Productivity Voice

“If you are not checking the map, you risk never reach your destination.”
– Augusto Pinaud

It had always impress me how little people check their goals, (I am even more impressed with those that don’t even write them down or don’t even had any) the reality is that what it is the use of writing them down to review them once a year. It is exactly that reason why many of those goals are never accomplished. Think about the following: If you are traveling on a car to a place you are not familiar, you check the map constantly. Why don’t do the same with your goals?
Like many, I have goals for the next twelve to eighteen months as well as things I want to accomplish in the next five years, but I am not waiting fro 2018 to check the list and see if I am actually there, I check them constantly to make sure I am moving in the right direction.
Before I begin my weekly review, the first thing I do is review this goals, I spend some minutes to think about them, why are they important, and why I want to accomplish them. The reason is simple, I want to guarantee that the projects I am working on are the ones I should be working on, in other words, those projects are getting me closer to my goal, otherwise, why I am working on those.
The next time you do your weekly review, begin checking your goals, from there begin your revision. Simply you will be able to see which projects get you closer to your goals and which ones not. Which projects you should eliminate and which ones you should add. You can’t expect this is going to happen in other way.
Most people, hope to accomplish their goals, but forget that in order to make this possible, they need to know they are taking the right steps. How to know your steps are right? How can we know if they are going to help us get closer to our goals? For me the answer is simple, remembering which ones are they, constantly.
Think about the following, you do the weekly review, so you are on top of the important. You do the weekly review to remind yourself of all the pending things that you will forgot otherwise. But you do it without any direction and you hope that the actions that you are going to take will take you to a place that you review every three, six or more months. You want to accomplish your goals, review them constantly.
My recommendation, review them before you begin your weekly review, so when you are doing it, don’t hope to find critical stuff, but you could identify without any doubt which ones are taking you in the direction you want to go. Review the map, constantly, so you don’t forget the direction you are going and where you want to go.
Stop hoping that your weekly review will take you to your goals and begin directing it towards those.

I include this tip in my book 25 Tips for Productivity, and it is one of those things that are interesting. The principle is simple, if you have the cash flow, and someone can do a job cheaper than you, simply pay for it.
People tend to think that they are the cheapest option, and doing that they convert many tasks into really expensive ones. If you can produce $20 on an hour of work, and there is a task that can be done by other person for $10, and you choose to do it yourself, guess what it is not a $10 task any longer, you just made it a $20 one. Understand how much is an hour of your time, anything bellow that point, simply paid for it.
i.e. Also take into the equation preparation as well as cleaning time. Paint a room may feel like an hour activity, but getting the room ready may take another hour. Really that’s a two hour job. Get your rate, times two. If the quote is less that that, simply pay.

Most people I know don’t have a clear purpose for money, most rich people do.
You want a million dollar to buy a car? a house? quit your job?
Most people get into the working force and begin making money just to make money, hoping that someday some number of zeros in the savings and checking account will make them happier. They go and work sixty to eighty hours a week just to be unhappy.
Do you want money to travel the world? Help the poorer? Own your home? Have a home in each country in the world? Buy cars? Why do you want money.
Until you discover that, all the money in the world, will just make you as unhappy as no money at all. The only difference may be that you will be eating Caviar and Champagne, and maybe even didn’t even like it.
i.e. Once I work on discover my purpose for money, a lot of things change, for me travel is one of those things, and I hope that soon my wife and I will begin traveling soon. I also want money so I can provide with my kids education without debt. I would love to give them as a graduation present, a zero debt education.

Do you continue getting exited when you listen: “The Macarena” or “We are the World”? most likely, you skip those every time you listen to those in your iPod. (I would too)
You don’t delete them because when you sit in the computer you are not going to search among the million of songs and you for sure don’t remember now which ones they where.
You can create in iTunes an smart list that will aggregate songs that you skipped. Next time that you sync your iPod to iTunes they will be there. Then you can choose delete them or unmark them so they don’t sync (assuming you have so iTunes only sync check songs.)
Next time you skipped “The Macarena” you will finally be over to delete it for good…

 

– I am worried… really worried…
÷ Are you going to do something?
– What do you mean?, I am doing something, you are not listening to me?, I am worrying…

This is what most people do about worry. I have been guilty more times that what I am willing to admit it, but worrying just for worrying accomplish nothing. You can spend years worrying, the only thing you are going to produce is stress, anguish, and more worry.
Your other option is to spend fifteen minutes doing something to change that thing that worry you, you may even found a solution.
i.e. We all worry, I do, constantly. I need to remind myself constantly of this, stop worrying and begin doing. I had discover that I get better results doing than worrying, for that reason I do a big effort on stop worrying, and continue doing.

