prematurely, then that’s a really cool situation – you can weed out the posers and false friends from your life.

Who knows, you might actually end up left all alone … except for the handful of real people who accept you for who you are and are also willing to be transparent and honest about their own limits.

The horror.

But the Cult is relentless – so you’ve got to be relentless back at them. You can’t just say “no” every once in a while – you’ve got to make it a default answer in your mind, because the pressures of society will try and force you into taking more an more on until you every last drop of you is squeezed out.

That’s a scary thing for a lot of people – the idea of not taking on and endless array of goals – but it’s a damned important one for your life. Here’s why.
Saying “No” Means Saying “Yes” To Only The Right, Best Things

When you say “yes” to everything, you’re not making any judgement calls or assessing the value of things. You’re just taking things on because they’re there, or because you don’t want to disappoint someone.

But this is madness. It’s like deciding you’ll date anyone who is interested in you rather than looking for someone you like, respect and trust.

And just like sex sells in advertising, the Cult of Productivity wants you to be really easy when it comes to accepting goals. It’s already loosened you up with the “contact high” of other people’s super-productivity, and it’s hoping you’ll be a sure thing.
But you want to respect yourself in the morning …

… so you’re going to want to be more discerning. When you decide your default answer is going to be “no,” you’re forcing yourself to really evaluate whether this new commitment of time and energy really lines up with what you want for your life.

You’re going to have to ask yourself if it’s worth trading part of your life for it. As @CharlieGilkey says: “If it’s not worth doing, doing it will be at the cost of something worth doing.”

So repeat after me: Saying “no” is not a sign of weakness. It is proof you are not insane.

But it’s easier said than done.
How to push past resistance to “no”

There’s no doubt you’ll encounter a lot of resistance when you first start saying “no” – not only from the Cult of Productivity (who, let it be said, aren’t evil – they just believe you can always do something more) – but also from yourself.

It’s going to be difficult and uncomfortable to turn commitments down, but it will make you a happier person. It will also have the side effect of making you (dare I say it?) more productive, because you’ll be freeing up more focus to handle the things that are currently on your plate.

And as your plate gets clearer, your mind will get clearer, too. You’ll start rejecting commitments that add “shallow value” to your life and take on different commitments that feed your sense of self and value and contribution. You’ll become someone who builds a fullfilling life rather than just a life filled with “one more thing.”

It won’t be easy. But saying “yes” all the time is even harder, and you know it. Start the practice of resisting new commitments and only saying “yes” when they truly align with what you want.
But how do you start saying “no” when you’re not good at it?

Next post will talk about how to do this – but in the meantime, if you’ve got a strategy for keeping the number of commitments you juggle sane, feeel free to add it in the comments.

Good luck – and start saying “no” more often -

Dave

If the free market had it’s way, you would buy into the cult of productivity’s belief that you need to stock up on expensive planners, equip yourself with complicated organizing gadgets, subscribe to a dozen trendy web applications and attend $5,000 seminars to start Getting Things Done and putting First Things First.

The trouble is, technology doesn’t solve your time management problems. Those problems aren’t solved by simply “getting organized” and harnessing “willpower” – they are solved by making some pretty significant shifts in your whole mental relationship with time and what you do with it.

All a technology-based solution does is try to force you into someone else’s mode of operation, abandoning the way you do things now (because your ways are wrong!, they say) and taking on someone else’s working style. That rarely works (unless you’re already a fan of that working style to begin with).

Don’t get me wrong – the David Allens and Steven Coveys of the world are all valuable contributors (as long as you don’t take them as gospel). But the idea that a better system will make everything okay is simply not in line with reality. The truth is, you don’t need a better system. You just need to start making incremental shifts in how you treat your time, your focus and your results, and you can track it any damned way that you please.

But when someone forces you into a system – their system – that can become painful. On the other hand, just focusing on tweaking the way you already work? And building new habits using your existing working styles? Now that’s painless time management.

When you’re ready to stop thinking inside someone else’s box, and start building your own, there are 10 skills you can focus on that will make an immediate difference in your life – (regardless of the “system” you personally use to execute). Incremental improvement in any (or all) of these skills will make it a whole lot easier to create lasting, permanent change by tackling easy problems first, and then working your way up to harder ones. When you start making small wins right away, you’ll be more likely to stick with it and get the results you’ve really wanted.

