The easy way to develop your skills

People generally learn a range of skills when they’re at school/college/university. Then, for various reasons, some people stop learning. It might be initially frustrating, or they may think they lack motivation or opportunity so they stick with what they know.

But they’re missing out on a lot – often learning a new skill can blossom into an unexpected passion, introduce you to a whole new circle of people, push your career in a satisfying new direction or give you a whole new perspective on the world.

And it doesn’t have to be work-related skills – interests like learning a language, or how to cook, or how to appreciate art will enhance your life, and you never know where they might lead.

The easiest way to make this happen is to schedule your learning into your routine, perhaps just a little time, but regularly – that’s the secret. Just keep showing up – building your skills little by little.

You’ll look back in a year and realise you’re well on your way to mastery. And as well as your new skill, you’ll also have a great sense of satisfaction.

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Best productivity book of 2007

How to take action – the key to productivity

Life rewards action, not intention

Think about all the achievements in your life so far, the ones you feel most satisfied with. They don’t need to be grand things, anything that you are satisfied with will do.

Are they things you meant to do, or did you actually do them?

Of course you did them. Achievements are not our intentions – I’ve never seen a statue of a person with the caption ‘Joe Bloggs – he intended to lead the revolution’ – but are a result of actions taken on those intentions. Wealth comes from using your money to make more. Rewarding relationships grow from putting in the effort to keep them on track. Good health comes from exercising and eating right. And self esteem comes from achieving your goals.

Make time/opportunity

It may seem you don’t have the time or opportunity to take action but if you look carefully, you can make changes that will enable you to get more things done. Things like watching less TV, using your commuting time to learn a new language or rescheduling your exercise can work wonders – I found that I would never go to the gym after work, I was just too tired. Since I started running in the morning, it happens every day.

Break it down

Some goals may seem too large to start but if you break them down into actions, reaching them can become much simpler.

Recently I wanted to research investment properties in a new area.

I identified establishing relationships with Real Estate Agents as a key priority. To do that, I needed to phone them up and to do that, I needed to get their phone numbers.

So my first action was ‘Look up all relevant Real Estate Agents in the area in the Yellow Pages, and list names and numbers’. That was an easy five minute task – I collected the numbers and got onto the next task, calling each one of them to discuss what I was looking for. In two easy steps I was well on my way to achieving my goal.

Set a deadline

Having decided on an action, lock in a date and time for when to do it, otherwise it’s just an intention. If it helps, ‘make it public’ by telling someone else when you’ll do it – it’s harder to break a commitment to somebody else than one to yourself.

3 ways to take action

1. Stop intending. Don’t think about it, rationalise it, analyse it, deliberate over it or procrastinate about it – just do it. Develop an action mindset.
2. Make time. Adjust your schedule to make time for your actions and reduce activities that prevent action e.g. TV, Net surfing, drinking/drugs etc.
3. Set actions and when you’ll do them. Identify the next step you need to do, and decide when you will do it. Make it public if it helps you to lock it in.

You will feel much more fulfilled at the end of every day when you can look back over your achievements, and they’ll only happen through action.

Are you earning money or making money?

It’s just after dawn in mid winter and I’m out for an early morning run. The cold air bites at my face as I chug up the long, gentle grade to the local shopping strip.

Most shops are in darkness, with the exception of the newsagent and the bakery. As I pass the bakery I wash through the warm air that billows from the doorway. The air is thick with that comforting, doughy smell of freshly baked bread, cakes and donuts. Mmm.

I realise that the baker has probably been at work since about 2am and I think to myself, what strange hours to work. It would be a hard way to earn a living. Or to ‘make a living’. Which term is the correct one - they mean the same thing, don’t they?

I start to think about what the difference is. The staff in the bakery work their eight hours and get a wage – that’s earning money.
The baker owns the business, so he/she gets the takings after the expenses are paid – that’s making money. So there’s no direct correlation here between working time and the money that results from that effort – if the baker has a really good day (if he keeps pumping out those delicious smells, today will be one of those) he will make a lot of money but the staff will still earn the same. If business is slow, the baker will make less – but the staff earn the same. So making money seems to be dependent on many more factors that earning money – in this case the weather, customer numbers, competition etc. could all have an influence.

