JoeBailey.ORG

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.

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.