Let me walk you through how you’re going to make these ten skills work for you.
Skill #1 – Staying Motivated / Defeating Self Doubt

The first skill of painless time management is mastering the art of consistent motivation. Now, I know it’s easy to feel motivated after you go to a time management seminar or buy a new planner system, but what usually happens is that the initial excitement fades away and you fall back into the ruts of your old patterns.

Now, this may tend to happen for a couple of reasons. Maybe the system you chose is a lot of work to implement. Maybe you are just meeting up with resistance trying to change the old, comfortable habits that aren’t getting you the results you want. Maybe keeping things the way they are seems kind of, well, ok to you – you know, not great, but acceptable. Whatever the reason, you hit a wall where either the thrill is gone, or you doubt your ability to really take control over your time.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore. You’re going to come up with a way to keep yourself excited about becoming better and better about managing your time. And you’re going to recognize that you also have to bulletproof your confidence, to get yourself to believe that the dabbling is over – you’re going to really do it this time. You’re going to follow through. You nail that, you get your confidence solid and the benefits clear in your mind, and you absolutely will take action on a daily basis to be in complete control of your time.

This is the starting point – you’ve absolutely got to get this part down or you really won’t take consistent action on mastering your time. The bottom line is that if you allow yourself to doubt your abilities to manage your self and your life, you’re going to take a much lower quality of action, if you take action at all. You’re simply not going to get serious about taking control, because on some level you’re going to be living in doubt as to whether you can really manage the insane busyness that is your life. But to start you have to reinforce that belief that you can do it this time.

Think for a moment about all your doubts, all your emotional baggage that has to do with time management. Think of all the times you have felt that you just couldn’t see how you were going to juggle all the things you have on your plate, and all the things you want to do. Think of how it felt every time you had to look at how you’ve struggled with procrastination, or in keeping your focus.

Those are rough feelings, and they drain you, they paralyze you. But in reality, that’s all in your mind. Those feelings, there’s a systematic way to erase them and replace them with the kind of thinking that will not only make you sure that you can take total control of your time, but that will also keep you motivated to keep taking action, even if you have a lot of internal resistance. And mastering that begins to make time management painless because it moves it from something you have to do to something you want to do.

Now, out of all 10 of the skills I’m going to go over, I suggest that you focus on this skill first, since it helps guarantee you’ll follow through on everything else. That said, let’s jump over to the second skill of painless time management.
Skill #2 – Facing Reality

The second skill you’ll want to master is keeping up with is what I call a reality check. This is all about really seeing where your time is going on a daily basis. You see, we all like to rationalize how we’re spending our time. We really don’t want to face up to all the moments of the day when we’re living in reaction and distraction, where we’re getting off track or just plain wasting an opportunity to do something really useful with our time. Left to ourselves, we all do it – and unless you have an easy way to see where all your time is really going, you’ll never be able to reclaim the productivity you’re losing.

You already know how life works. During your day, from moment to moment, you have to face a harsh reality: either you’re working on the exact things that you intended to that day, or you’re not. You’re either on track for the things that you tell yourself really matter, or you’re off track. And the scary thing is that the average person spends over 50% of their time off track, doing something other than the things they intended to do to make their real goals come to life.

How do I know this? Because of a little tool I call a reality check. It’s a simple tracking sheet that I’ve used with clients in the past to show them how much time they are really spending off course – whether it’s because of their own day to day choices or whether it’s the result of unexpected things popping up that they have to react to. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though, because it’s all stuff that slows you down, that takes you off of the course you were meaning to travel on.

And unless you have a tool to track that kind of thing, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time that could be making you money faster or giving you the free time you’ve been looking for. That’s why you want to get your hands on that reality check, so you can see exactly where you need to make changes to guarantee you stay on track. In fact, just keeping track of where you’re spending your time during the day gives you an automatic productivity boost, I’d say, of at least an hour a day on average. (Don’t believe me? Try it for a day and see the difference.)

You can accomplish this with a pencil and paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever. Your system, your preference. Anything that lets you easily track what you’re doing throughout the day.
Circles of Activity

Now, everything you can do during the day falls into one of several categories, which I call circles of activity. Just imagine a bulls eye target made up of four circles in it to get an idea about what I’m talking about.

