I’ll post this tonight since tomorrow I’ll be driving most of the day to Spring Break at the scene of the crime: Jekyll Island (the crime? The creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1910, see http://budurl.com/jekyll for one version of the story)

But that is a tangent… something interesting happened earlier tonight…

I was at dinner with my wife and the chef/owner of the restaurant came over to talk with us for a while since I had asked the waitress a few questions about the place.  The topic turned to his business level and I asked him whether he was using social media like Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about his business.   I gave him a few examples of other Atlanta dining places doing a good job of this…

His response was a bit of a shock… “I just started a Twitter account in the last couple of days and I plan to have a Facebook page up and start using Twitter to promote my business by the end of 2010”.

My jaw hit the table, and I said “2010? I doubt if Twitter will even be around in its present form by the end of 2010, and Facebook too.  You need to have that up and going this weekend at the latest.  It just isn’t that hard… You have a bunch of twenty-somethings working here, let one of them do it while they are standing around.”

To his credit, he agreed that it was probably not wise to wait for 2010 and he went back to his work at the pass, and a few minutes later I saw that he tweeted his “Special of the Night”—good for him… this is an excellent use of Marginal Time (which is a topic for a later day)…

The point of me telling you this true-life story?

Do you have plans to complete something way in the future that you should be doing right now?

Rob

PS: The dinner was great, and we went and saw the musical “Happy Days” at the Fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta afterwards. It was a lot of fun seeing Richie, The Fonz, Potsie, Ralph, Joanie (and of course Chachi), Mr. C. and Marion, and Pinky Tuscadero again…

First, a reminder… Don’t forget to organize all your “E” files today (as described in the Alphabet Strategy post a few days ago).   Now on to our next letter…

Dec 5.  “E” is for E-Mail

E-Mail (or electronic mail) is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a fast, free way to send even large amounts of information around the world at the click of a button.  The fact that it is so fast and cheap has led to rapid increases in the amount of “spam” (unsolicited commercial email) clogging up our inbox and wasting millions of hours of productivity.

Here are my most important tips regarding email…

1. Check it at certain times during the day, and do not be a slave to email.  (Unless your job is to respond to emails in realtime).  I find that checking every couple of hours is fine, and it allows me to get uninterrupted blocks of 90+ minutes to actually get work done.
2. DO NOT check e-mail as your first priority in the morning.  We will be discussing this a bit more in a future Alphabet post, but you should not let your first thing in the morning be something that you are reacting to.  Email is usually reactive.  I like to have at least 45 minutes worth of pro-active work done before I open the e-mail up.  And you should decide what this task will be the night before.
3. Have a junk e-mail account that you can use when signing up for stuff that requires an e-mail address but that is not vital, core information.  Then check that once a day or every couple of days, this keeps from clogging up your primary account.
4. Get a gmail account, they do a nice job of removing spam, and this is a great way to manage google alerts as discussed in an earlier post… The Power of the Spider…Google Alerts
5. This is a key point…DO NOT use your Inbox as a place to store things. You want to try to end every day with your Inbox empty.  You need to create Folders that you move things into to get them out of your inbox and into places where you can access the files.  I have several… Action (means I need to do something with the file), Print (means I need to print, or download when I get a chance), Waiting (means I am waiting for something else to happen before I can take action), Read/Review (means I need to read or review when I get a chance).  When something comes into my Inbox it gets put into one of these folders and I work from the Action folder when I am doing e-Mail stuff a couple of times a day.
6. Have a good folder system for filing away emails that you might need in the future, and put things in their proper places as soon as they are no longer Action items…
7. Try to respond quickly to email where possible, a quick short reply is often much better than the long delayed one.  Be smart about this but not everything requires a lot of thinking about it.
8. Acknowledge receipt of emails with a terse note at least so that people know you received it and appreciated it.
9. Use e-Mail effectively in your marketing.  It is a killer tool.  I will talk more on this in a future post about Autoresponders…

 Tomorrow, we will move to “F” and we will be discussing the greatest of all the F words… “Family and Friends”…

First, a reminder… Don’t forget to organize all your “D” files today (as described in the Alphabet Strategy post a few days ago).   Now on to our next letter…

Dec 4.  “D” is for Desk

Your desk (or work area) can be a critical factor in how productive you are.  And getting 10, 50% or 100% more out of every hour is possible with the right habits and environment.  Here are several keys to a desk that will help you maximize what you get done. 

