JoeBailey.ORG

Every day I receive some type of fax spam. In the beginning, I would receive a fax maybe once a month. One day, I decided to fix this problem. So, what did I do? I called the fax removal line/number on the bottom of my page and moved on. Great, problem solved. Err, months later, I get one or two faxes every day.

So, how do you fix this problem? Well, I don’t know. But, how about this solution to fight back. Next time you receive a fax from the company, call the number, then enter THEIR contact number. This way, their own system will start spamming themselves!

Attempt to put all of my tasks in some place on my calendar. In an effort to actually complete all of my Important/Non-Urgent tasks I’ll put them all on my calendar somewhere to make sure they are completed. Granted, the assumption here is that all Urgent tasks are complete. At this time, no tasks are urgent, so things are well.
I expect I will book all of my tasks, but not complete all of them. I’m also wondering if the art of placing my tasks in a certain time is over engineering my calendar.

Results: Wasn’t able to do it. I didn’t give it enough effort. Will try again this evening. The effort to start this was more than anticipated, but did open up a lot of information. For example, I’d have to weigh the amount of time for each task. Therefore, prioritizing became a higher… well priority. Also, considered looking at batching or bulking some tasks together.

Right now, it’s hard to find a job or lead in this economy. If you’re looking for a full time job, part time, contract, or just some regular business, why not add some incentive? At PayForJobs.com, you can post your resume, service, or product. Then tell the world what you would like to offer them in return. Let the community of PayForJobs.com be your personal recruiter.

It’s free! The idea is that if anything can help, maybe this will. Imagine, if you’re a full time person and you know about a job opening, maybe you’ll find someone looking in your area. Contact them, if they get the job, you’ll get the bonus.

Imagine if you’ve been paying someone for leads, offer some incentive here. For example, let’s say you sell insurance. You can post your information here and they’ll contact you. Plus, you don’t have to pay to list your company.

I’m not sure which is worse, video games or TV. But if you’re in to video games, you probably need to take a break. I’ve found myself spending more time playing video games than TV. It all came to reality one day after I completed a game. At the end, it told me I had played for 100 hours. Holy cow, 100 hours. If I was able to work and make money for that amount of time, I could have made a ton.

The key to remember is, is this thing I’m doing better than something else. Heck, even sleeping would have been a better use of my time. Also, is that show you’re watching making you smarter? Chances are it’s not. Tomorrow morning, try to remember what show you watched last night. You may not even remember.

Total time savings, 100 hours.

Ok, every day, I go through each day and come up with tons of ideas. Easily I can get distracted and start on a tangent search on the internet only to forget my original task.

Big tip, keep Outlook or, if you’re online all the time Remember The Milk, open. Each time you have an idea, post it in as a task. Later on when you review your tasks, decide if the thought or idea is worth researching. Chances are, it’s not. This idea alone could save you at least one hour a day.

Yes, we’ve all heard the 80/20 rule. In this case, we’ll approach email. The approach, only check email at 11AM and 4PM. Results, I’ve saved a ton of time. Granted, it’s extremely hard to do, it’s like an addiction. Here are some tips on how to save time with your email:

• Set an auto-reminder letting people know you only respond at certain times. If they really need to reach you, have them call. Chances are they won’t call.
• Delete all spam and miscellaneous emails without even looking at them.
• Clean your inbox every time you go in there. This eliminates the excuse to go into your email and check a task… then checking for new emails.
• If you have a task based on an email, put that task in your to do list categorized by the Covey Quadrant. Chances are the task from that email is not important an can be handled at another time.
• Turn off the bell for Outlook, or close Outlook until the right times.
• Hide the BlackBerry. Just keeping it in front of me was still too tempting. Put it in the desk drawer and out of site.
• Calculate the amount of time you save. I guarantee you’ll save at least an hour.

The average person watches 20-26 hours of tv a week. It’s a staggering number. So, avoid television. If you would spend just half of that time working on something else you would be that much further along in your goals.

So, if you live to were to do this for 40 years, you would have spent 4.8 years watching television. Imagine taking back 4.8 years of your life. What would you have accomplished or done?

Does this sound familiar? You are sitting at your desk working, you have an idea, you research it on the internet. Wow, you think, I found some great information, this gives me another idea. Since this is such a good idea, you think…. I’ll research this other idea and then, before you know it, 30 minutes have passed. Geez, in 30 minutes, I could have finished my work. Well, it happens to all of us. I call this Business ADD.

So, how do you solve business ADD, well the good thing is, you don’t need to see the doctor. An excellent solution to solve this is to do one thing, write it or type it. Since your idea is a great, you don’t want to forget it. So, track it. Personally, my solution involves using Franklin Covey’s time management quadrant and Outlook.

Here’s how it works. Open up Outlook Tasks. Every time you get a great idea or thought, type it into your task list, and get back to work. Set a time of day, let’s say before lunch or before you go home, take a look at the list. Next, go through the list one at a time, if you still think the task is worthwhile, keep it, otherwise delete it. By just doing that, you’ll save yourself at least 30 minutes a day.

Now, if you are getting advanced, there’s another trick. Using Outlook Tasks, create a category for eac of Covey’s 4 quadrants (Important|Urgent, Important|Not Urgent, Not Important|Urgent, Not Important, Not Urgent). Next time you go through your list of tasks, place the task into one of these categories. Now, sort your tasks on category and take a look. You will be amazed at what ideas/tasks are not important at all. Try this for a day, you’ll notice the difference in how much you can accomplish if you stick to the important items.

My dad is my biggest fan. Not too long ago, he sent me a link to the Randy Pausch lecture which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watched it anyway. Since then, I have definitely reanalyzed my life and made it much easier. In fact, for about a week straight, every day, I would just let the lecture run in the background as I worked.

Here’s what I learned. Life is short, make it easy on yourself. But, of course this is more difficult than it seemed. But, I started following what he’s discussed and it’s made a lot of changes. Here are the steps that affected me the most:

1. Follow Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people
2. Plan out my day, week, month, etc and stick to it. This was much harder than originally anticipated.
3. Analyze my day every evening and see how I can improve upon it.
4. Keep moving forward.
5. Analyze my time. Too much of my day was spent jumping around from task to task. Since then, I’ve been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each activity and eliminate those unnecessary ones.
6. Be proactive.
7. What would you do to help your family if you knew you were going to die soon? How come I’m not doing it now?
8. Ask why? I can accomplish anything or any task, why just tackle the simple ones with quick gratification. And, is this task, thing, really what I should do?
9. Focus. I found it much to easy to start on a tangent while working with the internet 2 milliseconds away.
10. Clean out my inbox every day. This is tricky. But, essentially, I’ll check my email 2-3 times per day. Answer or respond to any email, then categorize/file my emails into the respective areas. For example, I work on a lot of projects. I’ll file my emails in that project. Then, allocate time to each project. This allows me to clean my inbox, establish time for each project, and keep all of the information together.

Listen to it, think about it. You can’t lose anything, but a couple minutes of your time.