Project management is among a top skill to master in any business; especially one wanting to grow.
Why?
Because without project management, business owners will unnecessarily run into common issues:
You often get derailed by "the unexpected.”
It’s inevitable.
You get interrupted an unexpected number of times daily. Those interruptions come at unexpected times. They each take an unexpected amount of time with which to deal.
That’s why it’s "the unexpected."
These interruptions kill your flow, destroy your focus, and force you to work on the urgent instead of the important.
So how do you deter, prevent, and deal with the problems these unexpected interruptions incur?
I was shocked, hurt, and felt like my idea had been stolen. Though I had the idea first, Nintendo would be the star. Nintendo would make $millions. It took years before I was old enough to recognize the important lesson in this experience...
Are you second-guessing your next great idea? Are you downplaying the value you could provide to others? Are you upset that you found a competitor in the market who seems to be offering everything you want to (and seems to be finding great success doing it)?
It might be time to step back and realize a few important things.
Tetris is the best puzzle game of all time. Period.
(I thought of ending the post here, but you’d have no f*cking clue how that statement relates to this picture, and I have a point to make...)
The satisfaction of slipping a multicolored shape into the perfect opening to clear the entire board in one epic moment can’t be explained, it must be played.
When you get good at Tetris, you automatically get good at similar games like Dr. Mario, Bejeweled, or Luminex.
That’s because they all have…
It was a simple question.
“Grab my power drill from the tool chest, would ya?”
My son, Charlie, whose game of Fortnight I had interrupted, reluctantly left his computer and hustled to the garage to follow through on my request.
For context, I was at work in my basement, reinstalling an improperly installed…
Planning isn’t for procrastinators.
Procrastinators need pressure to complete their project—time pressure, money pressure, the pressure of a demanding customer.
Procrastinators also need energy. Energy to focus on their task. Energy to ignore the coffee machine, phone calls, texts, cat videos, and other distractions.
When procrastinators have energy and pressure, they don’t need a plan. Shit just gets done.
Without these two things, however, procrastinators find themselves thrashing around like fish in a catch-and-release pond, biting one shiny lure after another, wondering why they can’t make it home.
If you’ve ever procrastinated, you know that fighting it is impossible. But you also know that succumbing to a day of lost work isn’t acceptable.
That’s where Kanban comes in.
People can steal so many things from you—your money, your attention, your time.
Your Fire
Your Skills
Your Ideas
Your Effort
Your Wisdom
Your Reactions
Your Perspective
Your Uniqueness
Your Experiences
Your Determination
Your Self Respect
There may be others. Comment if you think of any below👇.
In the meanwhile, take caution. While nobody can steal these things from you, you can steal them from yourself.
Stay diligent, stay disciplined, and always keep building that which cannot be taken away.
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
It’s Friday, and you’re battered from a 5-day attack on your focus, attention, and patience; a battle that started the moment your alarm blared Monday morning.
If you started with a plan, it’s now buried in the rubble of a week that bombarded you with emails, phone calls, and customer demands.
Yes, the work-week struggle was real, and though it’s now over, another battle looms next week.
But, enter the weekend with a clean slate and you’ll start next week fresh, reinvigorated, and ready to crush it. What’s more, your free hours won’t be consumed with thoughts of unfinished tasks. You’ll enjoy a truly restful weekend.
Every year without fail, on the first day of school, my Father would remind me to follow three simple rules:
Do what’s right.
Do the best you can.
The golden rule.
This past week, as school started for my own children, I reminded them to follow those same three rules. They got the first two, but when asked to recall the golden rule they said, “to have fun?”
She's my firecracker, my spitfire. She's the epitome of unbending willpower.
Fathering her is a delicate balance between goodnight kisses and unwavering stare-downs over the appropriate number of cookies one should have for dessert.
My boys aren’t like that.
One son is rule-bound and the other finds every way to please us.
But all three share one thing in common; the same thing all children share in common.
They just barge ahead.
The first time I watched my grade school friend, Brian, navigate his computer, I was awestruck.
Without touching the mouse, he was switching windows, selecting menu options, and “clicking” buttons on the keyboard, his fingers slamming keys like Mavis Beacon in a Red-Bull-induced typing competition 💻🏋️♀️😓.
I was shocked because I didn’t realize such speed and efficiency was possible.