I love when people said that everything it is a priority. In my experience, when everything is a priority nothing is.
The reality is that you can only have one Top Priority. At a given moment, only one thing can be a priority. If you think otherwise, you really don’t know which one is your priority, therefore you think everything is.
That doesn’t mean that priorities can’t change from one moment to the next, only means that if you compare two or more things, only one can have the highest priority, otherwise, none of them are.
Imagine for a moment, what it is your higher priority right now. What are you doing towards that priority? Do you have a conflicting priority? Notice that if when you answer the question of what it is your Higher Priority you though on more than one thing, honestly you need to sit and really think which one is the real priority, you can only have ONE HIGHEST PRIORITY, otherwise, you have none.
When I publish my latest book NO, my highest priority was that book, until was ready for sale, nothing else. I didn’t had twenty other higher priorities, I had one, that book.
We confuse, important things, and things we need to do with our higher priority, and it is that confusion that generate that really any of them get to be really our higher priority.
Think about it, if everything it is your higher priority, nothing is.

We are back to the focus read a book per month during 2013.
Our January Challenge was: “The War of Art by Steven Pressfield” and I hope you took it.

This month I bring a different kind of book. The book for February is a Walt Disney Biography, called: “Who was Walt Disney”

You may or may not be a Disney fan, but you can't deny that Walt Disney was not only a great dreamer but also someone who was able to create a business that last way past his life and time. More importantly, Disney was someone that failed, but got up, again and again.

Here is the link to the Who Was Walt Disney? “>book on Amazon (Affiliate Link).

We all have low days. Some people have them more often that the world actually is aware. That it is a fact of life. So you have two options, weep for hours or days; or remind yourself of the fantastic stuff you have accomplished.
This is more than just a list of stuff, it is not enough to have, wrote book, magazine cover. That will not do in a low day. Mine read:
– Wrote 25 Tips for Productivity that was on the Amazon Best Seller List for more than 150 days!
– Got Featured on Productive Magazine! on the cover of Issue 14
See the difference, this need to be written to lift your spirit. This is so you get reminded of the great stuff you had accomplished. Regardless how small seems, we all have Victories and Accomplishments, that may seem small today, but where big when we did, and we need to be reminded of them, as often as we need.
i.e. I have a Law Degree that was useful to get an MBA. I discover I didn’t want it to be a Lawyer in the middle. I really want it to quit, do something else, anything else. I am proud that I finish it. I don’t want to practice, I am not interested, but I consider an accomplishment that I finish my degree and move on.

Xmas already? Wait, wasn’t that on December? ok, it was.
I don’t remember when I create this list, but if you are like me, you struggle with presents. I am awful, I hate go to the shopping mall. Go Shopping and Go to the Dentist are at the same level of things that I avoid like the plague.
I learned many years ago that I could write down all that stuff that you see and think that someone will love, but that it is too early to buy. For example, if my wife said that she wants an X, I write it down. I may or may not ever get it, but it is great to have it in the list.
Same works for my daughter, nephews and nieces, (I think my wife is the only adult I gave presents to, as a general rule I only give presents to kids) a soon as we think on a present I added to the list. When the time is right (birthdays or X-mas for example) I just pull out the list.
i.e. That’s one of the reasons I finish my X-mas shopping so fast, after thanksgiving in the US, I open the lists, go to Amazon and buy all the stuff I will need. It is fast and effective. Because in general I have twelve months or more feeding this list, doesn’t take that much and the suffering is little.

I remember those days that Scan a document in order to fax it to the approbate person was something so complicated and expensive.
I remember when I got that really cool and super portable NeatScan that fit in by bag and could scan one page at the time.
The first problem, is that my main machine is an iPad. My Backup, an iPhone.
For many, that means you are out of business, for me means install one application to solve that problem. It is a software called Scanner Pro. That it is my go to every time I need to scan a document, it works incredible well in both of my devices and I can email, sent to Evernote (my file cabinet this days), DropBox, or another server, Print even fax from the application.
I have been using this application for my scan needs for many months and honestly I don’t need anything else.
One of the things that I love about working on the iPad (and with the iPhone as a Backup) is that sometimes it feels like I am carrying the biggest Swiss Army knife in the pocket, but somehow, it seems feels like it is the smallest one.