Art Of Money

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In the past couple weeks I’ve made a big jump in my productivity. It was a conscious choice, and the result of a fair amount of honest self-critique and reflection.

Here are the 5 changes that made the biggest difference.

5. Order and Prioritize your Tasks in Alignment With your Goals

I’m not quite to the point of not checking email, but I have cut it down and I have realized that it was a major energy drain, but it wasn’t the biggest thing holding me back.

The biggest one was that my actions were not aligned with my goals.

First, get familiar with my how to to-do and then you’ll be ready for the second phase of becoming a to-do list ninja.

Take each task and put them in order.

How Do You Determine the Order?

Start with the obvious. It sounds stupid, but if your goal is to make $10,000 a month and you have a choice to work on your blog, which makes $0.43 a day or to develop a spin-off to your successful affiliate promotion that make $50 a day, work on the latter.

Blogging and many other similar time sensitive activities can exert a force that yells for attention. But giving in to that attention is not necessarily the most productive use of time.

Perform to-do triage based on what is really important, not on who is screaming the loudest.

I also find that I’m at least 50% more productive when I do my to-do list the night before, so that the minute I hit my desk it’s clear to me what I am supposed to be doing.

4. Baby Steps & The Art of Under-doing

Big ideas feel good at first, but the don’t last.

“I’m going to make $10,000 a month” is a goal that’s bound to pump up your adrenaline and get you extremely motivated, but it when it’s been 2 months and you’re making .40 a day, the let-down can be crippling.

Rather than starting big, start small.

“I’m going to write and post one good article a week” is much more manageable.

At the gym where I work out, there is a huge crowd of people every January, but they’ll all be gone by Mid-February. Why?

They didn’t under-do. They came with hopes of big results, rather than taking baby steps (like 15 minutes of easy workout twice a week). The magic of baby steps is that you begin to fall in love with the process, rather than the results. It takes a lot of process to produce results, so you have to be in love with the little stuff to get to the big results.

You can begin to find working out very enjoyable, but you can’t get in shape if you push yourself to do something that makes you miserable.

3. Decay is Your Friend

When I had my last job, we all loved to find ways to drive our boss insane by telling him about how over-worked we were.

My way was to announce at any staff meetings (preferably when a director or another of my boss’s bosses were present), “My favorite way to get stuff done is to let them decay off of the bottom of my to-do list!”

In my manager’s mind this sounded like, “Clients are being neglected.”

But in reality I have discovered that many of the tasks that make it onto my to-do list can simply be neglected or tossed away with little consequence.

If you find the same item on your list for over a week then just cross it out and forget about it. You’ll clear your mind and if it was important, someone will yell and scream and then you can add it again.

2. Batching Tasks - Drive on the Highway

I’ve stolen this tip from The Four Hour Work Week, but I’ve been using it now for a couple weeks now and find it’s very effective.

E-mail

What I used to do:

Scan e-mail many times a day and reply if anything “interesting” came in or someone asked me a question or had a problem I needed to solve.

What I do now:

Scan e-mail about 4 times a day. Only “the earth in the path of an asteroid” type requests get immediate attention, everyone else waits until the end of the day, after all my other tasks have been completed. If you get an e-mail from me that isn’t send around 10pm, consider yourself special!

Blogging

What I used to do:

Write blog posts once a day.

What I do now:

Take notes in a notebook whenever I think of an idea, then sit down once or twice a week and write a batch of stories.

It is much more efficient to work in batches as the start-stop-start is minimized - it’s just like how your car gets better gas mileage on the highway as opposed to city driving.

1. Take Time To Stop & Think! 

I used to believe that I was only making money when I was plowing through a list of tasks, but that is far from the truth. Lately I have balanced my time between working on tasks and taking time to just sit and think or play with ideas in my head.

One good, well thought out idea can make you a lot of money, so it is important to make space for thinking or contemplating as part of your day. 

I’ve moved a couch into my office and I use it a lot. Turn off the computers and just sit on the couch and speak honestly with myself about what’s going on and what I’m trying to accomplish.

The most productive activity in my day; by far.