I might whine at the work I made for myself by ordering all my trees at once, but I felt pretty accomplished at the end.

Of course, I never would have finished before dark if I’d spent the day like so many of us spend our work days.

What if I’d stopped to read email a few times? Responded to a few Twitter conversations? Checked my feed reader for new blog posts? Answered instant messages? Googled questions that popped into my head? Checked Craigslist for *insert-random-thing-I’m-looking-for-this-week*?

Heck, I’d still be planting those trees right now.

The Dangers of Multitasking

I used to be proud of my ability to multitask. I felt very productive because I’d be typing 80 wpm and alt-tabbing from window to window, managing to keep a dozen balls in the air at a time.

And yet at the end of the day, I’d look back, and I wouldn’t be quite sure what I’d accomplished. I’d been busy, certainly, and I’d done a lot of work, but what sort of finished product did I have to show for it?

In our modern world, multitasking is the norm. Being busy is the norm. But as I’ve written before, there’s a big difference between being busy and being productive.

Busyness creates stress while productivity creates a feeling of accomplishment. Busyness makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel that never stops spinning while productivity makes you feel like a marathon runner with the finish line in sight. Busyness makes time fly in a holy-smokes-I-was-supposed-to-finish-that-today-and-it’s-already-11:30-at-night way while being productive means looking at the clock and being pleasantly surprised at how much you got done.

Okay, enough of that busyness. Let’s get productive.

Four Tips for Becoming More Productive (and less busy)

I realized the error of my multitasking ways more by accident than by insight. When I started having trouble with repetitive stress injuries and it hurt even to type, I had to figure out a way to make a living without sitting at the keyboard for 8 or 12 hours a day. Because I could only spend about an hour at the computer, I was forced to make the most out of that hour.

How?

Let’s start with the obvious…

1. Stop chatting all day

Like I said, it’s obvious. But because we like to justify it as “networking,” especially now with the social media marketing craze, chatting remains a huge time sink for many of us.

It’s hard to focus on anything when new messages are constantly inundating you. Also, the pressure to reply to everyone and give everyone on your ever-expanding “friends list” a piece of your time is a big stress creator. Want to fail as a blogger, writer, internet marketer, etc.? Get burned out, so you decide to stop altogether.

I’m not going to tell you to stop Twittering, Stumbling, Digging, IMing, etc., but if you often find yourself wondering where your days went, it’s worth doing the math and seeing how much you’re really getting out of your networking efforts. Consider analyzing your traffic logs to see which social efforts are giving you returns and which aren’t worth the time.

Again, I’m not going to say you should stop all forms of online communication, but as far as networking goes, you’ll probably get more out of a local mastermind group that meets once a month than hundreds of hours spent on Twitter. If you do want to continue networking (or just chatting) online, then consider doing it at the end of the day, or after you’ve accomplished something concrete. Make it the dessert after a healthy meal.

And for those who may be wondering… yes, it’s entirely possible to make a living online without talking to anyone. SEO + Adsense got me there. Maybe I’d be richer if I’d networked along the way, but I make enough, and I have a lot of free time. It’s hard to beat that.

2. Brainstorm ahead of time

By necessity, I started figuring out what to write about before I sat down at the computer. Personally I find that walking the dog, swimming laps, or running can make for fabulous brainstorming sessions. Maybe it’s that sense of forward momentum you get when your body is in motion: your mind naturally wants to go forward too.

If you already know what you’re going to write about when you sit down, the words flow easily. You don’t waste time scanning your feed reader or clicking from search result to search result looking for inspiration.

3. Focus on one task at a time

Perhaps the biggest “oh, duh” moment I had was when I realized multitasking wasn’t as efficient as focusing on one task until it was finished.

You may have laughed when I told you I didn’t send answer any emails while I was digging holes for my trees, since that would have been pretty hard unless I had my laptop out in the yard with me. But that’s kind of the point. If you remove yourself from temptation (in my case, the Internet), you’ll find it’s a lot easier to stay focused on one task.

While some of your work may require being online for research, there comes a point where you need to just sit down and create output. The fewer distractions around, the easier it is to stay on task.

If you’re writing, try taking your laptop to a coffee shop that (brace yourself) doesn’t have wifi. If you don’t have a laptop, grab a notepad and go to the library or the park or wherever you can be by yourself without distraction for a time.

It’s amazing how much you can get done in an hour if there’s nothing else to do.

I always laugh at the folks who suggest ancient monolithic structures were built by aliens. They were just built by people who didn’t have tv, internet, books, or any other modern distractions inundating them day in and day out! (Okay, being royalty and having tons of slaves probably helped.)

4. Give yourself one project a day

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you have to do this and get that done and get this posted and don’t forget about that. You end up with a huge to-do list, and it takes you as long to create the list as it does to actually do something. And half the time, there’s no way in a reality-based world you’d get all these things done in a day anyway.

What if you just gave yourself one key thing to get done for the day and decided to be happy with that?

That’s what I started doing, and lo and behold… it works.