The bulls-eye in the center, that’s what we’re going to call the circle of intent. This is where you are when you’re spending time doing exactly what you set out to do for the day – in other words – when you’re following through on the things you intended to do. Naturally, this is the bulls-eye, because you want to spend as much time as possible on target, doing the things you planned on doing every day. This is where you get into that state of flow where you’re really getting tons of incredible stuff done, time seems to lose its meaning and your productivity goes through the roof.

Now, you know and I know that life doesn’t just let you hang out if the circle of intent. If it did, your to-do list would be very short and you wouldn’t be listening to me right now. No, most of the time you’ve got to fight for your right to be there, because you get dragged outside of that circle all the time dealing with things that pop up as well as your own bad habits.

When this happens, this puts you in the second circle, the one surrounding the bullseye. This circle is called the circle of reaction, because it’s where you are when you’re reacting to some urgency that’s sprung up around you. Sometimes breaking away from intent and dealing with the reaction makes sense. For example, if you’re working on finding new business and someone is calling you up to close a deal and write a check, then answer the phone, that’s a good thing to react to. Or maybe a true emergency pops up and you have to rush someone you care about to the hospital. Life will throw things like that at you. You gotta do what you gotta do. In fact, I’d call this less of reaction and more like an intelligent response.

But on the other hand, there are plenty of things that you shouldn’t be breaking away from the circle of intent to react to. You don’t have to do them – or maybe at least you don’t have to do them now. You already know what these things are – they’re the things that seemed urgent, that seemed like a good idea to work on at the time … but they weren’t the best use of your time right then. They could have waited. They should have been scheduled for a different time. But instead, you jumped, either because you reacted to the urgency or you just wanted to get away from the task you should have been focusing on. This is what you want to avoid, by resisting the temptation to trade the good for the best.

Now, that covers the circle of intent – where you want to spend most of your time – and the circle of reaction – where you’ll undoubtedly spend some of your time. That leaves the next circle to deal with, and it’s an ugly one. It’s called the circle of regret. I don’t even need to give you examples of what this is. You already know. It’s full of the things you look back on and say to yourself, Man, I wish to God I hadn’t wasted my time doing that.

Sometimes you spend time in the circle of regret because you’re trying to distract yourself, or trying to escape from dealing with something in your life. Sometimes you get there simply because you’re being sloppy with your time and you don’t know what to do, or you lose track of time doing something pointless. But it almost always keeps happening because you aren’t tracking where you’re spending your time. If you did, you’d be so fed up with yourself that you’d fight to stay out of that circle as hard as you could.

The way start fighting against this is to simply track your time, and track what circle you’re spending it in. Just like tracking your money in detail keeps you from wasting it – tracking your time will raise your awareness so you don’t waste as much time as well. And as you get accustomed to noticing you’re drifting away from the circle of intent, you’ll begin to find that you snap yourself back into line a lot more often than you would have if you weren’t tracking things.
Wait a minute …

Ok, at this point, you’re probably thinking that tracking your time doesn’t sound very painless – it seems like a pain to have to do that. Well, that’s just an excuse to get out of doing the work, because the payoff on this activity in the beginning is so damned high, and it’s honestly so little effort. It’s not like you’d have to stop what you’re doing every 10 minutes to write on a piece of paper – it’s more like you only write when you stop what you’re doing, so that you become more conscious of the fact you just stopped doing something (and maybe because you’re getting distracted or off track).

The truth is, it becomes more painless every day because when you start doing this, you’re going to realize that by day three that you’ve freed up at least an hour or two a day of productivity because you’re more centered and focused, all because you took 5 minutes total throughout the day to scribble on a sheet of paper or update a spreadsheet. And tapping into all that additional time takes the sting out of keeping yourself accountable.
Skill #3 – Funneling

The third skill to master is the art of funneling. You master this skill, and you will knock out 50% of your feelings of overwhelm and stress and nothing will ever fall through the cracks, ever again. Ever.

Funneling is a simple concept, you’ve probably heard of it before but you just haven’t seriously put it into practice. It’s all about managing the flow of incoming activities in your life, those things you put on your to-do lists. You’ve got a million things you have to do – a million little commitments you’ve decided you want make happen.

Now, I call them commitments instead of to dos because face it – to-dos just pile up, while commitments get done, don’t they? You tend to be more likely to make yourself follow through on commitments, so let’s start reframing all your actions that way.

