Have you ever been frustrated, because business is not moving forward? You are giving it all, but success seems to be far away. Many business people know this kind of situation. Whether as part of a big team that they are managing or as solo entrepreneurs, who run on their own.

In my experience it is even harder for the lonely rider to cope with “lack of success”, because there is no social support by colleagues, no other department, nor the “stupid boss” that you could blame for lack of results. (There’s no big budget to cover up inefficiencies as easily as well.)

From the many different types of businesses an Information Product Business seems to provide many benefits, like

• low startup cost,
• high margins,
• and you don’t really need an office

You and me know that thousands of people try to get their Internet based business off the ground, but most of them give up too early.

Why is that?

They are overwhelmed by the amount of information and advice that’s available (either for free or for sale), they get it all, but what’s missing is the big plan that ties it all together.

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.


Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.

I start the new week with giving you excellent reading tips. Yes, I feel a bit lazy today, and I do admit it. However, the content I give you links for is worth your clicks.

In my Get More Done posts I have written about the importance of handling email the right way rather than getting overwhelmed by email. Tim Ferris (↑), author of the 4-hour-workweek goes one step further. He even outsources the handling of all of his email (about 1,000 emails per day) and only spend 10 minutes with it a day. Sounds cool? He even shows you his procedure that works for him and he actually wants you to steal it, modify it, use it for yourself. If you have trouble with handling the size of your inbox, you should learn from Tim.

Even, if you are not ready — but being not ready is one of the oldest excuses for procrastination by the way — you can apply some of the rules to automatic filters, autoresponders, etc.

Here is Tim's post:

Certainly I was taking some time to write this post after I have asked my readers to submit a question for me to answer. 4 questions qualified. In the meantime I have sent an even more detailed answer to those folks, who dared to ask a question.

Now it's time to share my answers in public. I don't want to carry that as liability into the next year. But since I am lazy at the end of the year, while my assistant enjoys a nice skiing vacation in Switzerland, I only will answer 2 of those questions today. I will deal with the other 2 topics in future posts in January.


1. You have hosted some blog carnivals on your blog. Do you recommend that?

Yes, and no.

It appears to me that hosting a carnival gets you more traffic, while using the same amount of time for writing and submitting your articles to other carnivals will get you more back links, which leads to more residual traffic in long term. What do you prefer?

I found the response from the folks whose articles get used in a carnival is less than it could be. Not many digg, sphinn, stumble, or bookmark your post with the carnival edition. That seems to be the reality.

Unless you see hosting or organizing a carnival as part of your content strategy, and you are willing to put some effort to work, you probably should just stick with submitting.

However, if everybody only submits, there won't be good carnivals left soon. Then it might pay off more to organize or host a carnival, again. I noticed that many recent carnivals are basically just link lists. If you don't have any problems with that, Blogcarnival.com (↑) makes it really easy to publish such a “list”. You only have to press the InstaCarnival button and copy the HTML code as is to your Blog. Finished.

It's up to you, how far you want to go. I will host other editions on my Blog throughout 2008, but I will have an assistant doing the actual work.


2. In “Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret” you wrote “You cannot leverage consulting, unless …”. What's the unless part of it. You never wrote that following post.

Good observation, I never wrote that post here. I only wrote parts of the answer in my time management series of articles Touch It - Do It - Get More Done! and in some comments on other Blogs, and I believe in one of my newsletter editions. Anyway, the answer is very simple.

You need to teach and train others to do your type of consulting in a similar fashion. Those folks will have to be employed or contracted by you. Then you will have the time to work on your business, expand it, and make it more independent from you.

One example:

If you are often hired as consultant for doing project management, then you need to start building a real business, a company around it. You'll need other people doing the work in the future that you are still doing by yourself right now. It's moving from being a freelancer towards being a business owner.