Now I don’t know how much profit there is on a loaf of bread, but I expect that it’s pretty high. This guy seems to be doing the right things – he sells drinks as well and has a coffee machine to catch the early morning railway trade. So he’s making money on all those extra items as well, and he’s still working the same hours. In fact, there are probably all kinds of additional, low cost items that he could up-sell to increase his income if he was creative.

Hmm, there’s an interesting idea – if he was creative… Maybe making money is more about creativity than time?

I’m now at the other end of the shopping strip, near the medical centre. The doctors who work here are employed by the medical centre so they’re earning money. The centre handles the fees (including the government and health fund money), the insurances and the rent but by the size of the waiting room, they do a roaring trade. The owners of the medical centre are making money. Probably serious money.

A block further on I come to the local used car yard. Not a lot of cars, probably just the owner who works here most of the time. How many cars would he sell in a day? Less than one I suspect – who knows? One thing is for sure: this guy makes money. He makes it using his persuasive skills, his buying skills and his knowledge of the market. He could stand there all day but doesn’t make a dollar until he sells a car. It’s not about time on the block for him.

So maybe making money is not about creativity, it’s about applying skills. Maybe it’s a bit of both?

I start to wonder whether I earn money or make money. I have a day job, so I earn money. But I also have some investments that produce income without me spending time on them, although it took creativity and acquired skills to set them up. So I’m making money as well. Bingo! However, right now I’m earning a lot more than I’m making, and I can’t stop working until I’m making enough to live on

I’m away from the shops and skirting the edge of the cemetery now. It’s peaceful - the sun is rising and there is a bit of a mist across the lawns. I wonder how many of the residents were money earners, and how many were money makers? I do a mental calculation and work out that if I retire at 65 and live till I’m 85, more than half of my remaining life will be spent working. Eeek! And in that last 20 years when I get the time to do the things I want to do, I probably won’t be able to! Mortality is sobering.

The cemetery is behind me now and I’m picking up pace as I turn downhill towards home. My mind is racing too, trying to work out how I can turn the tables and boost my money making ability. Creativity and skills. What habits can I acquire? Can I be creative and increase my money-making skills every day? How could I do that? Are there any bad habits that I have that are holding me back, like wasting money on credit card interest or poor spending habits? Can I gain some habits that will help
me save more money to invest?

This making money idea is a powerful, powerful one for me. And the best thing about it is that wage earners are in a unique position to take advantage of it.

Think about the baker. For him, it’s all on the line. If he has a really bad day, he loses money. At least he has the bread I suppose – it would be even harder for the car salesman. I suspect most days are losers with the few days he sells something making up for it. He must have nerves of steel.

But for us money earners, we’ve got a safety net to protect us while we learn how to apply our creativity and build our money making skills.

The curse of a safety net is that you can get caught in it. Many people never make any money at all – once they stop earning their lifestyles decline. It’s such a shame.

The sun is up now, and I feel it on my back as I coast down my street towards home. I feel like I’ve seen the light about earning and making money – earning money is the opportunity to make money. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Now to start working on those money making habits…

To do more, you have to do less

Things always get done more effectively when you focus on them, but there are just so many things that you have to multi-task, right?

How do you reconcile this paradox? Here’s a recent productivity adventure…

Like you, I have more things to do on my various lists than I can get through in a reasonable amount of time. I can identify many of these as ‘backburner’ tasks, but unfortunately I can also identify many as ‘important’. So even if I blow out the backburner tasks, I still end up with too many important tasks.

Recently, I managed to prioritise my list of really important projects down to 7 projects. I decided that I would identify the next action for each and begin to progress them all.

But then I thought about it and tried to project (no pun intended) what would happen if I I took this approach:

For the sake of simplifying the exercise, we’ll assume that each project was made up of 4 1-day tasks and I was working 7 days per week on them.

Pushing ahead with all projects one day at a time, my productivity would look like this:

So the first important project, project A, would finish in week 4, as would all the projects. i.e. NONE of them finish before week 4.

