The Shotgun Approach To Dealing With Indecision

What do you do when you reach one of those places where you’re just not sure what to work on? You know what I mean - a window of time, maybe three to four hours opens up - and though you can work on anything, you’re at a loss for what to work on next?

Help! What Do I Do?
A lot of people react to this situation in a typical way - they just kind of freeze up. Since it’s not obvious what should be worked on, and since there are so many competing priorities … sometimes nothing gets done at all. Maybe it’s because they spend time analyzing “the best” course of action. Maybe it’s because, unable to choose a big priority to focus on, they do something relatively unimportant.

Who knows. But if you’ve been in one of these spots, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Big important things don’t get done because of indecision and self-imposed time pressure. So what’s an achiever to do?

Give Your Schedule Both Barrels
One solution is to use the “shotgun approach.” A shotgun shoots pellets in a spread pattern, covering a much wider range of fire than a simple pistol. Now, I’m not saying if you’re stuck for what to work on load up a real firearm … but what you can do is shotgun your schedule.

Instead of choosing one or two major things to work on, set a wide range of tasks that spread over many different areas of life that will only take 15, 20 or 30 minutes each. Maybe you hammer out a blog entry, file that small stack of paperwork in your briefcase, make 3 phone calls, and whatever other set of small tasks you can think of to hit as many areas of life that you can reasonably cover.

“The Peace Of The Done.”
While this won’t advance you much in any particular direction it will do one thing - it will get you going. It will start greasing the wheels of productivity and leave you with that feeling that you now have less to do than you did before, and that is a good feeling, my friend. The kind of feeling that helps you get more focused on the things you really do need to be working on now, so you can take action with the confidence that comes with clarity.

So, if you reach a point where you’re not sure what “the best” course of action is, shotgun your schedule and just start doing small meaningful tasks as quickly and consecutively as you can. You’ll soon break out of that spot you’re stuck in and put yourself into a better position to move forward in the long term. Give it a shot. You’ll thank yourself for it.

- Dave Navarro

How To Make Yourself Really, Really Want To Take Action

There are countless ways to try to overcome procrastination, but one little strategy I use is something I have to share with you because it works so well for me. It lights a fire under me almost every time I use it, even if I’m starting out from a state of complete “blah.” Would you like to know how to apply it? It will take about ten seconds to use once you understand the concept.

First Things First: Remember, Time Is Money
How much is your time worth? If you’re not sure – or if you’ve ever really considered it – then you need to take a long hard look at why you’re even in business in the first place. When you work, you either trade your time (now) for money (now), or you’re working on building future income.

It’s easy to value your time if you’re getting paid right away. If you get $25 an hour for every hour that you show up for work, the motivation is simple because it’s in your face. But if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s not always so simple. When you have to do product development, copy writing, and marketing before you see a dime, it can become more difficult to get yourself to focus and take action on what you need to do.

But time, indeed, is money. So if you haven’t figured out your worth-per-hour (or potential worth), stop reading and do it now. If you’re totally unsure, just think of how much money you’d like to reasonably make per hour of serious work on your business. Is it $25? $50? $100? Whatever you feel you’re worth, put a dollar value (or, of course, your home country’s currency) on it now.

If you’re a very serious entrepreneur, you need to consider that to be at minimum a three-digit number (or at least a very high two-digit one). Let’s assume for this example that your time is worth $100 per hour.

Now, How Much Money Did You Forfeit Just Now?
This is where the tough question comes in. How much time have you wasted today due to procrastination, disorganization, or whatever? How much non-productive time did you tolerate? Think seriously about this number and multiply it by your hourly rate, and it will probably scare you. I know it scares me.

If you’re worth $100 and you wasted 15 minutes of time surfing the web when you should have been building your business, that’s $25 you’ve just flushed down the toilet. It’s money you’re never going to see. And that half-hour you can’t account for today? $50. By the end of the day this can add up to a lot of money, even if you value your time far less than $100.

Keep That Price Tag In Front Of You
At the time I’m writing this, I charge $125 per hour of consulting. So when I realize that I’ve let myself slipand I’ve wasted 30 minutes getting sidetracked or doing an “okay” task rather than my best task for the moment … I realize that I’ve just blown a little over $60. When I break it down further, I have to face the fact that the real value comes out to about $2 per minute. And that hurts when I have to face up to the fact that I spent x number of those $2 minutes in the land of the not-so-focused.

