John Cow dot Com » time management

Step 1 of 4 Week Plan to Answering What Is This All For!

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:55:13 +0000

Yesterday I was traveling back from Colorado Springs (I am going for another week next week if any of you live there, drop me an email and we can maybe have a lunch thing) and I realized that there is no way I can put this plan all in one post… so I am going to have to divide it up.

In the previous post “4 Weeks to Answering What This is All For” I mentioned the four part…

Time: I needed to give myself as much time as I could to focus on the right things, needed to eliminate activities that were time suckers or may even seem important but distracted me from achieving this goal.
Health: I needed to eat better, sleep better and exercise more so I could feel better and be more focused… but I needed time to do that.
Clutter: I needed to organize myself better and delegate better (ties into “Time” but for me I made this a separate category).
Family & Friends: I needed to make room for the people that I love first and foremost.

Today I am going to walk you through the “Time” steps I took. My notes initially were a lot smaller but that is because I knew in my mind what it was they meant and I realized writing this post that I need to go into a little more detail.

NOTE –> This is NOT going to be a four week post series… but it is going to take 2 or 3 more posts (a couple more then I originally anticipated).

Make Some Time

The first part of this entire process for me was making time for things. If my thought was “I have no time because I am too busy” then I was never going to be able to achieve my goal. This also made me look at what the word “too” means and one of the definitions is…

excessively: to a degree exceeding normal or proper limits; “too big”

That means that I have an excess of things that are keeping me busy and therefore I needed to trim the excess. If this was really important to me, then I can NOT use the excuse “too busy”. So the very first thing I needed to do in order to make this work was clean my time table and commit to holding to it. Since this is a 4 week plan, the clean slate time frame was focused on that period of time… meaning i did not have to quit and cancel everything… but i had to at least postpone as much as possible to clear the 4 week period.

Clean Slate Check List

1. Planner: Set up a 4 week daily calendar for this specific goal and put in big letters on the goal date so you can see it. I recommend you use a day planner type calendar that will allow you to pencil in time for each day (you should be using a planning system of some sort anyway but that is just my opinion).

2. List Commitments: On a separate piece of paper, list all time commitments that you would normally be committed to for the next 4 weeks. This includes appointments, activities, meetings and so on.

3. Prioritize Commitments: Now create two columns… one with the header “Critical” and the other “Not Critical” and enter in the appropriate column each commitment. This is harder to do then you may realize at first (was for me anyway) because it is human nature to often think everything is much more important then it is. The thing to remember here is that you are not categorizing for life, this is simply for the next 4 weeks, so if there is an appointment or volunteer activity that can go on without you or be rescheduled then put it in not critical. For those that have a full time job working for someone else, make sure to put the hours of work and travel time (if there is a bit of a commute) in the critical.

4. Reschedule Commitments: For all the “not critical” tasks you now need to reschedule, postpone or cancel. I actually quit one volunteer activity I was involved in because there was enough help and it was too big a time commitment for me. A word of warning… they will try to convince you otherwise but just say no. Do not waffle on this! Tell them that after 4 weeks you will reconsider but for the next 4 weeks the answer is no. Now in your calendar / planner enter in all the critical commitments and mark the times.

Note –> This is going to change a bit in the next 4 weeks as new things come up but I found it a lot easier to say no to new things because I was too busy for them… and the cool thing was the things I said no to were not important and it felt good to say i was too busy for them.

5. Schedule Rest: Our bodies should get at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. I realize each person is different but one thing I find is when I talk to people about sleep, it is the people that stay up late that feel they need more then that. It is believed that every hour of sleep you get before midnight is worth 2 hours of sleep if you go to bed after midnight and personally I can vouche for this because I find if I go to bed after midnight, I feel that I wake up with almost a hangover type feeling… which never happens when I go to bed earlier and sleep the same amount of hours… unless i have one too many beer

What I did here was make a commitment to be in bed by 9:30pm and this way I could hopefully be a sleep by 10pm. I also made sure to set my alarm for 6am to ensure I got my 7 to 8 hours but did not waste any time sleeping in. Yes, this includes weekends… and remember this is just for the next 4 weeks, but i hoped i could get my body in a better pattern.

This was very important for me because I know personally that giving my body the rest it needs is critical to having the right mindset and having a healthy body.

6. Daily Time Suckers: Next I looked at all the time wasters I participated in that were small daily things but wasted a huge amount of time. An example of this is flopping in front of the TV and wasting 60 minutes watching TV. So I made sure that I committed to clearing up ALL not critical time. I erased everything… no matter what it was because I wanted a fresh slate.

Now for those of you saying you need to have time in there for family and exercise… I 100% agree, but those are not time suckers… I am talking about doing things like going to forums online or just aimlessly browsing the internet, chatting on the phone, playing video games and stuff like that.

Now I struggled here at first with just saying I am committed to this because I know for myself I need constant reminders. So I updated my start page and put a reminder on the wall beside my desk about focusing time on my goal. I recommend you do that as well to keep that reminder front and center.