So you’ve got all these commitments coming at you every day from a lot of different sources. You get emails that generate new commitments for you. You get phone calls, you get new commitments. Mail comes in, bringing more commitments with it. Conversations with other people generate more commitments. You scribble stuff on post it notes, on the back of envelopes. You think of stuff you need to do in the car, at work, in the shower, and everywhere in your life you’re adding more and more of these items to whatever to-do list manager you’re using right now – if you write it down at all.

The problem with all of this is for most people, they have no consistent way to manage all of these commitments. Post it notes get lost. Emails get buried under other emails. Mail gets stacked and stacked some more. Scraps of paper with to-dos on them get lost. Conversations get forgotten. Stuff falls through the cracks, and you end up living in the circle of reaction, jumping to whatever seems most urgent at the moment. Its how most people live, and it kills your productivity. You already know from experience how much time you’ve lost in the past because of this.
It’s Funnel Time

This is where funnels come in – you create these funnels, which are really just specific ways to capture new commitments. Maybe it’s a notebook when you’re on the go, or a special folder in your email, or a little voice recorder – whatever works for the spot you’re in. You’re already doing this to some extent, but the key to taking it to a level where it really works 100% of the time is when you decide on a specific system to handle incoming stuff ahead of time. You set up multiple funnels so you’re not just noting it some reactionary way like on an envelope or in your head.

When you do funneling right, you set up an elegant, effective way to capture all your incoming commitments and then you set aside a few minutes on a regular basis to dump all of these funnels into one place, like a special notebook or a spreadsheet, and you manage all your commitments from that one spot.

Once it gets into there you clean your funnels – you cross it out of your notebook, you delete it from your email, you erase the voice recording, because you don’t need it anymore … you can manage it all in one place, in the style that works best for you.

It may sound less than painless to get organized about how you capture incoming commitments but let me tell you it pays off like crazy. You get this great peace of mind seeing everything in one place and it makes it so much easier to prioritize what you want to do. Instead of having everything swimming in your head you’ll have it in one place, ready to take action on.

And you’ll never have to look for a misplaced piece of paper again. Things won’t fall through the cracks and your productivity will shoot way up. And it’s painless in the long run because it eliminates the pain of stress, the pain of worry and the pain of overload. So if you don’t have a funnel system set up yet, start figuring out how you’re going to create one.
Skill #4 – Keeping Accountable

It’s one thing to set goals, but it’s quite another thing to actually hold yourself accountable for following through on them. Accountability is key to getting things done, and getting them done quickly and with as little wasted time as possible. Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Any serious goal that actually gets accomplished goes through a number of stages. First, you set the goal – let’s say, you want to start a business and make $50,000 over the next 12 months. That’s great, but making that decision is just the first step. What you’ve got to do after that is the second step, which is flesh it all out into a series of steps, you know, a project plan. So many people don’t do this, they figure they’ll just wing it, and then they wonder why they never get the goal accomplished. Or maybe they eventually get it accomplished, but it took years longer than they expected it to. So getting the project planned out is the second step.

The third step is to start breaking the project down into milestones – you know, saying, ok, in 3 months I’ll be this far along, in 6 months I’ll have these other things done, and so on and so on. Basically, you’re creating a roadmap that tells you how far you should be from quarter to quarter, or month to month, or week to week, whatever makes sense for your project. But here’s where it gets sticky for most people. Once you do this, then you actually have a bunch of deadlines to meet. You have specific measurable things to accomplish. You can’t hide behind the “I’d like to get this done, sometime …” no, you’ve milestoned it, so now it’s something you have to deliver on.

A lot of people freeze up at that idea, because it means they have to be accountable. They can’t be sloppy with their time anymore. They have to get focused and organized, so they don’t do it. But remember, this is not how you roll – just by reading this far, you’re confirming to yourself that you want to raise your standards. You nail this and you’ll see how freeing it can be to know exactly what you have to accomplish from week to week to stay on track, and you’ll start making more of your goals a reality.

You won’t have to stress out about all the things that are yet to be accomplished – you’ll know exactly what you have to do, so you can focus like crazy on getting it done fast.

As you work at keeping accountable, you’ll learn to to quickly and easily break your major goals down into sub-projects and get them milestoned. Then once they’re milestoned, you can simply make a tracking template to make it painless to chart the progress you’re making as you go through the week.