And you better believe that a realization like that lights a fire under me. When I realize that I’ve been procrastinating, or getting diverted, distracted or derailed, I ask myself “Am I really willing to blow $2 a minute on this?” You see where I’m going here.

You Set Your Value (And Boy, Do You Believe It)
The key to all this is that you have to get in the habit of asking yourself this question constantly. You have to keep it running in the background all the time so that it ill become an ingrained belief - a fact of reality rather than just wishful thinking. When I started out with this I set my Outlook to pop up a reminder every 15 minutes and it worked like a charm. Find out what method works for you best and start building this habit. Learn how to value you time and you’ll want to take so much more action than you’re taking now. So put this into practice. Do it now. You’ll thank yourself for it.

- Dave Navarro

Honoring Your Schedule (How to Meet Deadlines Faster)

On a coaching call today I got the question, “How do I make sure I meet deadlines faster and more consistently when I seem to get bogged down in the individual tasks of my projects?” The answer is a simple one, but it requires building some new disciplines. Fortunately, you’re not afraid to do what it takes to get to your goals faster, so here’s a summary of my answer:

Honor Thyself
David Allen (Getting Things Done) is absolutely right in the end of his book when he says that a lot of our stress and procrastination comes from the fact we often break agreements with ourselves. We say that we’re going to do all of these things, but then things get “in the way,” or we lose motivation, or we flat out don’t give it all we’ve got. And that does nothing to help your productivity.

To pull yourself out of that slump, you’ve got to start respecting and valuing your time more so you an honor more of those commitments to yourself.

Respect = Follow Through
Think about this: If you make a commitment to someone - say you tell them you’ll meet with them Tuesday at 5 - you tend to follow through. You do this because you want to show the you respect them (It would be rude not to show for your appointment). But every commitment you make to yourself is basically an appointment with yourself - but we don’t tend to think twice about breaking those.

Well, it’s time to start thinking twice. if you’re facing discipline issues, when you build your schedule you need to treat each task like appointments with different people. In other words, when you show up to an appointment, give your full attention to the person (task), and when the time comes, you say goodbye to the first person (task) and move on to the next one. If you haven’t finished up with the first person (task), you immediately set another appointment to continue later.

Again, this makes sense when dealing with people (you wouldn’t just keep hanging out with the first person and ignore meeting with the second one). But the shift here is thinking this way about your tasks.

Which Would Motivate You More?
People may balk at this at first, because it seems to go against the idea of “flow” - getting into a groove of high productivity and not stopping to do anything else ’till you’re done. But that’s the advanced stage of productivity, that’s not what we’re talking about here. This is how to handle things when you go from day to day not getting into flow much at all.

Imagine this situation: You have four tasks to complete today, each of which you estimate will take you two hours. Seems easy enough. You start in on task #1 and realize after an hour that the task is going to take a lot longer than you thought - either because you underestimated the task, or you’re honestly not giving it your complete focus (be honest if this is the case).

Now, what if you tell yourself, “I’ll stick with task one till I get it done …” and after a full workday you’re still on it. Now you’ve totally skipped out on making progress on tasks two through four and you likely look at your day as a failure, because you’re behind. How motivated do you think you’d be to work hard on the other tasks?

But what if …
But what if you handled it differently - if you said to yourself up front, “Listen, here’s the deal. You have two hours to work on each of these tasks. Whatever you don’t get done you have to stay late and do, so you’d better give 200% while you’re working in each time block.” Don’t you think you’d be more motivated? You know you would.

You’ve already experienced this before. Think back to the time when you left your term paper to the last day and “suddenly” found the ability to focus and execute like mad to get the job done. And you stayed late ’till it was all finished.

Or think of a time your boss came in an said, “I need this by the end of the day,” and throws you an eight hour task when you’ve only got four. But you still managed to get it done because you got insanely focused on meeting that commitment.

When you do that to yourself - when you say, “Hey, if you don’t get this done now, you’re staying late,” you open yourself up to a higher level of focus. You’re guaranteed to get more done than if you just gave it “your best shot.”