Watching him, a master, was transformative.
It’s Monday, closing time, and in four days your week will be over.
Where will you find yourself Friday afternoon? What will you have accomplished?
Most people don’t know. They begin each day, do what they can, and try to “finish things up” Friday afternoon before cashing out for the weekend.
I’ve been there. Living day to day, never knowing how much I can get done, never planning a path my goals.
There are exactly two places in the world I feel 100% me.
The first is my home office.
I’ve worked from home for a decade, so have refined every corner of my office for optimal comfort, productivity, and happiness.
Take my typewriter, for example.
It’s my prized Olympia Spendid 66, refurbished and mailed from @mr.mrs.vintage in London. The machines curves and deep navy blue glossy finishes are beautiful. But when I start hammering those keys, it walks right off my desk.
So now, underneath, are four hidden globs of poster putty holding the typewriter within millimeters of my Game of Thrones book set (which is simultaneously on display and positioned for instant reading).
It’s not just the poster putty. Everything in my office is arranged just so. My whiteboard, my pictures, my computer, my chair, my desk. Even my samurai sword is on display, out of reach from my children, but accessible to me for the inevitable zombie invasion.
The second place I feel 100% me is Hotel Kabuki (@hotelkabuki).
When I walk through the doors of this hotel, unobtrusively located in Japantown San Francisco, I have dreams of buying the place, moving my home office across the country, and living there with my family for the rest of my natural life.
It’s the lobby library, stocked with history books, pop culture references, and classical literature. It’s the vinyl’s in a grid on the wall decorating the front desk. It’s the black and white wall art, squared off modern furniture, fancy phones, and bonsai trees in the garden exercise room.
But what really gets me is the coasters...
For all the grand decorations, coasters seem like a trivial flourish. But the small white round cardboard with its red brushed circle gives a certain zen-like calligraphy feeling, emphasizing a message that I’ve now taken to heart:
“Shine Brightly”
When my brow is furrowed because I’m concerned about how much I’m getting done or thinking too hard about what I’m supposed to be doing next, these two words remind me to keep trying to bring joy to others and to help those near me with what I have and what I’ve learned.
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
Everyone knows it snows in Michigan.
I remember shuffling down the streets of Midland one October, trick-or-treating, with thick ski pants and boots covering my Halloween costume; just a kid with a pillowcase wearing a Chewbacca mask staring out from under a winter hat.
Two feet of snow. In October. And that was in the lower peninsula.
The upper peninsula? That’s no joke.
The people that live up there, lovingly referred to as uppers (pronounced yew-pers), get hammered in the winter.
Yet, even knowing that, we stopped in awe at a lone sign in the woods. Deep into our seven hour drive, in the northern part of Michigan’s upper peninsula, we stared up at the sky where this sign, 29.5 feet in the air, marked their record snowfall.
When you grow up seeing two to four feet of snow at a time, 29 feet seems unbelievable.
But this sign didn’t lie. It was accurate, and the record it represented has been beaten since.
(Email me a pic if you’ve seen it recently, I didn’t have a camera back then and I’d love to marvel at it’s height again)
This sign, and the extreme snowfall record it represented, reset my expectations of what’s possible. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know, didn’t realize, or couldn’t imagine.
It’s easy to get used to the status quo. But that’s not how to stand out. That’s not how you make the biggest impact. That’s not how to strike awe in your customers.
Recognizing that, it’s helpful to ask yourself a question—one that will help reframe your expectations of what’s possible:
Think about it. Write it down. Then improve it, eliminate it, or delegate it.
Improve what you’re not good at and raise the bar on what you can accomplish.
Eliminate what you’re not good at and give yourself time to work on more important tasks.
Delegate what you’re not good at and buy yourself energy while allowing for someone more skilled to set the bar higher.
Don’t wait for a sign in the woods. Challenge what you know. Ask yourself this question monthly to reset expectations of what’s possible, what you can focus on, what’s important, and what’s holding you back.
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
I’m pissed 😡🤬🤯🤭😡
Somewhere, in the Denver airport, some kid is walking around with my lost AirPod earbud dangling from his right ear.
I can see him now, happily listening to crappy music, laughing obnoxiously while playing that God-awful Fortnight game with his friends.
