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.
You are a block of stone.
Chipped and cracked and carved by life.
Molded since birth, you now embody a unique shape, reflecting all that you’ve become.
Your parents were the first to sculpt you. Using the only tools they knew how. Tools given to them by generations of parents before them, they whittled you into the shape they wanted, or needed, or were proud of. A sculpture of sorts.
What he said to me was, “You’re such a nice guy, Mike. The nicest.”
What he meant was, “Everyone is trampling all over you. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re never going to get anywhere in life, and you certainly aren’t going to find success in this company.”
I’ve heard it a thousand times before.
“Mike, you’re such a nice guy.”
or
“Mike, you’re the nicest. So nice.”
Which would be great if it were a compliment. But it’s not.
Of course, there’s truth to what they say. I am nice. I do treat others with kindness. I would give you the shirt of my back if you needed it.
But their so called compliments are laced with an undercurrent of misgiving concerning my ability to get ahead in life or, at the very least, avoid the wrath of distrustful, self-interested sinners who would rob me of my possessions, my honor, and my virtue.
These stabs at my character disguised as flattery are enough to make me wonder if I should be more of an asshole.
Nice guys finish last, right
Sorry, this post isn’t for you.
It’s for me.
It’s for me internalize the mindset of a big-screen hero, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Someone who, though I’ve never met, I respect and admire.
It’s for me to capture the thinking of a giant who has been kicked around, ignored, laughed at, and ridiculed only to bust through to success in endeavor after endeavor.
It’s for me to embed an absolute can-do, break -through-walls, leap-over-obstacles kind of attitude into my psyche.
This post isn’t for you. It’s for me. But you can read it anyway :-).
In fact, I’d love everyone read these ideas and watch the video at the end.
I want everyone to hear Dwayne Johnson’s heartfelt words and catch a glimpse of how this success-genius made his way through failures from poverty to continual and lasting success.
Because unlike so many other successful people who share what they’re doing today to be successful, he talks about the mindset he fostered in the past that led him to his present and will help him grow and win big in the future.
It’s a fact.
Waking early is NOT correlated with success.
The proof is in the research.
According to the Huffington Post, “nearly 50% of self-made millionaires wake up at least three hours before their workday actually begins.” [1]
Okay, that’s not a lot of research, but read that quote again if you need to. While it suggests rising early contributes to success in a matter-of-fact tone, less than half of self-made millionaires are early birds. Which means the other half aren’t.
This article goes on to list a dozen or so wildly successful business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs who wake up before the crack of dawn, as if this is correlated to their success.
It’s not the only one.
Self-improvement gurus publish dozens of listicles daily on the benefits of rising before dawn. Success experts scream of the benefits of an early start. We even hear of historical figures like George Washington who “the sun never caught in bed.”
All this pressure to set an early alarm, get your ass out of bed, and get moving before the rest of the world... its enough to make you want to try.
But when you do, you feel groggy, cold, and it takes you an hour to warm up for the day. Then, when afternoon arrives, sleepiness strikes, and it’s all you can do to keep from nodding off (let alone get anything done).
If the point of waking up early is to crush your day, why does getting up early suck so much life and productivity out of you?
And, if getting up early is not correlated with success, what truly makes a successful day?
I’ve got three answers to those questions, and they all start the night before.
Mass confusion struck in droves, and baby turtles were scattered everywhere.
It was 9:30 pm in Topsail North Carolina and we were walking along the beach toward our beach rental home to hustle the kids into bed and watch as many episodes of Handmaids Tale as we could before becoming deliriously tired.
Ten minutes earlier, we had wandered passed two lines of people lounging in beach chairs. Some had beers in hand. All were chatting quietly.
On any other night, seeing people drinking and chatting on the beach would have been routine. But tonight, two extremely strange behaviors of this crowd caught my attention:
First, everyone was lined up the wrong way; not parallel with the water, but perpendicular to it. Two rows of people, arms width apart, beginning at the base of the dune and extending down into the ocean wash.
Odd.
Second, there was a strange excitement in the air. The kind of excitement you might feel in the moments leading up to a surprise birthday party; the quiet anticipation of a big event.
Come to find out, we were about to witness just such an event.
There are 24 hours per day and 168 hours per week.
That sounds like enough time to finish your work and have time for yourself. But, as the end of the workweek draws near, you often find yourself with an unfinished to-do list and having spent very little time on yourself or the activities you enjoy.
This is fine on occasion. Nobody is perfect, nor should be.
But if this scenario repeats week after a week, you may soon find that your life has become all work and no play. Something which is a chilling thought by itself.
To help you strike a proper work-life balance, here are five simple ways that should help you find time for yourself and let you enjoy life more:
Less than 10 minutes after waking, I threw up cigar chunks into my master bathroom toilet.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Twelve hours earlier, the groom and I were celebrating his upcoming wedding with a night on the town in historic downtown Leesburg, Virginia.
As you might have guessed, this night included alcohol and stogies.
We drank and walked and talked and smoked and drank some more. We hopped from restaurant to restaurant, downing wine and beer and whiskey, all the while drawing down a box of cigars purchased at the local tobacconist.
At one point, the groom had me laughing so hard that I bit down on the cigar butt, crumbling the outer paper, which I inhaled, coughed up, then involuntarily swallowed.