I find that by thinking of my desk as a “Cockpit” it enables me to have the right mental picture of the work space.  The pilot of a Space Shuttle doesn’t have to move to access the entire controls for the shuttle.  The closer that you can come to that the better.

1.      Have a Catchall near the entry to your office area where you can place wallet, keys, cellphone, voice recorder, camera, and other stuff from your pockets.  I use an antique wooden tray I bought for the purpose on eBay that is inscribed with the word “Simplify”.  This is a great habit and will help you always know where your stuff is.  (This is a great thing to buy someone as a gift for their house or office as well)…

2.     You should have an Inbox preferably on one side of your work area.  This is where you put anything that needs to be “processed”.  Mail, faxes, things in your briefcase when you get back from a trip… The Inbox is something that you will go through once or twice a day to move things to their proper destination. 

3.     You should have an Outbox on the opposite side of your desk from the inbox.  Work flows across your desk and into the Outbox which is where things go that need to be mailed, faxed, or filed.

4.     I also have a “To Be Filed” basket where I put things that need to be filed at some point that is not time sensitive.

5.     I have a large basket under my desk where I throw all magazines, newsletters and Internet printouts of things I want to read.  I save these up for plane trips and put a big stack in my bag to read and discard as I travel.

6.     Your desk area should be relatively free of clutter.  If you find yourself with a bunch of random stuff strewn about the desk, these distractions sap your energy.  Try to put things away and keep at least a reasonable sized work are free to work without distraction.

7.     Keep necessary things close by (pens, pencils, reference books, highlighters, post-its,…) whatever tools and items you need should be at arms length.

8.     Invest in a comfortable desk chair.  Even $1000 is a good investment considering how much time you spend there.  Just make sure that it is comfortable and provides back support.

9.     Organize all of your chargers so that you are not having to always fight with getting to them.

10.  Turn off your email and Internet access unless you are doing something that requires it.

I reserve the right to extend these comments at a later date. 

Tomorrow, we will move to “E” and we will be discussing “E-Mail”…

How many letters are there in the alphabet?

How many days are there in a month?

What I like to do every December is go through all of my customer files and clean them up, and make sure that I haven’t left anything to be handled heading into the New Year.

Monday is December 1^st and I have developed this simple strategy that I call the Alphabet Strategy to break this project into smaller chunks and get it done.  Here’s how it works:

On Dec 1, I work on my customer files that start with an “A” and I go through each one looking for papers that I can throw away and I make a small one or two line comment about the customer in my ACT database about my plans for the new year.  I also go through my Outlook email files and clean up all the “A” customers there….

On Dec 2, I work on the “B” customers.

On Dec 3, I work on the “C” customers.

And I do this every day until I hit Dec 26^th and finish off the “Z” customers.  (Actually I usually do the X, Y and Z customers all on the 23^rd and I am done for the year at that point.

And yes, I do this on Saturdays and Sundays too… If I want a day off, I do the extra days on the day before I want to take off.  Some of the letters are pretty sparse anyway and it is easier to get ahead… 

Then on the last four days for the year, I have another strategy that helps me prepare for the new year which I’ll talk about in a week or two…

This Alphabet Strategy can be used for many other things as well, just think about what you need to “chunk” into smaller pieces and assign yourself one chunk a day… and then do it. 

Seize the Day,

Rob Northrup

Is Your Corporation Protecting You?

When I first met Kevin Hogan, I would often start projects in a blaze of energy and exctiement.  I would work long days and long nights getting things done and planning out each step in detail.

And then, as the project started to get closer to completion, I would lose the passion just a little at first, and then a little more, and before I got to the finish line, I would find another project to get all excited about and begin the process anew.

This behavior leads to a lot of very long days, a lot of hard work, and a large pile of unfinished “projects”.  And do you know how much value is generated from unfinished idle projects?