Try it. Give yourself one main thing to do, and when it’s done, you know that you’ve accomplished something. Then you can go onto other smaller tasks if you want (no pressure to finish them since you got The One Thing done) or take the rest of the day off.

You might just be surprised at how much you can get done over the weeks and months with the One-Task-a-Day approach.

Today’s task was this blog post. And now that I’m done… time to go write for fun.

What about you? Do you have any suggestions for folks who are struggling to be less busy and more productive?

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How to Be More Productive (and less busy)

The Difference Between a Dairy Farmer and a Cattle Rancher

A dairy farmer raises cows in order to milk them daily and profit from the milk.

A cattle rancher raises cows in order to slaughter them and profit from the meat.

For a dairy farmer, a cow must be fed and cared for and raised to adulthood. It then lives for many years, producing milk day in and day out. All you have to do to continue getting that milk is toss in some food for the cow and spend a few minutes each day milking it (you can even get machines to milk the cow for you!).

For a cattle rancher, a cow is fed and cared for and raised to adulthood… and then slaughtered. Short-term, the rancher makes good money on the sale of the meat, but for the next week, the next month, the next year, no more money comes in. The rancher must go through the whole process of raising a cow again in order to profit again.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a dairy farmer. Not only is there less blood involved, but you get to keep your asset alive and well, generating a steady income for you day in and day out.

Dairy farmers and cattle ranchers in the world of writing

You can probably think of ways people act as cattle ranchers or dairy farmers with their writing.

For example, a freelance writer is like a cattle rancher. She spends time finding a client, she spends time researching the topic, and then she spends time writing the article. When everything is done, she sells the article and gets paid once for the work. Usually the rights are sold along with the words, meaning she can’t profit from that particular article again.

Another example of a cattle rancher is someone who flips websites. I’ve noticed that “site flipping” has become popular of late (or at least selling products on how to flip sites has become popular). This is where you put in the time to build up a basic blog or site, write some content for it, get some links to it, and then sell it once it becomes profitable.

If you sell your asset, you can usually make more money upfront than if you kept it (a cow’s worth of steaks doubtlessly brings you more than a pint of milk). This is where people lose their way. They chose immediate financial gain over long term cash flow. As the saying says, they don’t do the math.

If you sell the cow and make $1,000, that’s a good deal of money. But what if you kept the cow, and it produced $5 worth of milk a day, and it lived for 10 years? That would be $1,825 a year and $18,250 for the lifetime of the cow!

Your writing can do exactly the same thing.

But what if you invest your money?

This is the argument the cattle rancher type invariably makes. What if I sold the cow and invested the money? Couldn’t I get rich that way?

Here’s my response to that argument:

How many people do you actually know who are financially independent thanks to saving and investing money in stocks and bonds?

I’m willing to bet it’s not very darned many. The slick talkers on Wall Street (AKA the people who make money by taking a share of your investment money) like to talk about how much the market increases every year and how much you can make with compound interest, and yada, yada, yada.

At the end of the day, very few people make enough to be financially independent this way. And they’re never truly secure. Their financial fates rest on complex markets and companies they have no control over.

Just look at what the stock market has been doing lately. My parents are of the retirement age, but there’s no way they can do so right now. They invested all along as they were told, but their portfolios are way down right now. And chances are things are going to get worse for a lot of people before they get better.

Now that you’ve dredged your mind trying to think of people who have truly gotten rich in the stock market by investing and diversifying and following the Wall Street propaganda, think about the people you know who are financially independent and maybe even rich.

The people I know who fall into that category have all gotten there by buying and holding rental properties or starting their own businesses (or both). They’ve made their money–and created true financial independence–by owning and controlling assets that create positive cash flow every month.

Real estate is one way to create financial independence, and building a business is another. What’s the third?

Create something and get paid by royalties, licensing fees, advertisers, etc.

Traditionally, for writers, our only route was to write a book and hope it was picked up by a publisher and hope people bought it.

Today the internet makes it much easier for us to turn our words into profitable intellectual property that we own and control. Blogs, books, ebooks, subscription newsletters, membership sites, e-courses… we can do it all without querying agents or appealing to publishers.

It’s entirely possible to get started with nothing but your time and a few bucks for webhosting (heck, you can even start on a freebie blog site if you need to).

By investing in assets you own and control, you create security you don’t have when you’re investing in someone else’s company. Also, you don’t worry about retiring. As soon as you get to the point where your assets are earning you more money than you spend each month, you’re financially independent.

It took me about three years to get to that point, and that was with working at it part time.

Of course, everyone is going to have different results (some people who aren’t as lazy as I am have done it a lot faster, and others take longer to find a route that works for them), but if you work toward creating ongoing cash flow, instead of getting paid a dollar’s wages for a dollar’s work (or raising a cow and sending it to the slaughter house), you can become financially independent a lot sooner than if you set 10% aside and invested it in the stock market each month.