I washed it down with a swig of wine—all of it came up the next morning.
Gross, I know.
But it perfectly illustrates the entire point of this article...
1. Get 7 hours of sleep
2. Lay out daily clothes in advance
3. Block calendar for important work
4. Schedule commute time
5. Schedule breaks
6. Plan to deal with time obstacles
7. Schedule administrivia
8. Exercise
9. Eat healthy food that energizes you
10. Tell everyone when you plan to leave
11. When work begins, begin work (don’t get distracted)
12. Squeeze meetings together
13. Focus (or leave) meetings that aren’t productive
14. Reschedule meetings that start late
15. Hold stand up meetings
16. Decline meetings where you can’t contribute
17. Add buffer between meetings and tasks
18. Schedule important tasks
19. Prioritize urgent tasks
20. Delegate unimportant tasks
21. Delete the rest of your tasks
22. Limit emailing to 3x per day
23. Automate repetitive tasks with apps like IFTTT
24. Bundle similar tasks together
25. Set a timer for your tasks
26. Begin with the end in mind
27. Minimize distractions
28. Stick to your schedule
29. Delegate
30. Work on what matters
31. Focus with music
32. Work intensely
33. Take breaks often
34. Work when everyone else isn’t
35. Call instead of email
36. Send shorter emails… get to the point
37. Only read emails where you are in the to: line
38. Block time before you leave to clean up your day
39. Reduce and remove clutter in your workspace
40. Add some greenery to your workspace (scientifically proven to increase productivity)
41. Sit, stand, walk, talk, act confidently
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs organize their brain and schedule so they can organize their life and business.
Subscribe to my free, weekly newsletter on personal excellence and business mastery that one client called “The Owners Manual to an Awesome Life.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting around 30 thousand spam calls a day.
OK, I exaggerate. But sometimes it feels like that.
Anytime an actual phone number shows up on my caller ID, I know it’s from someone I don’t know.
When my Mom calls, it says Mom. When my wife calls, it says Elaine. When a telemarketer calls…
It wouldn't have mattered if all 7 billion people on this planet were screaming in unison for my success. Nor would it have mattered how early I'd woken up that morning, how much water I drank, or if I'd eaten protein for breakfast. It wouldn't have made a bit of difference if I'd created a plan for my day, meditated, or drafted the perfect self-introspection piece in my journal.
I didn't know how to drive a stick-shift well, so it was unlikely I'd get it right. I would have stalled that son-of-a-bitch on the platform every single time.
Skills can't be faked.
Wanting to succeed is never enough.
And life-hacks won't give you some magical power to achieve more than you're already achieving.
It looks like “the good life,” doesn’t it?
The influencers life.
Wake up late, post a selfie next to your new Ferrari, then make money horsing around on social media with some trending product sent to you for free by some hot new company.
Cushy. Fun. Exciting.
Who wouldn’t want that life?
I sure have thought about it. About how to get it. More than once.
Everywhere you turn, influencers seem to dominate the online conversation. Youtube celebrities push funny new videos and receive thousands of likes per second. Instagram characters publish a new post and, before you know it, you’re swiping up on their latest story to buy what they’re pitching.
Though I have no fucking clue what he does, it’s not hard to see myself as the next PewDiePie. It’s not unreasonable to see any influencers success and believe that you can have it too.
And guess what? You can.
You have more opportunities than ever to become a massive, influencing success through dozens of online platforms that reach (quite literally) over 40% of the world’s population.
For the first time in history, you can get paid to promote a product that you’ve never used, developed by someone you’ve never met, sold by a company you can’t pronounce, and make a fortune doing it.
But this isn’t an article about how to do that.
In Orange County, California, the sun warms your skin like a campfire on a cool evening.
I was visiting for business, but accepted these personal pleasures that came with travel.
So, when the opportunity to ride top-down in a convertible along the Pacific coast to Los Angelos arose, I desperately wanted to take it.
Yesterday, I was high on a big fat doobie of accomplishment, a productivity monster crushing every activity with aplomb. Today I woke up to a sick wife and daughter, a migraine of my own, and two sons who had to finish last-minute school projects that rivaled NASAs space shuttle development program in size and scope.
I felt defeated, exhausted, overwhelmed, and wishing for my day back.
When this happens, you can recover in three ways:
Whenever there’s a new month, there should be a new plan.
With a fresh month, you’ve got 20 or so whole working days in front of you.
You weren’t thinking of just winging it, were you 😉?
You already know this, but “winging it” is not how you achieve your goals. That’s not how you’ll finish this year a success.
People who wing it often wonder how they worked so hard and yet don’t find themselves where they want to be.
On the other hand, high-achievers use every new month as an opportunity to do two things:
I know you.
You’re already thinking about working this weekend.
You’ve got a shit-ton to do, mostly from random crap that piled up this week, but also from everything you couldn’t tackle due to last-minute meetings, an unprecedented number of emails, and constant interruptions from, ahem, Instagram and other social media notifications.
Overwhelm manifests when you have too much to do.
When, for example, you have multiple projects, dozens of emails, texts, meetings, and notifications from everyone who wants a piece of your time.
The problem isn’t with any one of your projects. Nor is it with the distractions.
The problem is that it’s all…