Yours
John W. Furst

Many people, who use the Internet as a tool professionally complain about the ease on how you get distracted. You start out with a task and all of a sudden you are 15 clicks away from your original goal. Well, it's just that you found the trail to some tools or information that could make you more efficient. You follow that trail believing that you will save time in the future. In reality you get off your schedule and it will be hard to recoup that lost time.

Don't understand me wrong: If your task is to find tools or anything on the Internet, then pursue it, but if your task is to complete a simple task, then just complete that simple task.

Later, when you see you need to perform that same simple task repeatedly, then of course look out for some efficiency boosters, or even better, outsource that task altogether.

This was just an example, it could be about chasing info about more profits, less work, better conversion, better rankings, …

I though I write some tips on how to stay on track without getting distracted. But above is not really distraction, it's your choice to click a link that you simply should not click at this time. A real distraction has something external to it, like a coworker or your spouse rushes into your office and … That's a distraction, but I showed you how to deal with that kind of situation in my series of Blog posts about Getting Things Done.

Enough of a prelude, here are the bullets:

1. Read my post “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done!” again.
2. Write your task list every morning. First thing to do.
3. Stick with it, no matter what. Focus on what you are doing.
4. Most important tasks are tackled first on the day. The fact that they are mostly challenging and important will keep your attention in the morning.
5. Just write URLs or whatever you find interesting down on the back of your to do list or bookmark them not wasting more than one click. You can follow those in your spare time.
6. Don't deal with products or information that you do not need at this time. There will be another one time offer from someone else or probably the same vendor in the future.
7. You should have procedures for repetitive tasks that you can follow. Those tasks should be outsourced anyway. As long as you are doing everything by yourself, you are more prone to get thrown off the track by new information.
8. Simply don't throw away your strategic plan, after you have learned something new. Keep your business on track and apply small changes at a time. Experiment with new tactics in a separate, new project. But your core business should run smoothly already before you do this.
9. Limit the number of people, who's advice you are following. That also means you can unsubscribe from a lot of email newsletters and RSS feeds.
10. A real business should neither depend on you, nor on a single employee nor a single contractor, etc. Strive for that. Then you can surf the Web all day long and it won't hurt you at all.

What are your tips to stay on track?

Yours
John W. Furst

I warn you at the beginning. This will be a short article. Why? Because everybody of us has work to do. No matter in what position you are. So I will quickly give one of my popular “generic - this helps everyone in every situation” rules. It's not limited to business. All you need is the drive for “getting results”.

Here's the tip:

“Implement your ideas as quickly as you can!”

Are you

• A business owner (home based, small or large, …)
• A manager (first level, middle or top management)
• A freelancer
• Or simply an employee

Even if you are a student or if you are unemployed, you should get out something from this lesson.

Ask yourself, how many times in your life you had a “great idea” or a “great opportunity”, but you didn't really follow through. Instead you switched yourself into “research mode”. Or in “waiting mode” and never switched to “taking action”. Later you simply dropped the idea. Another, “what would have been, if this had worked …” story is born. Think a little:

Today I am releasing the final issue — Part 4 — of my series of articles about time management.

Last week I have spent some time on explaining how to create a “to do list” with six important tasks each day. Now we need to create a schedule for our day and fit everything together smoothly.

An important aspect is setting your priorities straight and if done right, you are able to get the “most” out of your time. What is the “most” for you? Money, better health, less stress, growing your business fast, or working less?

In Part 4 I am putting all loose ends together, do a recap of all steps, and tell you, what I am personally using to keep myself organized.

Since this article has 9 pages, I don't publish it on the blog. I have created a PDF document that my newsletter subscriber can download.

If you enjoyed reading the first 3 parts of this series, you definitely will not want to miss the last issue.

If you are already subscribed to my email newsletter, you will receive download instructions shortly.

If not, Sign Up Now!

Get this report now.

Update: Part 4 of this series is finally available again for my newsletter subscribers, as of March 07, 2008

Yours
John