The Double Bonus
And here’s the great part. Even if you underestimated all your tasks, and the end of the day you have four tasks that are only halfway finished (which will happen a lot), you’ve accomplished two things.

First, you’ve honored your commitment, so you feel good about yourself. That in itself goes a long way to building your motivation and creating the “procrastination antibodies” that will help you in the future.

Second, you’ve made across the board progress, so your motivation levels get boosted again. In the first scenario, you were behind in three tasks and (maybe) done with one. In the second scenario, you’re approaching the finish line on everything - so you’re much more likely to schedule the time to finish the and really follow through on it.

So Give It A Shot
Now it’s time to put he rubber to the road. Give this a shot for the next few days and witness what it does to your productivity. It may feel uncomfortable switching gears and “staying late” if you have to, but that’s a good thing.

Being uncomfortable means you’re moving away from your comfortable habit and into something greater. So give it a shot today. You’ll thank yourself for it.

- Dave Navarro

Three Simple Cheats To Free Up Five Hours This Week

Keep the questions coming. I received a response to yesterday’s post asking a good question: “I want to score a quick win, but how do I manage that when I don’t have the time?” Lucky for you, Jon, I’ve got three easy ways to recover time you didn’t know you had. These three ‘cheats’ will get you on your way.

Cheat #1: Consciously decide to cut one hour of “crap” out of your schedule.
Guess what? You (and everybody else on this planet, myself included) spend time doing stuff that has little to no bearing on our quality of life long-term. So bite the bullet and declare war - or at least a guerilla attack - on that this week.

Do you watch television? Tape or Tivo five hours this week and save it for later. Do you read for fun? Ditch the novels for a week. Do you web surf aimlessly? Call it quits for just one week. Except for the part where you come to this blog, of course.

The point here is that you’re not making a “major life change” here - you’re just taking a quick pause to focus tactically on something important to gain back five hours. You can always catch up on this low-priority stuff next week (though you may find that getting more done is more satisfying enough to repeat the experiment next week).

Regardless, you’re blowing time somewhere. Free it up and take it back for a week.

Cheat #2: Take a half-day off of work.
It blows my mind how many of the people I coach never thought of this one. Most of them even have a lot of vacation built up because of heavy schedules. The concept of taking a half-day off to nail a tactical goal can be a weird shift in thinking. But it’s a great way to free up time.
But hey, you take time off to go to the doctors, or to get your car worked on … why not do it for your personal or business goals? Chances are, the world won’t end if you take a half day (and your lunch time to make five hours total). And since it’s just a half day, it won’t bust your vacation balance.

But the best part of this tactic is it automatically focuses you. Hey, you’re burning vacation time so you know up front that you better not be wasting it! That pressure keeps your nose to the grindstone.

Cheat #3: Get up earlier and love it.
Okay, you might consider this a shameless plug. But the truth is, getting up earlier isn’t hard to do if you do it with a little finesse. If you could trim forty-five minutes off of your sleep time per day you’d have those five hours in no time.

Jon, I hope you take this advice to heart - and I hope all the rest of you out there reading this put it to good use as well.

All the best,

Dave Navarro

Have You Hit The Ground Running Yet?

It’s January 1 again. Presumably, you have big plans for this year - not only to attack new and juicy goals, but also to kick the living daylights out of the goals you “fully intended” to knock out last year.

Hopefully, you’ve already hit the ground running and have already knocked out a good number of positive, goal-advancing actions today. If so, then high-five to you.

If not, then you need to get serious about this upcoming year. Make no mistake, this first, crucial week will set the tone for the entire rest of the year. Success breeds success. Momentum needs to start building somewhere.

If you’re not taking this first week seriously, if you’re operating from the “hey, the year is still young” perspective, then you need a swift kick. Don’t let this golden opportunity to start making massive progress pass you by.

Whatever you do, whatever your goals, make this first week count. Push yourself, give 200%, face your fears, and all that other happy ****. Don’t accept any excuse from yourself for not giving this first week all you’ve got.

Chances are you know exactly what you can do right now to score a “quick win” and start building momentum for this year. Don’t schedule it for tomorrow - do it today. Score a win, right now. You’ll thank yourself for it.

- Dave Navarro