This is the critical part, where you go through the week asking yourself, “what have I done so far to support my most important priorities?” The tracking template you use (whick , honestly, can be a 3×5 index card if that works for you) will keep everything visible in one place, so you can see how all your projects are getting worked on in a balanced way. It’s gonna be nice, it’s going to help you get focused and take a lot of stress off of you. And making it easier is what we’re all about, right?

So let’s turn our eyes to the fifth critical skill of painless time management – wiping out weaknesses.
Skill #5 – Wiping Out Weaknesses

So far we’ve talked about strategic things – how to set yourself up to win in the larger, big picture sense. But now we’re going to move into the down and dirty, day to day challenges you have that are sucking your time away. This is a critical thing to nail down because it’s what takes you out of treading water or standing still and gets you steadily moving in a direction that makes you stronger, that gets you better results.

Most of us know we have weaknesses, but we don’t sit down and figure out a systematic way to eliminate them. We take it for granted that we can get by with them, or maybe we just think that there’s no way we’ll ever overcome them. But that’s not how you roll, because you’re raising yourself to a higher standard. If you’ve done your reality check for any length of time, you’ll be getting a really good idea about what your time management weaknesses are.

So you’re going to want to create a battle plan – a specific guide to how you are going to knock them out, one at a time, so instead of wishing you had more time in the day you’ll be living a life where you have the time you need.

Later in this series I’ll guide you through how to make your battle plan and how to carry it out in a way that’s as easy and painless as possible. Some of these weaknesses relate to the final five skills we’re about to go over. Just keep in mind that if you don’t nail this, if you don’t have a battle plan, it’s like looking at the bad habits that steal your time and continue to keep key goals that you want to achieve out of your reach and saying “No problem guys, you just stick around. You’re safe here.”

You’ve got to make a plan so you have something to take action on. And the time you spend on developing and working your battle plan will pay you back over and over. So don’t skip investing the time to get started on this critical skill of painless time management.
Skill #6 – Overcoming Procrastination

Just like there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good stress and bad stress, there’s a good kind of procrastination to go along with the bad. Think about it – procrastination is simply putting something off until later. That can be really valuable if you’re leveraging the good kind of procrastination – putting off anything but the best actions until later. You’re going to learn to leverage good procrastination as you move through this series of articles.

Procrastination is a monster-sized killer of your time, and it directly affects how much time you spend in the circles of reaction and regret – time that you could have been spending getting important things done that made you money and enriched your life. But procrastination flushes all that down the toilet. It slows your productivity down considerably – and in a lot of cases, destroys your productivity completely. You do NOT want to be here.

So let’s talk about how to overcome procrastination. It’s simpler than you think. People tend to think of getting past procrastination as an exercise in willpower, a kind of mental toughness that lets you push through it all, but it doesn’t have to be that way. All procrastination is really just based around how we represent a task to ourselves – what it means, how hard it is, how uncomfortable it is to deal with it.

All these are just feelings in our heads, and the only thing that gets us past it and into taking action is learning how to defuse these feelings and reframe things in a way that makes us want to get them done – and to get them done fast, with energy and motivation, instead of dragging them out forever.

To really master the art of overcoming procrastination, and to make it as easy and painless as possible, you need to understand the specific causes of procrastination. As you begin to recognize the different mental frames that allow procrastination to flourish, you will be able to match those symptoms to specific, key tactics that will defuse procrastination’s hold on you. We’ll discuss those later in the series (or you can download them now if you don’t want to wait).

You see, when procrastination takes root, it’s sort of like a combination lock. You can spin that dial all over the place and get nowhere – or, you can learn the specific numbers that are part of that combination and unlock it. Once you learn to recognize those combinations, and you practice using them, you’ll be able to break through the things that are causing you to procrastinate.

And look at it this way – how many times have you procrastinated on something because you built it up to be this great big thing in your mind, and had all this stress about it and when you finally dealt with it it was over with quickly, and it wasn’t really that bad at all? As you developing this critical skill of painless time management, you’ll consistently be able to get to that “done and over with” point a whole lot more quickly.
Skill #7 -Bulletproofing Focus

Now we come to the seventh critical skill of painless time management – Bulletproofing Focus. Without focus, you cut your productivity in half at the very least, so bulletproofing your focus is something you definitely need to take seriously. When you have a bulletproof focus, an amazing thing happens. You start tackling your work with a force multiplier – doubling your productivity, tripling it, or even more. It’s another way to tap into that flow state where time loses meaning and you are so totally immersed in what you are doing that it brings out the best work that you are capable of.