The left earbud, still in my possession, doesn’t cut it. My brain rejects music in only one ear, and trying to talk on the phone in my left ear is like trying to brush my teeth with my left hand, possible, but messy and ineffective.
It’s not about the money. AirPods are expensive, but the missing bud can be replaced for only $69.
I’m pissed because I’ve lost one of the most effective tools in my toolkit.
AirPods are awesome. They are game changing. They are (were) one device that absolutely, unequivocally helped me comfortably, enjoyably, and reliably get more done.
That’s because while I maximize my productive time through planning, scheduling, and building systems, I also get more done by using the right tools.
AirPods were my tool. I popped them in for phone calls, music, dictation, podcasts, or just drowning out airplane noise while traveling. I wore them while walking my dog, hustling through the airport, working out, or even sitting hands-free at my desk.
These little wireless wonders have saved me more hours than I probably realize, and now they’re gone; lost forever in a massive airport 1,465 miles away.
I’ve ordered a new earbud. It should show up in two to three days.
Until then, if you’re traveling through Denver and see a snobby-looking kid with one white bud in his right ear, give him your best stink-eye for me. He’ll never understand why you did, but he deserves it nonetheless.
Have any tools you’re passionate about? Tell me in the comments below. I’m always testing out new ways to be productive and love a good gadget more than most :-).
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, it feels like you've kept busy yet accomplished nothing.
It's not that you didn't work hard. You answered emails. You took phone calls. You attended meetings. You made decisions.
But for some reason you got nothing done.
Well, that's not true. You got other people's work done, just not your own. You've made little progress toward your goals. You've been running around solving other people's problems. You've been answering other people's questions, and spending time in their meetings.
There's a solution to this problem. It’s a way to move closer to your goals every day while quickly separating busy work from important work.
It's called the Eisenhower Priority Matrix. Here's how it works:
Now, here's how you deal with each quadrant:
Not Urgent and Not Important? Delete it. These are things like checking Facebook, organizing files on your computer, or other trivial tasks.
Urgent but Not Important? Delegate it. Making dinner reservations, dealing with unimportant emails, and booking flights would qualify here.
Not Urgent but Important? Schedule it. These are things that must get done, but keep getting kicked to the back burner. This would include activities like calling a family member, exercising, developing a marketing plan for your business, etc.
Urgent and Important? Do it. Right now. This is real work. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where you make real progress toward your goals. Today.
That's it!
If you've ever wondered why you stay so busy but get so little done, this just might be the answer.
It's a simple tool, but should keep you massively productive every day, and leave you with a sense of accomplishment (and time for fun and games)!
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
Have you seen that commercial of the “productivity guy?”
He’s crushing it.
He’s emailing, texting, shuffling papers, taking phone calls, all at the same time.
It’s funny. But it’s NOT healthy.
Multi-tasking. Frantic effort. A relentless pursuit of the next task on full afterburner.
How long can you operate at that level?
Pro hockey players can for about a minute and a half. After that, they hit the bench to recover before taking back the ice.
Your work isn’t as physical, but you still need rest after focused effort.
Real productivity isn't "go go go." Real productivity requires balance.
Balance between exercise and relaxation, business and family, achievement and celebration.
Without balance, you’ll spend a few hours crushing it like the “productivity guy” only to burn out for the rest of the week.
Which sounds better to you?
90 minutes of achievement followed by a week of under-performing?
or
Balanced, sustained, consistent progress and results week after week, month after month?
Uhhhh, option 2 please.
For these results, you need a personalized system complete with:
🍎 A nutrition plan to keep you sharp and focused so you can get work done without sacrificing fun food like 🌮🍔🥓🍩.
🏋️♀️ An exercise plan to give you more energy on tough days while fitting your work/travel schedule.
📅 A projects/goals plan so you can achieve consistent results over a predictable timeframe.
📝 A daily management plan so you can end each day with a sense of accomplishment and not feel guilty for resting and recharging.
Shoot me an email if you need help developing a personalized system to find an optimum path to your goals: one that will make a massive positive impact on your health, energy levels, and productivity.
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs live their passion and achieve their dreams by consistently saving time, getting productive, and being more efficient and organized.
Subscribe to my free, short, 60-second newsletter for tips, tricks, links, products, and other discoveries to becoming a more purposeful, passionate, and productive human.