Result: The end result here is a clean as possible plate that I can start working with, which you will see why i did it in the next couple posts. My mindset behind this is, when I start listing important tasks and activities in the next step, I want to be able give them as much time as possible and I wanted to be able to schedule the rest of my life around them. I am not posting the next step tomorrow (Sunday, I have a few paid reviews I have to get caught up on, so this will be on Monday).

Any questions?

Posts in this series…

Work Stress Affects Your Overall Life – So Take Time OFF!

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:23:11 +0000

Are you happy?

Think about that seriously right now… are you truly happy? I do not mean do you love your job, are you rich or anything like that… I just mean happy.

Are you out of shape, do you eat like crap, do you feel like crap?

Are you always on the computer, always working, always telling family members, “give me a few more minutes”?

Are you stressed out and always worrying about something?

I am sure that these question do not relate to all of you but I can guarantee there are a lot of you that know exactly what I am talking about.

The entrepreneurial spirit is a great thing to have, wanting to grow your business, get out of the rat race and have freedom… BUT AT WHAT COST?

You know there is a funny thing about computers, they can almost mesmerize you in a way that is addictive and this in combination with wanting to get a business running can be a bad combination.

Just the other day, my wife made me laugh when she was doing a blog post for her blog An Aud Life and my youngest daughter was asking her to tuck her in. I heard my wife say 3 times in a row “Just a minute”… and WOW did that make me laugh.

Why?

Because only a few months a go my wife had nothing to do with the computers… she maybe would check email or facebook but spent very little time on it. Now that she is getting into blogging, she suddenly is finding herself getting sucked in. She loves checking for comments, commenting on others blogs, getting involved in her social communities and checking stats.

It felt so good to finally say to her, after the third “in a moment” to say… “HA, I TOLD YOU!”

Having no idea what I was referring to, I explained and she almost could not believe what she had done. I reminded her how she would be so intolerant of it with me because she could not understand why I could not just stop what I was doing. She finally understood and felt terrible and immediately shut the computer down and went to tuck in our daughter.

Now for those that are asking “why did you not tuck her in and let your wife work”.. well I already did, they like us both to tuck them in.

OK, so the point of this little story is to emphasize the point that it is vital to keep priorities in order at all times. We can get so involved into the present moment that we lose complete sight of the big picture and what really matters. We can spend so much time focusing on “Work” or other things that we think are so vital that we miss everything else and later we look back at these moments and absolutely regret missing out on them.

What also happens is we make it even more stressful on ourselves because of guilt… so we exhaust ourselves, do no take care of ourselves and also beat up on ourselves because we know we should not be doing what we are doing!

Do not work yourself to death, do not ignore your spouse or your kids, do not exhaust your mind and body and take some time off.

On Friday I had a situation arise in my office and I truly think I had every reason to use the excuse that I could not go away this weekend because I had to handle it. Well you know what, too bad. I had promised my family we would go away this weekend and so I went. Now believe me, it was not an easy decision but it was the best one.

We had an excellent weekend, it was a tremendous stress relief and you know what… I can truly say… I AM HAPPY!

Enjoy life and keep priorities in order… that is what true success really is.

For me what really brings it all into perspective is this –> What do you want your loved ones to have engraved on your tombstone?

“Your Name Here” was a hard worker who knew how to put work above everything else!

or

“Your Name Here” was a loving husband, dedicated father and lived life to the fullest!

So what are your priorities?

OCD… An Online Marketers Nemesis?

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:25:16 +0000

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

Do you sit there and hit the send and receive for your email inbox repeatedly, anxiously waiting and looking for “something”… not sure what but “something”? Do you log into your ClickBank or AdSense account 25 times a day, in hopes that something magical has happened? Do you find yourself automatically going to a website, even though you were just there 5 minutes ago and nothing possibly could have changed yet? Do you stop what you are doing everytime the phone rings, even though we know it will take us 20 minutes just to get back into the grove of where we just were… destroying all our momentum.

It is like watching TV (not sure if this is mainly a guy thing here) and constantly flicking to the next channel… we are not sure why we do this, perhaps something is telling us that the most amazing show in the world is on and we are missing it. Regardless of why, the fact is we do and the end result is by the time we shut the TV off, we have not really watched anything.

The same is true for growing your business. You are constantly doing things but at the end of the day nothing is done.

You see the OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many in the “MMO” field where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, even if they make no sense. If you were paying a person by the hour and saw them doing those activities, you would fire them… or re educate them anyway.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business. Pinpoint your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a lot of your time.

STOP THE MADNESS

If at the end of the day you feel exhausted, stressed out and anxious because you know you were busy but are not sure what you have to show for it…. then maybe it is time to do things different.

How… Tell me please.. How?

Well, if there is one thing we have learned is there is no perfect answer for everyone. What works for us might not work for you but what we do recommend you try however, is to ask yourself these two questions…

1. Is what we are doing right now making us or going to make us significant money for our business?

2. If we were paying someone to do what we are doing right now, would we feel good that the money is being well spent?

These two questions might not do it for you, but we hope you see our point here. Busy work does not mean quality work. Focus on your ROI (Return on Investment) and treat your business like a business.