And the funny thing about focus is that it’s not so much about keeping your mind on what it is that you’re supposed to be doing, but about keeping your mind off of everything – and I mean everything else. For an achiever personality, this is a tall order, because we’ve always got our goals bouncing around in our heads. We’ve always got tons of stuff swimming around in our heads. But if you want to unleash the raw power that comes with an unbreakable focus, you’ve got to get all the kids out of the pool. No more swimming around in that head of yours.

The good news is that focus is definitely a learnable skill. It’s not something that only a select few people get to master. It’s yours for the taking. But you have to develop a system to keep your mind off of everything else so it has no other option than to be right where it needs to be, fully present, fully engaged, fully ready to give everything to the task at hand.

In other words, if you want more focus, it’s not about trying hard, it’s about knowing the right things to do ahead of time to safeguard your focus and the right things to do real-time, when something threatens to take your focus away. Developing focus is like lifting weights – you’ll quickly see results and you’ll be stronger to the degree you practice it. And that’s a nice situation to be in.
Skill #8 – Managing Interruptions

So let’s bump on over to the eighth critical skill of painless time management – managing interruptions. This is a big one, because interruptions kill your productivity in two destructive ways.

First off, any time someone interrupts you, you have automatically shifted away from the circle of intent – where you were working on the things that were important to you – and drifted to the circle of reaction. Your progress on the things that matter most stops dead in the water. With the number of distractions that typically come most people’s way, it’s no wonder that the days, weeks and months creep by with us not making the progress we want on our major goals.

So when interruptions come, you’ve got to know how to push back on them – either by deferring the work until later or just choosing a small part of the task to tackle now. Many interruptions can get the 80/20 treatment, where you do the most important 20% of the task and get 80% of your results.

You want to leverage this any way you can, and later in this blog series I’ll teach you simple tactics for making the process as painless as possible – for you and the person who’s interrupting your flow of action. This way you can pop right back into the circle of intent and do stuff that matters instead of just doing stuff.

Now, the second way interruptions kill your productivity and steal time from your day is they take you back to a cold start. You know how when you get started on something, it takes a little bit of warm up time to get focused and get totally engaged in giving your all to knock out whatever it is you’re working on. Well, whenever you get interrupted, guess what – you’ve got to do that all over again. And when you’re interrupted a lot during the day, that can literally eat up hours of your time.

And remember, it’s not how much time you spend working on something that gets you results – it’s how much high quality, focused time you spend on it. Every time you permit an interruption to get in your way, you drop straight down into low productivity time for generally five to fifteen minutes at a time. Now, if you’re interrupted a dozen times a day by things like phone calls, emails or other people, you can see how that can add up to an hour or more.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore. You’re going to learn how to prevent most of your interruptions from happening in the first place with a few simple tactics as you go through the managing interruptions coaching session. And you’re going to take those hours back, so that you can get important stuff done with them.
Skill #9 – Giving 200%

Now let’s get to know a little about the ninth critical skill of painless time management – and that’s Giving 200%. A lot of people talk about giving your all, giving 100%, but that’s not going to get you the massive results that you want – it will just get you the same results you’re capable of with the skill levels you have.

And giving 110% isn’t much of a help either, because that’s basically just taking the same wall you’ve been banging your head against and banging harder. It may get you a little farther than you’ve gotten in the past, but it’s not going to take you to the next level.

No, giving 200% is all about aggressively pushing past your productivity limits, of taking steps that significantly change the way you’re doing things now – but in a good way, and in an easy way to implement. It’s not about swinging the ax harder – or even sharpening it - it’s about heading out to the store and getting a chainsaw.

It’s about stepping back and looking at the way you do things and finding out what small changes you can make and manage right now, right where you are, that will keep you totally immersed in what you’re doing, totally on fire even you don’t particularly care for the task you have to do.

It sounds like I’m talking about motivation, but it’s more than that. It’s a simple procss for getting yourself into a state where you’ll push past your limits and actually enjoy the experience. It’s about learning how to summon up all these personal resources that you’re currently not taking advantage of and using them to take your performance and productivity through the roof. It’s about making the pain of hard work – a lot more painless. We’re going to have fun with this one, you and I. This is one of my favorite topics, and I think you’ll really enjoy it as well.

