Just Say No
Every day is a never ending battle against the time wasters in your life. People, things, email, errands, and all kinds of other little knick knacks are competing for your valuable attention. You have to decide where to focus it to get the biggest return on investment of your time. Ultimately, how good of a return you got will be up to you to define.
I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for a few hours tonight after not having played it much in the last 3 weeks. That made me happy and feel ready to leave it alone again for a while. Now I’m refreshed and ready to get back to work on my marketing endeavors. Is the PS3 a complete mind-numbing time waster? You bet it is, but it brings a lot of people a lot of joy and they enjoy playing it for hours on end. Controlling the time I spend on it will allow me to enjoy it periodically but still make more time to do the things that get me results in REAL life.
Recognizing that I need to start cutting back on those things that steal my precious time is my biggest task for this year. Checking email less, playing video games less, and talking on the phone less are all things I plan on implementing. It’s hard to cut back if you’ve already accepted these things as the norm and are saying “yes” to them on a subconscious level. It doesn’t matter what Jim Carrey did in the movie “Yes Man”. It was just a metaphor for experiencing life more fully and not turning your back on what could become a great experience. In order to have those experiences, you have to say “no” to the things that are pulling the wool over your eyes and keeping you bogged down by a million pointless tasks that either can wait, aren’t important, or can be ignored altogether.
My question of the day is this: What can you say “no” to more often so that you can make more time for the things that deserve a “yes”?
New Look For 2010
Happy 2010!
As you can see I’ve changed the look of the site. I really enjoyed the old theme but I felt it was a bit dreary at times and wanted something fresh and new.
Along with the new look, I want to provide more content than ever. I’d like to write as much as possible, daily even for 2010, which is a lofty goal but I think if I just provide even a blurb here everyday then I’ve achieved what I set out to do. That’s not to say that I’ll never write the longer authority articles I’m accustomed to here, but I am trying to increase my presence on the web in a big way in 2010 and I hope you’ll help me to do that. Time is of the essence for me and I have to get maximum results with even the small things I do.
I know I bashed New Year’s resolutions in my last article, but I do recognize the power of the clean slate, fresh start mentality. Now is the time to be thinking about what you want to achieve this year. Make it your mission to form habits that will make those things happen for you. Eben Pagan has a saying called “inevitability thinking”. It means that you structure your life in a way that the things you want can’t help but happen to you. What is your inevitability thinking?
This is what I want for myself this year:
1. Write everyday, even if it’s just a little bit.
2. Use all the wonderful business tools I’ve learned over the past 2 years, stop being lazy, and build a sustainable income online.
3. Provide real value.
4. Eliminate and cut out all the time wasters that take me away from the things I really want to be doing.
5. Try to maintain a balance between my health, wealth, and relationships this year.
That’s it. Those are the only things I want. There are sub-goals that fall underneath those that will help me get there along the way but it goes back to what I said in the last post. Establish systems that will help you automate your efforts as much as possible and you will get closer to where you want to be with less effort and more time to do even more.
Good luck for 2010 and I wish you all the best for your success now and in the future.
