If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and check out Getting Started. Thanks for visiting!

Guy Kawasaki has started a new venture, AllTop.com It consolidates the content of numerous top sites for numerous categories including: LifeHacks, Personal Finance, Sports, and World News. I’m happy to say Success Making Machine is in the career section.

I think it’s a great way to keep up with your favorite topic.

Check it out.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under Success | No Comments »

Being more productive has many advantages including getting more done and feeling empowered. But productivity on its own, can cause your belt to become less productive. You see there is no need for a belt when your stomach gets so big it can hold your pants without assistance. In fact, the more productive you become the more likely it is that you are getting fatter. Here’s five ways productivity can make you get fat and what you can do about it.

Too Efficient

Being productive can make you too efficient at getting the wrong things done. For example your to do list will work perfectly when you’re shopping- even when this means adding a “family size” bag of chips to go with the super-sized chocolate bar. You end up buying all the wrong things because you’re used to it and your good at it.

Solution: Take the bad foods off your list. Replace it with healthy (or at least healthier) alternatives. Avoid being in a position to see the “bad” items.

Work Long Hours

A strange phenomenon happens to productive people, they get more responsibility. More responsibility equals more work. Long sedentary hours especially when coupled with the lack of time to exercise leads to more weight.
Solution: Schedule breaks. Delegate: see if others can do some of your tasks(especially the ones you did before you got increased responsibility). Train others to do what you do- it’s worth the investment. Studies have shown that long hours lead to decreased mental function, so limit your work time. Use the extra time to do something fun and active.

Look to fill every second

Productive people don’t want to waste a second. You are always looking to use every minute of their time. So if you have an extra minute that may mean an downing an extra snack or treating yourself to a double moca latte.

Solution: Allow yourself time to soak in your surroundings and think. Thinking can lead to creative solutions. Let yourself unwind, being stressed can make you less productive.

Multitasking

Productive people look to save time - this includes doing two tasks at once aka multitasking. Sometimes people will combine food with another task- thinking they’re saving time. The problem is that they’re so busy doing the other task, like watching TV, they don’t realize they’re eating. Before they know it they have scarfed down a huge meal and they don’t even know what they ate.

Solution: Multitasking has been proven not to work, doing two tasks at once means one or both won’t get done well. Don’t multitask! You can combine tasks if you want though. Combining a task means that you’ll spend the right amount of time on each one- you are just doing them together. For example, you can schedule a meal with a friend- you’ll get your networking/socializing opportunity yet you wont be scarfing down the food. You’ll be eating at a reasonable pace and interacting- the best of both worlds.

Finish Everything

Productive people like to finish everything they start. That means that super-sized meal will be finished in no time even if it isn’t needed.

Solution: Stop yourself, realize food is not a task. Even simpler, take smaller portions.

Of course there’s more you can do to become leaner and healthier but frankly changing your approach is easier than dieting or exercising. Keep your eyes open and see where your habits are bringing you into bad situations. Then use your productivity skills to productively wipe it out.

Photo credit: Melting Mama

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under Health & Principles & Success & productivity | No Comments »

The Getting Things Done Yahoo Group is having an interesting discussion about Control mechanisms.

Without control mechanisms of some type in place, doesn’t that pretty much leave you in the lap of the gods so to speak?

In my response I outlined 8 steps to being productive. I try to instill control, yet give the flexibility to be creative and maximize your day. It all starts with thinking first.

Preplanning

At the end of each day you should plan your next day. This may be an outgrowth of your weekly review- or as it should be called “The Weekly Preview”. Depending on your type of job think this is impossible, but it’s not. For example, if you are in constant crisis mode most of your plan may be thrown out each morning but your plan should be to get the bottom of the crisis so you can move past it.

First you’ll need to determine the most important tasks (MITs) that need to be done the next day. Don’t count daily maintenance tasks like following up and checking email as part of this. If there are 20 things you need to get done then you’re just setting yourself up for failure (unless they aren’t big and you can batch a bunch together and count it as one of your MITs).

Don’t try to fill your full day with MITs- these are just the choices to get you started. Just pick the 1-5 items that you want to get done the next day (keep it 3 or less ideally). Start with items that MUST get done (e.g. deadlines) - that if you don’t do it you’ll need to stay late. Also check your calendar of how much time you’ll have. The more scheduled time you have the less MITs you should plan. Then if you still have open slots, pick tasks that will be best for you for the long term while balancing for project size: smaller projects go first. A better idea is to use layering to cut your most strategic projects into small attainable parts so they don’t get pushed off and are the smaller projects that you end up doing.