So wow, that brings us to the final critical skill of painless time management. You’ve read this far and I’m impressed, because that means that you’re one of the select few who stick it out, who finish what they start, who win the race. I like the way you roll. So let’s roll into this tenth skill and finish this up so you can get cracking.
Skill #10 -Maintaining Energy

This tenth and final skill is the art of Maintaining Energy. Most people find their energy comes and goes in spikes and valleys. They feel tired at times, wiped out, and it’s hard to get motivated or to give 200%, or even focus for that matter at times like those. I’ve been there and I know you have, too. But if you really want to get more of what really matters packed into your day you’ve got to master the art of summoning up and holding onto a consistent supply of physical or mental energy.

Now, I’m not talking about getting all hyped up and bouncing off the walls, or keeping some dreamy-eyed positive thinking grin on your face all day. I’m not talking about adopting a crazy diet or popping pills. I’m simply talking about taking command of simple strategies that help give you the energy to act, to do what you have to do with intensity and purpose, without being held back by feelings of being tired out.

Sometimes you get in this state of total energy, that place where you were just able to keep hammering at the things you had to, and you didn’t get tired – or maybe you did get tired, exhausted even – but you summoned up the energy and commitment to push past any tired feelings and keep going. It’s like those people who can run a marathon – they may get to the end sweating and exhausted, but they followed through on every step and never missed a beat.

And managing your energy has everything in the world to do with time management because face it, in reality you’re not actually managing your time after all. You’re managing your results, the things you get done that really matter, that really move you forward rather than simply filling your days. And you’ll only get things done to the degree that you have the energy to do it, just like a car is only going to go as far as its gas tank will take it.

When I go into this topic during this blog series, I’m going to help you isolate the exact causes, the exact things that are sucking your energy away, and it’s going to show you how to start turning the tide – even if you only have two minutes a day to devote to it. It’s one of the most powerful parts of this series, because it gives you the power you need to consistently take action on the things you say are most important to you.
Whew. You did it.

Well, you finally did it – you got to the end of this non-stop, 6500-word article and now you’ve got the ten critical skills of painless time management fresh in your mind. You can jump back to the table of contents to see how far the series has developed.

(If you’re new to this site, what’s going on here is I’m taking my 11-CD time management program and turning into free blog articles. So be patient with me – this is a lot of material to translate into article format. If you don’t want to wait on my schedule, you can download all the MP3s and PDFs right now, right here).

Until we meet again, this is Dave Navarro saying, It’s your life – so take total control of it!

Parents always wonder what kind of adults their children will grow up to be. And, the ultimate person your child will become depends a lot on how you raise them. So, if you discipline your child and teach him what is right and wrong then your child will grow up to respect authority, rules, and the like. However, if you do not discipline your child he will grow up with no real respect for authority or what is right and wrong. Because of this it is of utmost importance to discipline your children. But, you might be wondering what will happen to your child if you do not discipline them?

Problems at School
It is so important to begin disciplining your children early because if you dont problems might arise later. This becomes most evident when your child begins school. Following rules is important at school and kids who have received discipline at home as toddlers are willing to follow school rules and understand the repercussions if they dont. However, kids who have not been disciplined at home as toddlers arrive at school with no appreciation for rules and how they should behave. This results in outbursts, tantrums, poor schoolwork, feeling left out, and developing a hatred for school. Sometimes kids can even become bullies and pick on other children. You want your child to succeed in life and in school so you can help them on their way by disciplining early. It is not easy to discipline your toddler, but it is important to help your child grow as a person and become the best they can become.

No Respect for Authority
Our world is made up of rules and those who follow the rules, at least most of the time get along just fine and have good lives. However, those individuals who have no respect for authority frequently break the rules and end up with all kinds of problems as a result. This could be problems with the police, problems maintaining employment, and more. Many children who do not receive discipline as a child grow up with little if any respect for authority. This results in the child having problems for the rest of his life, unless he learns on his own to discipline himself and respect authority and laws. Dont allow this to happen to your child. Instead, enforce rules and discipline while your child is growing up.

There are many other things that can happen to your children as a result of not being disciplined. They may begin using alcohol and drugs at an earlier age, start hanging out with the wrong crowd, and exhibit all around poor behavior and bad choices. So, discipline your children to give them the best chance in life.

