Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain
I’ve got my September 2010 goals ready, got yours?
I also put them on my iPhone just to make sure I carry them with me EVERYWHERE.
This month my goals are focused primarily on HouseOfRave and NevBlog. One is a current business, one is a hobby.
Also as an unofficial health goal I’d like to schedule my ab workouts for 3 days per week again since my abs recently shrank.
I really wouldn’t know what to do with $300 and this blog.
In the past I performed the Bottle Water Experiment, the Painting Curbs thing, the Confiscated Goods experiment, the Inventory Control add-on to HouseOfRave, and The Scratch Lottery Experiment.
I kind of want to do the Lottery Experiment again, but with $300 instead of $100.
I’ve already done some other successful experiments with my own business lately, but those don’t get mentioned on the blog ;-)
Have you set your goals for this month yet? I made mine on the 1st:
I also like to take a picture of these goals and make them the wallpaper on my iPhone, so when I’m not in the office, I can look at them and think, “Is what I’m doing RIGHT NOW helping these get accomplished?”
In order, I wrote:
In the future, I might associate a punishment and reward for each goal. In school, it was simple:
You didn’t do it, you failed.
If you did well on it, you got a good grade.
I currently don’t have that accountability for all of these.
I write this for two reasons:
1.) I am starting that 6-pack experiment in April and have begun preparing for it by eating ultra-clean and ultra-lean. Pretty much all day I’m eating 100% raw foods only…that’s not the plan for the whole month, but it’s been my diet for the last week. It’s not hard as I expected (because I’ve been eating well for a few months now), but keeping this up for a full month and resisting the urge to pig out at social events gets HARD.
However for the month of April I want to see a dramatic change in the way my stomach looks…and for that I need to be calorie deficient for weeks at a time. I can easily keep my current physique with the way I’m eating now, but my diet must be extra-ordinarily good to see those extraordinary results.
2.) As you know I own a business called House Of Rave which is all online. Over the last year I made a lot of small tweaks which cut down on the number of customer support inquires and time spent getting orders out. At a bare minimum I need to spend less than 30 minutes every weekday administering the site…the rest runs on it’s own. That alone can pay all my bills and still save money.
Pretty cool eh! 30 minutes of work per day!
Well…I also like the business to GROW….so to maintain AND grow the site takes about 2 hours per day (mainly spent adding product photo/video reviews).
I will admit…over these first few months of 2010 those small required amounts of time have spoiled me. I’ve stopped updating the site as much as I should. The 1st quarter is never a FANTASTIC time for a business like mine (which sells party supplies) and is also enduring a bad economy, but I think I’ve been slipping quite a bit on my responsibilities to it.
Extraordinary effort doesn’t necessarily mean long hours (although that certainly helps)….because with this business a very consistent tweaking of small things every day can make a HUGE impact. I’ve proved this many times, including one time I documented 30 small changes I made with very clear results (aka MO MONEY)!
I think what I’ll do in April is one day blog about a small HoR change, then the next day document the diet and steps I’ve taken to get a ripped-ass six pack.
Find merchant supplies and POS terminals at Moneris Solutions.
Do you have your March 2010 goals lines up? I do:
Remember, I keep them on my iPhone:
I stopped making monthly goals a while ago because I rarely followed up on them. They always get stuck on a sheet of paper somewhere which I promptly forget about on day 2 of the month.
Now every time I look at my phone, guess what I see? Monthly goals staring me in the face waiting to be completed!
I made the original Seinfeld Calendar post 4 months ago.
It’s simply a giant year calendar that faces my bed so I see it all the time. If I accomplish my daily to-do list, I put a checkmark. If I don’t finish the to-do list, I put a dot:
The whole reasoning for this calendar is to make finishing my daily goals consistent. The quote I keep on top of the calendar sums it up:
Excellence is not an act, but a habit
–Plato
Here’s the number results of these four months (weekends included):
Good Day: When my written-the-night-before to-do lists get completely finished.
Bad Day: When to-do list not fully finished. Most of the bad days are weekends.
UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES:
The to-do lists I give myself are generally quite a bit of work. A standard to-do list generally will keep me occupied for a full 8-12 hours. Sometimes it takes less, sometimes it takes more. Most of this work involves me staring at a computer, so 8-12 hours of this per day gets a little straining.
I noticed when I tried getting a checkmark 7 days of the week, I burned myself out! The following days would be very unproductive and filled with low quality work because I was burning myself out. So after figuring out different ways of becoming more productive, I found out the best way is to allow myself about 2 bad days per week. This can be the weekdays or weekends…whatever I feel. This way the work is enjoyable and I still get large amounts of work done.
Here is a recent shot of the filled out calendar:
The first month I was getting REALLY pissed if I didn’t fill out a checkmark for the day, so I started working very hard the next day to fill it out. After a while I started making checking these off a habit. It’s helped me stop procrastinating as much, because in the middle of the day I think, “I can either continue to screw off and get a dot for the day, or just start doing this work, getting it out of the way and get a checkmark for the day.”
I also have less fun going out if I don’t finish all my work. When I finish off a great day of work, it feels good and well deserved to go out. So being more productive actually allows me to have more fun!
Anyhow, I’d highly recommend this Seinfeld Productivity Calendar method. It’s definitely helped me become more focused and productive through the day!
Flashback to January 2007 I decided to try not having any yearly goals. Well that didn’t go well as planned (or…unplanned)?
I like how Earl Nightingale put it:
Think of a ship with the complete voyage mapped out and planned. The captain and crew know exactly where the ship is going and how long it will take – it has a definite goal. And 9,999 times out of 10,000, it will get there.
Now let’s take another ship – just like the first – only let’s not put a crew on it, or a captain at the helm. Let’s give it no aiming point, no goal, and no destination. We just start the engines and let it go. I think you’ll agree that if it gets out of the harbor at all, it will either sink or wind up on some deserted beach – a derelict. It can’t go anyplace because it has no destination and no guidance.
While 2007 was a good year, it was also a relatively stagnant year. At the end of 2007 I wasn’t much further along as I should or could have been with clear cut goals. It’s a pretty gross feeling.
Bad idea.
Somewhere in the February to April part of 2008 I once again started focusing and making very clear cut goals on yearly/monthly revenue and other things. It worked great. Making month to month comparisons was especially helpful because you can literally SEE yourself slipping or getting lazy in numbers:
Before I made my 2009 list of goals, I made sure to really think about each goal first. I used this criteria:
Here are some of my top level biz goals for 2009:
SOME PERSONAL GOALS:
I can sleep on the floor with a thin sheet for all I care, so a bed seemed like a ridiculous notion to me (I know I know….I sound like a homeless person).
Anyhow, a few months ago I think I officially became an adult when I…….bought new pillows. Under my own will power I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought a king sized pillow and a body pillow. It was a big step. It was the first (non-forced) purchase I’ve ever made that benefited my own physical comfort. This is the first cautious step into slowly becoming somewhat of a grown up.
I would try to duplicate this some mornings without the hour of yoga preceeding it, and I found that simply sitting in a comfortable meditation-like position (but not comfortable enough to fall asleep), would yield a similar clarity, but without the brain-shutting-down part. This means I can think about my plans, goals and objectives for the day in a clear state. I also tend to get some great ideas during this time (although about 50% of my ideas still come to me whilst showering).
Doing this morning exercise every day would feel great and be very beneficial.
So far these are the only goals I have that I know I can stick to. They can always be modified or added to during the year.
Anyhow, have a great 2009!
First post of the year!
Let’s get started. For starters, I’m not going goal-less this year like I tried in 2007. That worked out OK, but setting clear goals is quite an important task. I was using some pretty flawed logic in that goal-less post.
Short Term Goals:
Medium Term Goals:
Year Long Goals & Wants:
That’s all the publicly available goals I’ve got for now, I may add more later. Have a happy & prosperous 2008!
-Neville