At the end of this process you’ll have you a few MITs and a bunch of other tasks. Dont worry these other tasks will still get done.

Here’s how to schedule your productive day:

1. Most Important Tasks

Start with your first MIT first thing when you get in, before you check email or process your other in boxes. Much has been written about the advantages of starting the day early. Getting in early to do a MIT can set your day in the right track. Even if you cant get in early get to your first MIT as soon as possible.

2. Process

When you start processing your in boxes do the quick tasks on the spot. GTD has a two minute rule that in itself can trim items off your to do list before they get there. I would expand this to a 5 minute rule (or even 10) for the following scenarios:

a) Lots of small tasks

Your to do lists are long enough, if you keep having to add 5-10 minute tasks to it and cycle through 5-10 minute tasks every time you want to pick a task you’re just wasting time and energy. Further if you know someone will spend 5 minutes following up on these tasks then it wastes more time. Get it done. Once it’s done it’s no longer on your list and out of your mind. This is part of the reason you didn’t over schedule yourself, so you can properly react to your incoming tasks. If you have a lot of these tasks then you may decide to schedule a MIT for the next day to get rid of the 10 minute tasks.

b) Offensive Opportunities

Sometimes if you take care of a task quickly you can create good will. This can be used with prospects, customers and bosses.

c) Preparation

If you receive information about a task that doesn’t have an immediate deadline don’t just file it away, look at it first. Jot down a quick outline of your thoughts. You may create a few Next Actions right away. Pay special attention to missing information, you’ll want to email people quickly so they have maximum time to do proper research. Seek to get project scope/deadline early on- this will save you lots of rushing at the deadline.

d) Soaking Time

Give yourself time to be creative by figuring what needs to be done and let your mind work in the background. Again an outline helps here. Then let your brain work in the background. You can even schedule a reminder for your self in a few days to jot down a few more notes.

3. Maintenance tasks

These are the small daily tasks you need to do like ticklers/follow ups. Be sure that you go through your follow up list.

4. More MITs

Spend uninterrupted time on your next MIT. Set your environment so you can get in the zone.

5. More Processing/Breaks

Breaks are good for you- just don’t take it to an extreme. Two to five minutes every hour gives you time to rejuvenate. After a break you can switch gears to the next MIT or processing time.

You should schedule processing time at key intervals of your day. Different jobs have different requirements. I would recommend once in the morning, once before and after lunch and one last time before you leave.

6. Context

You can only do certain tasks in certain places. In your Preplanning, you may have scheduled yourself to be in a place to do one of your MITS (e.g. a meeting). Be sure that you think through where you’ll be so you can have a productive time during the transitions e.g. as you wait. Trace your steps through transitions. If you find yourself in your car be sure to have your cell phone or something appropriate to listen to.

7. Seize The Day

After you’re done with your MITs for the day, you pick your next task by gaugin the time available/energy available. If you’re ambitious you can find another MIT, otherwise just slice and dice and get your task list down.

8. Start Planning

Before you leave for the day preplan (see the first section) the next day to get it going on the right foot.

As you see this schedule is rigid but allows flexibility. You may be going along one day doing your tasks and realize that the current task can be ATEd (automated, eliminated or delegated). If you spend some extra time now you’ll receive greater benefits in the future. You can then decide to schedule it for the next day or push off your next MIT to the next day and do the automation on the spot.

I used this flexibility to write this blog post. I started the base of this blog post as a reply to the conversation but as I kept writing I realized it was getting lengthy as there were some concepts I wanted to explain. Some may have quit and said there’s too much to write and not enough time allocated. Instead I took the extra time and it became the foundation for the blog post that I wrote later.

Have a productive day!

Photo credit: Maik Radke

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under Altomate & GTD & Goal & Layering & Review & Success & Think & productivity | 4 Comments »

Michael Jordan can beat you at a game of basketball without trying. Donald Trump can find a better real estate deal than you with just a few calls. Jeremy Schoemaker can make money on a web site faster than you with minimal effort (and get other people to promote for him for free). Skellie can get more subscribers for a new site in just 5 days than you can in a year of trying. So how do they do it? Why is it so easy for them? The answer is they built a machine.

