The Way You Work Could Be Working Against You
Archives: Daily Issues
Issue #2227
- WEALTHY: Are you a workaholic? (Michael Masterson)
- HEALTHY: Get lean by increasing your GH (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Bill Gates on having a balanced life
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- A quick way to know who’s visiting your site (Rich Schefren)
- 10 little things Sarah loves about the holidays
- It’s Good to Know… why December 25?
- Add "boondoggle" to your vocabulary
The Only Three Ways to Grow a Business
Did you know that there are only three ways to grow a business?
1. Increase the number of customers.
2. Increase the average transaction value.
3. Increase the frequency of repurchase.
Find a way to maximize each one, and your business will experience an astonishing rate of growth.
In his "9 Pillars of Business Growth" program, acclaimed consultant Jay Abraham outlines hundreds of proven, frequently unrecognized, and almost totally underutilized ways to grow these three key areas of your business. If you own a business (or would like to), be sure to take a look at Jay’s program.
- Patrick Coffey
"Having kids has been a fantastic thing for me. It’s meant that I’m a little more balanced. In my twenties I worked massively, hardly took vacation at all. Now, with the help of my wife, I’m always making sure I’ve got a good balance of how I spend my time."
Bill Gates
The Way You Work Could Be Working Against You
"If I had more time, I’d have more fun," we tell ourselves. Or, "If I had more time, I’d knit/ paint/ write a novel/ [fill in the blank]."
Time is an equal opportunity provider. Every one of us, regardless of age, sex, race, or religion, has the same 24 hours a day. How we use those hours determines our success.
On the one hand, we know that working long, hard hours is a characteristic of most successful people. On the other hand, we understand that working that way gives us little pleasure and less time to pay attention to family, friendship, intellectual stimulation, etc.
"Workaholism is an addiction," Julia Cameron says in The Artist’s Way, "and like all addictions, it blocks creative energy." Cameron’s concern in the book is to find time for creative writing. But her advice is useful for anyone who is fighting his or her workaholic streak.
You can be successful in business without sacrificing personal relationships. You can make money and art too. You can accomplish your major goals in all of life’s four most important dimensions:
- Your health-building goals
- Your wealth-building goals
- Your social responsibilities
- Your personal aspirations
To do so, you’ve got to follow a productivity plan that recognizes (1) achieving any important goal takes time, (2) at any specific period of time in your life you must establish priorities and give primary attention to your top goals, (3) many of the problems prioritizing may cause can be limited by respectful scheduling and thoughtful communication, and (4) as opportunities change, so must your objectives.
You must also recognize that the way you work right now may be working against you. A workaholic pattern might help you accomplish your primary goal, but will usually leave your other goals in a shattered heap.
Begin, today, with this self-administered evaluation – from Julia Cameron – to help you figure out if you have workaholic habits. Answer "seldom," "often," or "never" to the following:
- I work outside of office hours.
- I cancel dates with loved ones to do more work.
- I postpone outings until the deadline is over.
- I take work with me on vacations.
- I take work with me on weekends.
- I take vacations.
- My intimates complain that I always work.
- I try to do two things at once.
- I allow myself free time between projects.
- I allow myself to achieve closure on tasks.
- I procrastinate in finishing up the last loose ends.
- I set out to do one job and start on three more at the same time.
- I work in the evenings during family time.
- I allow calls to interrupt – and lengthen – my workday.
- I prioritize my day to include an hour of creative work/play.
- I place my creative dreams before my work.
- I fall in with others’ plans and fill my free time with their agendas.
- I allow myself down time to do nothing.
- I use the word "deadline" to describe and rationalize my workload.
- I go everywhere, even to dinner, with a notebook or my work numbers.
"There is a difference between zestful work toward a cherished goal and workaholism," says Cameron. "That difference lies less in the hours than it does in the emotional quality of the hours spent. There is a treadmill quality to workaholism. We depend on our addiction and we resent it. For a workaholic, work is synonymous with worth, and so we are hesitant to jettison any part of it."
Your answers to Julia Cameron’s self-evaluation questions will give you a quick sense of whether you have a problem with workaholism. But don’t just test yourself. Do what I did. Ask a few members of your family, or a few friends, to answer those questions for you. You may be surprised by what you find out.
It can be hard to make time for your personal life when you’re trying to prove to your boss that you deserve a raise… when you’re busy building your business… or when you just plain love what you do. But don’t work so hard or so long that you neglect your family and friends. If you do that, you will eventually regret it.
Here’s how I keep myself from falling into that trap:
- I don’t take work home at night. I put in my time at the office, and then I come home… without my laptop and papers.
- I don’t take work home on weekends. If I want to put in a few extra hours on Saturday, I clear it with my family in advance. But, again, I don’t pull out the computer or papers in front of them. It sends the wrong message.
- Away from work, I try my best to stay "in the present." For me, this was the hardest lesson to learn, because my mind is always jumping from one topic (the story someone is telling me) to another (something related that happened at work). When I feel myself drifting – and it happens frequently – I pull myself back.
When I follow these rules, I am happier twice – at work and at home. I recommend that you do the same.
[Ed. Note: If you're a workaholic, you could benefit from learning how to break your goals into smaller, more manageable objectives. ETR's Total Success Achievement program can teach you how to accomplish all your goals - without neglecting your health, social life, or family. We're putting the finishing touches on our 2008 Total Success Achievement Program right now. So keep reading ETR for more details about how to make 2008 the year you accomplish all your dreams.]
Start 2008 With The Most Powerful Investing Strategies For Today’s Market
The media’s been pummeling the real estate market all year, but you don’t hear top investors complaining. They’re doing 6- and 7-figure deals every month, and thanks to the headlines they won’t have as much competition as usual in the coming year.