Zip.  Zero. Nada.

This wasn’t the case for me with everything.  I have ran my own successful business with a co-owner and we have done well.  I have a great family with three kids and we have been able to do so many great things as a family that have required focus and effort.  But in some areas of my life and some types of projects, I seemed doomed to remain incomplete.

Then I met Kevin Hogan through a teleseminar he did on “The Secret”.  This hugely successful book really ticked me off, and I searched for kindred spirits to discuss this abominable concept with, and I found Kevin.  And then I started to buy his programs, starting with “The Three Disciplines” and progressing through “Lifestorms”,  and then everything he has recorded and written.

And for the first time I understood the concept of Self-Sabotage.  And how our brain actually works against us to shut down our dreams.  And understanding what I was up against changed everything.

I have for a long time played around with the idea of creating a product to help small corporation owners to keep track of all the record keeping they need to be doing.  Once I identified the self-sabotage, I was able to dust off my abandoned project file and start working on it again.  And six months later I had finished the product (Phase 1) which I call CorporateVeil Pro and in July/August of this year I had 33 people in all sorts of businesses take a “Test Flight” with me and we went through the system together…

I got rave reviews about how easy-to-understand it was, and it has inspired me to do more of the same type of products to help small business owners cut through the garbage and get to the clear, concise, step-by-step truth of business matters…

I’m not working any harder, I’m just getting things “finished”.   And that, my friend, makes all the difference…  Thanks for the insights, Kevin Hogan!

Short post today…

A simple Question…

What is the one thing in your business that you know that you need to do, that has the potential to change your business or your life for the better, yet you keep putting it off?

Get out a fresh piece of paper.  I’ll wait…

Do you have the paper?  Good…

Now, on the top of the paper write out a single sentence:

I will start this at ____ and I will work on it till it is completed…

Mine says: 

Getting my revision of my Corporate Veil Pro sales letter completed will lead to better sales conversion, and re-energize my entire marketing strategy for the product…

I will start this at 1:15 am today and I will work on it till it is completed…

Have a great day…

Rob

If your project will take longer than you can possibly schedule, then break it down into smaller chunks on the same page and then schedule the first chunk…

There was a job opening for a new lumberjack and there were two candidates for the position…

Both men had almost identical resumes, with identical experience, and identical references…

The lumberjack boss didn’t know what to do, so he hatched a plan…

The boss said, “Both of you report to the woods at 6am tomorrow morning and we’ll have a contest, the one of you that fells the most trees and splits it into cord wood will win the job”…

The day arrived and the two lumberjacks—one all muscle and brawn, the other a bit smaller were set to work in adjacent parts of the forest.  At 6am the boss fired a starting shot and both men started to work, and work and work…

The contest was set to run for eight hours and give each man a fair chance to show his strength and endurance.  At the end of the eight hours the size of the wood piles would be measured and a winner given the coveted job…

All day long the men cut and cut and cut at a furious pace until the clock struck 2pm and the ending shot was fired to signify that the contest was over.

The boss went to the first pile and measured out “25 and a half cords!”, an amazing production for one man in only eight hours…

They went together to the second smaller man’s pile and the boss measured it and found it was an amazing “27 cords! You are the winner!”. 

The first lumberjack went ballistic and accused the man of cheating, and getting help.  “I was in the forest next to him and I didn’t stop a single time for all eight hours, and this guy took a break every hour or so for five minutes or more.  There is no way he beat me taking all those breaks”…

The winning lumberjack said, “I don’t know what breaks you are talking about, but I did stop every hour or so when my axe got dull, and I sharpened my axe”…

I am in St Louis for a four day weekend to sharpen my axe and immerse myself into the world of Sales and Marketing at the Dan Kennedy summit.  As I said previously, this next four years I am choosing to vote for myself.  I can make more difference in my life than any politician.  And I recommend that all business owners should take some time to “sharpen the axe”—its not all about brute force and hours, effectiveness and productivity are critical too…

Find time to sharpen your axe, even if it is just reading a good non-fiction book or listening to a tape set on personal development…