How to be a dairy farmer (create profitable intellectual property assets) with your writing

This whole site is about building assets that create cash flow, so it’s hard to condense all the good stuff into one post, but here’s my attempt at the brief version:

1. Keep the rights to your writing and publish in a model that lets you get paid again and again — If you sell your work to someone else, you get paid once. If you keep your work, you can publish it in a way that you get paid again and again. One way is to write books and/or digitally delivered information products that let you get paid every time someone buys them. The route I’ve taken is to build websites and blogs and charge merchants to advertise–no one buys anything from me, but it averages out to me making money every time someone reads one of my articles.
2. Build up a fan base — Anyone can write and publish a book, but if no one buys it, then you’re not going to make anything. If you use a mailing list to build up a fan base you can contact any time, then you’ve got a ready-and-waiting group of people who will buy your products or visit your blog posts whenever you publish something new. It’s a lot easier to sell products to people who are fans than to try to sell to strangers.
3. Start a blog — Right now, there’s just no better way to find those fans than by starting a blog. It’s a way to attract your target audience, establish your authority, and build something that will become an asset in and of itself. You can make money directly from your blog (i.e. by selling advertising or promoting affiliate programs), or you can use your blog as a way to attract people who will buy your books, information products, etc.
4. Write what people want to read — This is huge. A lot of writers flounder because they’re writing about what they want to write about. Figure out what people want to read about and write that. Writing for profit is just like starting a business. It can’t be about you; it has to be about your customers. That doesn’t mean you have to “sell out.” Chances are there are places your interests intersect with the wants and needs of a potential audience. Popular topics are making money, diet/health, and finding love. Of course you can find other topics to write about–just make sure there is an audience before you sink too much time into creating an asset.

Those are the basics, and if you know that, you know more than most.

Now, for all you freelance writers out there who have your hackles up over being accused of slaughtering cows, let me finish by saying, I know we all live in the real world here. We have bills that need to be paid today. We can’t spend five years without pay in order to build up our assets. And I’m not telling you to.

However, what you can do is keep the “day job” and in your spare time work on building assets that produce cash flow. This is where true financial independence comes from.

Good luck, everyone!

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How to Create Financial Independence with Your Writing (AKA Be a Dairy Farmer, Not a Cattle Rancher)

A lot of the “secrets” of success are applicable whether you’re swimming for gold or you’re trying to build long-lasting wealth and create financial independence.

Here are a few “lessons” I jotted down while watching the games last night, and I would love to hear any others that come to your mind.

There’s No Such Thing as an “Overnight Success”

In the Olympics, it’s clear that there are no overnight success stories. All the athletes who compete have spent years, and maybe even decades, of mental and physical training to master their sports and get into the shape necessary to win.

For some reason, though, people think it’s possible to be an overnight success in other venues in life, whether that be succeeding at business, building financial independence, or becoming a best-selling author.

The truth is that we merely perceive of people as instant successes because we hadn’t heard of them until they seemingly came out of nowhere to leap into the public eye. Look into the histories of those “overnight successes” and you’ll find that they spent years learning their trade before they got that lucky break (and you know what they say about luck: the harder you work, the luckier you are!).

When you’re building wealth, this is especially true: success comes to those who invest time in educating themselves and who repeatedly take purposeful action.

Great Athletes Have Great Coaches

In sports, it’s a given that you’ll have a coach, whether you’re striving for Olympic gold or playing in the peewees. And when you listen to interviews with successful entrepreneurs, you’ll always hear them speak of great mentors in their lives. Even in the world of writing, you’ll find most authors have lists of people in their acknowledgements, often those who helped or mentored them along the way.

And if your goal is to build long-term wealth-generating assets, rather than simply working in a job for the rest of your life, you too will find it advantageous to have a coach.

Does that mean hiring some guru for hundreds of dollars an hour? I suppose it could, but it could also mean something as inexpensive as reading books, blogs, and forum posts from folks who are where you want to be. Let me emphasize the last part: only take advice from people who are where you want to be. (There are a lot of broke people out there who are perfectly willing to give–or even sell–you advice on how to make money.)

Winners Take Risks

If you watch the sports like gymnastics, you’ll probably find yourself gawking at the incredible maneuvers these people can do–all while risking falling off their chosen apparatus. Every Olympics, the bar is raised, and athletes have to push themselves to new extremes, risking absolute failure in order to achieve the greatest heights. If they don’t take those risks, there’s no chance of ending up on the medal stand (or even making the Olympic team).

In the world of finance, it’s easy to play it safe, by working for someone else, getting paid a steady and “secure” salary, and investing in retirement accounts, but anyone who has built true wealth will tell you that’s not the way to ensure golden years without lack. People who play it safe with their careers and their investments are unlikely to even beat out inflation; people who focus on building assets–whether through real estate, starting a business, or creating bodies of work that earn royalties and advertising dollars–have no limits on what sort of wealth they can accumulate.

It’s the difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. One path involves more risks, but the rewards are worth it, for that’s the route that can earn you the gold medal in the form of the financially secure and independent lifestyle you want.

What do you think? Are there any other lessons we should take away from the Olympics?

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

What the Olympics Can Teach Us About Building Wealth