What’s their secret? They know the right way to buy and sell in today’s market. They’ve seen it all before, and know how to profit from the current storm. In fact, many of them made their initial fortunes in a market just like this one!
With the New Year approaching, there’s never been a better time for you to duplicate their success… even if you have nothing to invest or lousy credit. That’s partly because the biggest buyer’s market in 15 years is just getting under way. But it’s also because it’s time for our annual end-of-the-year closeout, where we blow out these investors’ most popular training products at bargain basement prices!
Click here to discover the secrets they’re using to make millions right now… and save up $2,165 with this exclusive, year-end deal!
Microsoft Predicts Demographics of Your Blog or Website
Website visitors. No matter how many you’ve got, you want more. To get more, you must know your market cold.
Sadly, most online entrepreneurs know more about their favorite sitcom characters than they do about their market. But there’s a painless way to make immediate progress in knowing your site visitors and customers better than you do now.
Last night, while surfing, I stumbled onto this nifty little demographics predictor from Microsoft. //adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx. All you have to do is type in your URL or keyword. (Sure beats analyzing analytics – but, unfortunately, it’s not a replacement.)
Anyway, once you hit "go," you’re greeted with a predicted male-female distribution of your site visitors, and a breakdown by age group. Something like this:
When you know these results, you can better tailor your articles, your blog posts, and your sales copy to the people who are visiting your sites most often. This tool is also helpful when you’re trying to determine what your next product should be. Plus, you can use it to tailor your advertisements to other sites. Just type their URL into the demographics predictor to find out who will see your ads.
[Ed. Note: Rich Schefren, president of Strategic Profits, is a business strategist and the coach to dozens of today's top Internet gurus. Rich has put together a free report that reveals how you can pull ahead of your competitors and position your business for invulnerability, pre-eminence, and market domination. Click here now to get his specific strategies.]
The Hormone That Controls Fat Loss
Growth hormone (GH) is touted as the fountain of youth and the best fat-loss drug available. There’s no shortage of anti-aging clinics trying to sell you on the injections or some miracle growth-hormone-promoting supplement. But what’s the truth behind growth hormone? Does it really work for fat loss and anti-aging?
Researchers from the prestigious Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA aimed to find out. So they administered it to a group of middle-aged, overweight men for six months.
On average, the men’s lean body mass increased by 5.5 pounds. Plus, they lost 8.8 percent of the body fat around their stomachs. Very impressive. The growth hormone therapy also increased their metabolism by 172 calories per day. That means if they burned only 2,000 calories per day before getting the GH, they burned 2,172 calories per day after getting it.
This study shows that growth hormone therapy can help you get lean. However, you can also increase your levels naturally. Start with strength training and interval training. This type of high-intensity exercise boosts post-exercise growth hormone levels, which is probably one reason it works so well for building muscle and burning fat.
[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne is the creator of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss system. If you want a free online source of information, motivation, and social support to help you improve your health, lose weight, and get fit, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.]
10 Little Things I Love About the Holidays
By Sarah Wade, Events Coordinator for ETR
1. Starbucks’ gingerbread lattes (Add a third shot of espresso and you’re set!)
2. Football season and the Redskins (Sometimes I’m referred to as Mrs. Chris Cooley. He may not acknowledge this, but I do.)
3. Lying underneath the Christmas tree after all the lights have been put on it and looking at the branches twinkle
4. That my birthday is 3 days before Christmas (I’m ALLOWED to be greedy for a few days.)
5. That the New Year is approaching and you get to start all over again
6. The Miller Lite holiday campaigns (and bottle designs)
7. The fact that every time I hear Mariah Carey’s Christmas album it reminds me of my roommate from college and makes me smile (My roommate started playing Christmas songs in October.)
8. That I have an excuse to wear knee-high boots
9. Christmas shopping… one for you, one for me
10. That I get to hang out with my little brother who isn’t so little anymore (He’s 6’3".)
It’s Good to Know: Why December 25?
Religious scholars agree that Jesus was probably not born on December 25. So why did early church leaders pick that date for His birthday?
One theory is that they were influenced by the solar symbolism of the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti ("birthday of the invincible sun"). The festival took place on December 25, the date of the winter solstice on the Julian calendar, and honored several sun gods and the annual rebirth of the sun.
(Source: About.com, Wikipedia; the Catholic Encyclopedia)
Turn A Single $100 Investment Into A $2,000-A-Week Profit Machine
In the next seven days, 4,589 people will leave their jobs, never go back… and have all the money they will ever need.
I would tell you that these people are “very lucky,” but the fact of the matter is that there is no luck involved.
It’s happening everywhere. Ordinary people – including people who never finished school – starting their own businesses… and making in the neighborhood of $40,000… $60,000… even $100,000 or more a year.
Even though all these people are “ordinary” in some ways, one thing is certainly “out of the ordinary” about them:
Many used the same secret to start a business on less than $100. You can do it, too. Here’s how.
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Boondoggle
A "boondoggle" (BOON-dah-gul) is an unnecessary or wasteful project or activity. The word was coined by a scoutmaster, Robert H. Link. Link’s boondoggle was a braided leather cord – a simple item still made by young Boy Scouts and campers. The word was later contemptuously applied to any "make-work" project.
Example (as used by Susann Cokal in a New York Times review of Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon): "In Michael Chabon’s gleeful new novel, a pair of 10th-century soldiers of fortune scramble up and down the trails and gorges of the Caucasus, engaging in a brawl or a boondoggle as regularly as they pause for a meal."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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