In this article I’ll outline how you can build your own machine. The concepts are simple but the results are long reaching. Building the machine may require hard work to create a foundation, but once it’s built you can achieve success without really trying. Follow the four rules below and your machine will give you long term, self-perpetuating success.

Long Term

Is Trump smarter than you? Maybe, maybe not. But his machine is certainly better than yours for making real estate deals. Trump’s machine has many industry contacts to get him the right deals. It has his knowledge in evaluating deals. It has his financial backers allowing him to move on his deals. His machine has many parts to it that allow him to succeed almost automatically.

A machine is different than an experience. It’s built to have long term results. I may have bought a house once and certainly would have some knowledge of buying a house but I’m not setup to do deals consistently. It’s more than just being smart- anyone can take the time to read a book to get the essentials of success. It’s about building a foundation. It’s building the bank relationships. It’s building the industry relationships. It’s building a track record to make people want to invest in you. It’s building a staff that knows what needs to be done. It’s the mind set that this will be done more than once, so I should plan accordingly and not just get it done.

Quality

The Trump example doesn’t mean that you need to be big to build a machine. Being big can actually be detrimental if you don’t have your machine under control. Let’s take Skellie for example. Does she have a big organization behind her? No. Is Skellie a better writer than you? Probably, but not necessarily. She may be a good writer but there are probably a number of blogs that are better written than hers that don’t receive the attention she gets (I don’t have examples because those blogs don’t get attention so I haven’t seen them). So what is it that makes Skellie able to launch a site and instantaneously attract 1000 subscribers? It’s her machine of course. Her machine is her ability to use her creative talents and harness loyal readers. Her machine includes the loyal readers she built up at Skelliewag. It includes her contacts with other bloggers. You get the idea.

Building a machine requires a commitment to quality otherwise your machine will work against you and create problems instead of solutions. Success requires that you solve the problem. That you create a process to ensure quality. That you review your open commitments so items don’t slip. A well built machine does the same thing over and over again.

Skellie didn’t take shortcuts by sacrificing quality in her content. Quality takes constant introspection and improvements. For example, Skellie batches her writing to one day a week (in advance) and has a system to deal with writer’s block. Skellie has found the way to keep creating quality content and her machine helps her achieve success.

Self-Perpetuating

How does Paris Hilton have the resources to continue her escapades? Simple, she’s an heiress to the Hilton fortune. The money in her trust is her machine. The money that built her nest egg just keeps earning more money with little effort. Some people are lucky enough to take advantage of other people’s machines.

A machine simplifies a process and makes success self-perpetuating. It provides a road map to the future and provides the tools to get there faster. This is what makes Success Making Machine special. It’s not merely a few helpful tips, it’s something you can build on.

Enjoy It

Even when I’m old and grey, I won’t be able to play it, but I’ll still love the game.
Michael Jordan

I’ve always told people that to be successful you have to enjoy what you’re doing and right now I really enjoy what I’m doing. I’m having too much fun with my life. Why would I want to do something else? Why would I want to run for governor?
Donald Trump

Enjoy your work and you’ll never work a day in your life. If you asked Trump or Jordan to do what they do for free, they would. With dedication like that it’s no wonder they overcame the obstacles in their way.

You can build your machine to eliminate the tasks you don’t like. Machines can do the heavy lifting. I’m sure Trump isn’t interested in the nitty gritty of making his deal more tax effective, but people in his machine take care of that for him. Always enjoy the journey.

The Right Way to Build a Machine
Building a machine is a conscious decision to create a quality focused, automated system for the long term for something you enjoy. Using these principles helps you realize your efforts today can have huge long term ramifications that can improve your life. Once your machine is built you can just live on the interest- without really trying.

What kind of machine do you want to build?

Photo by: Coda

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under Eliminate & Enjoy & Goal & Principles & Success & Success Machine | 8 Comments »

What’s stopping you from achieving your dreams? For many people it’s simple, they haven’t verbalized their dreams. Without verbalization, dreams can’t happen. Others will fire back the usual dream, “I want to be rich and happy”. Having a dream is a step in the right direction but if you haven’t turned your dreams into actionable items and pursued it, that’s what it will remain- a dream but not reality. So how can you turn a dream into reality? There are 4 easy steps: verbalize the dream, set your goals, create a plan to turn that dream into reality and of course execute. In this part we will focus on verbalizing the dream.