Now, these are important projects, and my definition of ‘important’ projects means that they may well relate to business or financial outcomes. So what if the completion of Project A was worth $10,000? This means I’ll get that $10,000 in 4 weeks. If all the projects were like this then week 4 would be a GREAT week, wouldn’t it?

But what if I focused instead? What if I took one project at a time and saw it through before moving onto the next? Then my productivity would look like this:

Now, I get at least 1 project payoff EVERY WEEK! This has to be better doesn’t it? Even if it’s not a financial payoff, we’re talking about important projects, so this means we achieve something important every week, rather than having 3 weeks of nothing then a big payoff. Furthermore, every single project finishes before it would have in the multi-tasking approach, except Project G, which finishes at the same time.

So what gives? Why do we get suckered into multi-tasking at all? So far I’ve come up with a couple of thoughts on this:

1. We lack the ability to decide which project the highest priority – we can’t work out which one to start with
2. Some projects don’t lend themselves to this kind of focus e.g. getting fit – you can’t get fit in one week – you have to build fitness over time
3. It feels very difficult to identify something as important and choose to do nothing about it.

The reality is though, that trying to move too many projects forward will mean that none of them get done quickly. When that happens, it’s hard to feel productive. You need to close projects to feel really productive.

I’ve been trying this approach:

1. Try to decide your prioritisation criteria without considering the actual projects you have on. E.g. You might decide that relationships are top priority.
2. Apply these criteria to the important projects on your list. E.g. organising a family holiday might take priority over doing your tax return for example if relationships are top priority.
3. If you still can’t decide, pick one at random and defer the rest.
4. Do it.

The good thing about this approach is that it really doesn’t matter which project you start with. If you realise that you didn’t choose the best one to start with, just finish it anyway, then move on to the one you should have started with. They’ll both be finished faster than if you’d multi-tasked them.

The other payoff that I’ve found is that once I’ve decided to defer a project, I feel much more ‘in the zone’ about the project that I have decided to focus on. It’s all good.

Best productivity book of 2007

The most significant book that I read last year and the one that really turned the lights on for me, was The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olsen.

It explains the difference between those people who seem to have it all, and those who don’t – and it explains it in terms of the small, seemingly insignificant but consistently regular actions that successful people take.

Importantly, it shows that these actions are not particularly difficult in themselves to do, but unfortunately they are easy not to do as well. Sadly, for most people, this simple fact is the reason they don’t do these actions. Success is the resulting accumulation of all these action that have been performed consistently.

Whether it’s a little daily exercise, or telling your spouse you love them every day, or saving a little money from each pay packet, it’s the regularity and consistency that leads to success.

They say “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. You can’t eat 5000 apples the day you find out you have bowel cancer and think it’s all going to be OK. It’s just too late then.

And of course, it applies to success at everything – relationships, wealth, health, work and wisdom and more.

I think the most interesting idea in the book is the idea that you’re on one of two curves. You’re either on the good curve – where you are doing the regular positive actions that compound so that the benefits start to go exponential – like compound interest. Or you are on the bad curve – where negative actions compound negatively. BTW there is no ‘neither’. Doing nothing is the bad curve.

So clearly, this book is all about how good habits cause success to accelerate over time. One message I took from it is that if I want to be more productive, I need to perform a positive productivity action every day. It needs to be a habit. A Productivity Habit.

My first productivity habit was simply to track the activity in each of the areas of my life that I wanted some movement in.

For example, I ruled up a diary that I update each night like this:

		Health		Wealth		Wisdom	Relationships	Work
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

 

Before I go to sleep, I update it with the positive actions that I took that day in each area. It’s a simple thing, but I can immediately see when I’ve dropped the ball somewhere. Easy to do, easy not to do.

It sounds a bit dorky, doesn’t it? Well too bad. Since I’ve started doing this I’ve noticed how much the areas with the most activity have started to improve.

Most people don’t consciously attend to this kind of activity. Most people end up with average health at best, average relationships at best and average wealth at best. Remember, doing nothing is on the negative curve.

I don’t want to end up like most people, so I’m working myself away from average one daily action at a time.

Recommendation: Buy the book.