We converse with other people every day, but have you ever stopped to think about how good you are at this vital interpersonal skill? Think about it, the most successful and most popular individuals are those who can carry on a conversation with almost anyone. With this in mind, here's a few tips to make you a more successful conversationalist.

1. Don't Compare - A lot of us have this nasty habit of responding to every statement with a comparison from our own lives. For example, someone says "Man, I have a ton of work this week," and you respond with "Me too! I've got 2 reports, a presentation, and a ton of meetings." This shows the other person you aren't truly interested in hearing what they have to say.

2. Be Concise - When you're asked a question, don't just ramble on or launch into a lengthy story. Consider what was asked and respond appropriately without hogging the conversation.

3. Avoid Controversial Topics - Sure, a good debate is great among friends, but when you're talking to someone new, try to avoid touchy subjects. It's best to get to know someone before you make them defend their views.

4. Selective Eye Contact - Maintaining eye contact is an important conversational skill, but don't stare down your companion. Remember to break eye contact occasionally to avoid being intimidating (or simply creepy)

5. Restate Key Points - Show your genuine interest by restating important points your partner makes. Don't sound like a clone, though. Paraphrase and summarize to show you understand.

6. Let the Conversation End - Look, you can't talk to everyone for hours on end. When the conversation seems to be waning, let it end on a positive note rather than drawing it out and potentially boring your companion. If you want to talk more, be sure to exchange contact information.

Mum, its been a long time since I state my emotions to you...

Its been a bad day for me yesterday... really bad...

I been dutifully carrying out my mission but due to one of my man, Hafiz, not checking the items properly, I am now on the chopping board...

Hafiz is new but this is not his first day. He been taught the items to check. So while I am checking the equipments with Vierra, he was off on his own doing his own checking. As we are to do an exercise in the morning, I focus on the key equipments.

This is on top of the disruption that is introduced by my superiors who asked for me to halt my inspection, resulting in loss time, in already a cramped time situation.

I trust Hafiz to do a proper job but he "shortcutted" and skipped some of his job scope, and I got my arse whipped. He told me only much later, long pass "the golden hour", and I am dumbed enough to not report immediately. Instead I carry out my own investigation for I found out that the one handing me the vehicle is non other than Fukhan, the same batch as I do, and I regard him as a friend.

So with mix reaction, I perform a sequence of misactions that resulted to this trouble that I am in now...

I am not without fault, for the facts are as below:
1> I should have double check with my man, and ensure it myself.
2> I should have continue the check on the new exercise location.
3> I should have report the problem right away.
4> I am no time conscious enough, as in the incident no.2 below.

All in all, in fire station, to survive requires me to totally "cover my arse."

As a matter of fact, 2 incidents of "cover my arse" raised today,
1> Another new man, Arfie, requested for a quick drink in middle of a lecture, I asked him to endure, for if he to go for a drink and was caught, I will be liable for his action for I am the one who gave the green light.

~ I never think of that until that morning... somehow my senses sharpened... and guess what, on a deeper thought, I realised that he try to bastard me; for he also knew that it is liable to go drinking during lecture, so he try to "TEST" me by asking me first, hence he is "covering his own arse".

2> The superior of the other group discovered a common problem that is shared by all groups since history. Then he pin-pointed to the higher management that it is our group fault. I thought that it is a common understanding that this "open secret" problem is to be hidden by all, but in order to save his own arse, he push the blame to us. End result? Our group had to come back to work during our off hours... brillant... while the problem continue to persist...

Now, I can only say that "I AM NOT PREPARED". I have the time but I never maximise it to benefit in the most useful manner.

I should have a plan, even if life has no regard for my plan, at least I have a rough idea what needs to be done.

Please bless me mum, may the lost items be recovered. I had learnt greatly from this lesson, I really do. I am really down now. I only seek for peace, not recognition nor anything. Please do let me has my guard up all the time. I do not wish to be popular or respected, but only wished to be left alone in peace.

Just read up something interesting...

"...READY for PLUCKING,
UNREADY for a fight..."

LATEST UPDATE: 23rd July 2009, Thursday
~ Returned to Station to serve our punishment due to "incident no.2".
~ I performed my work dutifully.
~ I once again procasinate my intention of good will and was shot on my leg...
> Officier Lim initiated on me and said that I wont be so lucky next time,
> I apologised and replied that it is due to BAPT,
> My Madam is frustrated and walked away.