Determining Your Dreams

One of the key points of the Success Making Machine (and how it enhances GTD) is that you are encouraged, dare I say required, to verbalize your dreams. In the dream phase you are picturing what success looks like. At this point, you can make them as unrealistic as you want or as generic as you want, even “I want to be rich and happy”. The more specific you are the more it will help you in the long run. One way to put some structure around your dreams is to verbalize dreams for each area of your life: career, financial, family, social, community, health etc .

Be Positive

When you are verbalizing your dreams- focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. For example, “I want to be rich” is more powerful than “I don’t want to be poor”.

Before you commit to a dream ask yourself if it’s really what you want. Picture your life with your dream achieved. You may find that it isn’t quite what you want. Growing up, many of us wanted to be sports/music or film stars. If you had the magic powers to have the talent for it would you still want it? Maybe you wanted the fun that went with being a baseball player but do you really want to play every single day for 10-20 years? Perhaps you may want it but do you want to keep up that rigorous travel schedule? How will this correspond with your goal of raising a family? So before you commit- think it through.

Buy into your dream

A dream should be something you truly want. Then set your energies to it. Your thoughts, beliefs and actions should be geared toward achieving this goal. You’ll need to believe this dream is possible. You don’t need to know all the details of how it will happen- just know that it will. As you continue to read through this series some of the next steps to success will crystallize. Some would call this the “Law of Attraction” (if you believe/act a certain way you will attract it). This site isn’t build on going into psychological tricks and unproven theories- it’s about logic and actions. Logic tells you if you believe something, invest yourself in it and your mind works toward achieving it, you will be more likely to succeed. You can call it karma- I’ll call it logic.

The Finale

Peter at I will change your life(which I recommend) has a well defined dream:

…to write a book that would help young people, or anyone really, find happiness and meaning in their life…

In the final part in this series I will outline how to use the lessons from this series to approach his dream.

What’s your dream?

Verbalize it and you’ll get closer to achieving it. Now that you’ve started to crystallize your dreams, in the next section we’ll talk about taking steps to achieve it. Subscribe to this feed to be notified when the next part of this series is posted.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under GTD & Goal & Success & Think | 6 Comments »

Completing a large project is difficult. You can go through a phase of requirement gathering, analysis and sign offs and still not anticipate everything that can go wrong. Plus the more time you spend on analysis the more likely the need changes. This is why large projects fail so frequently. The solution is Layering. The concept is simple: break the project into small parts, start small and “launch” frequently. Then add more layers of complexity on it. The advantage of layering is that you can see results quickly and adjust your plan to make your project more successful.

After identifying the desire to start this site I realized it would take months to set up and gather all the required content. That’s a long time. The solution launch quickly and often. Using the layering technique I did.

1. Identify the Goal
Every project must have a clear goal- if you don’t know where you’re going how do you know when you get there. The goal was to launch a site that conveys the best methodology to achieve success.

2. Start small
I determined the first step is to get a site up, outline the system and start explaining each of the concepts one at a time. If I would have waited to write all the content for all sections to explain the whole system it would have taken a long time. Further I wouldn’t be getting feedback from my readers along the way on tweaking the content. So this concept will actually make my end product better. I registered the domain and used blogger to get started.

3. Get better
I started adding some more content and filled out categories. But I soon realized that although blogger is good for blogging it’s not good for organizing information. The kind of information information needs a different tool. I evaluated Content Management Systems and dedcided on Joomla which I had used previously.

4. Tweak it
I tweaked the home page and site organization to make it easier to understand. I’ve added a Get Started page to make it easier to adopt the system. Then I added a game section to house all the fun exercises to teach the system.

5. Keep Layering
I keep adding more blog posts. Then I transform some of the small ideas from a post to the big idea for an article about the principles. I’ve come to a stable stage now, but i know that one day i’ll want to change my look and add logos and branding. But that isn’t important now as I’m building content and a community. So I’ll layer that later.

If you’ve noticed that some items in the blue print and principles aren’t built out yet, now you know why. Come back soon and they will be.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Posted by Heshy under Layering & Success | 1 Comment »