A change of pace from our usual programming

How often do you consider why you’re in business?

That’s a question I’ve given a lot of thought to recently.

At first, most business owners report starting their own business to “be their own boss”, realise a vision or make money.

These factors certainly applied in my case when I established Marketing Results almost 7 years ago.

But after establishing a toehold, then a foothold, in the internet lead generation space, it seems natural to start thinking beyond these initial goals to the question of how much we are contributing to society at large as a company.

To this end, we decided to get involved in more charitable and pro bono activities.  Rather than contribute money to a charity that (more often than not) simply spends it, I prefer supporting entrepreneurial projects that have the potential to benefit many people (the old “teach a man to fish” concept).

I’ve been donating to Kiva.org (microfinance) for some time, but when I visited South Africa in January an opportunity arose to help a local entrepreneur in a more direct way.

Here’s the background:

While visiting Cape Town, one of the highlights was taking a “Township Tour”.

“Townships” are the name for the crowded, informally planned mainly black communities that sprung up under the apartheid regime. They are typically woefully under-serviced with infrastructure and are in the process of playing catch-up.

Our guide, Siviwe Mbinda was recommended by Lonely Planet and took us on a 2-hr walking tour – providing a brief history on the way, showing us the local sites and allowing us to meet and interact with the locals.

For 34 rand (about $5) the local sheep-head stall will cook you up a whole sheep head, which is a local delicacy. We saw sheep heads being cooked and eaten but declined the offer to try some ourselves.

The townships have a reputation as hotbeds of crime and vice, but in Langa, the community is actually very strong and cohesive, struggling against many social challenges including poverty and HIV/AIDS with energy and resourcefulness.

Siviwe showed us through the upper-class, middle-class and lower-class areas of the township. Upper-class homes were on freehold blocks and were in good repair with electricity and running water. Prices of these homes are between 500,000 and 750,000 rand ($70K to $100K AUD), which is a fortune to most of the people living there (the minimum wage is ZAR 1,300 per month, or about AUD 200).

Middle-class homes were on smaller blocks and tended to be more modest in size (perhaps 2 bedrooms, a living area, a bathroom and a kitchen. These houses go for $30K to $50K AUD.

At the lower end were government owned hostels, which were 6 bedrooms with a common area in the middle. Originally built to house 3 men per tiny room, the hostel we saw now houses 16 families, with kids sleeping in the common area at night. A bed in a room here costs just ZAR 30 per month ($4.50) – a price tag that explains the enduring popularity of hostels.

At the very lower end were the shacks – very small, informal housing constructed by the people out of discarded building supplies, off-cuts and plastic sheeting. The shacks have no electricity or running water and are usually located in the least desirable areas (e.g. right next to a busy highway).

Nevertheless, the people we met were smiling and eager to engage with us foreigners and practice their English (which was much better than my Xhosa).

At the end of the tour, Siviwe took us to watch a local dance troupe perform the “Gumboots Dance”, a dance that originated in the mines of South Africa around 100 years ago. Siviwe gives up 3 afternoons a week to teach the local kids the dance as well as life skills.

We loved the whole experience and would recommend it to any visitor to Cape Town.  I offered to build Siviwe a website and when I returned back to Australia, we convened a volunteer project team to put something together – the result is this Cape Town Township Tours website (membership in the team was voluntary, and I have to hand it to the staff members who participated, who gave up their free time to work on the project.   Thanks to Nick, Ken, Mick and Stroggy!)

Siviwe has already reported a few new clients via the website and his hope is that he will be able to employ others in the township who hold tour guide qualifications in order to expand his business.

This initial foray into pro bono work was relatively successful and I look forward to seeing the results that come from it for Siviwe.  I even got to thinking that it would be cool to have a “Kiva for Services”, where providers can donate expertise to people in need — not sure if something like that already exists?

Last week I stopped myself from just aimlessly doing stuff and decided to refocus on the 20% of activities that generate 80% of the results for myself and my clients. Here’s my 80/20 List:

My Critical 20 Percent List

Installing good Productivity habits [see this post] yield rapid results, but it’s easy to backslide. Staying focused on The Critical 20% is the surest path to reaching your outcomes faster and with less effort.

Despite the fact that I “know” I should be focusing on this stuff, it’s so easy to chug along just taking care of the “Urgent” without addressing Important items like systems creation, while keeping a nice balance between sales (getting the work) and production (doing the work).

[Tim Ferris has recently written about habit acquisition techniques based on Leo Babauta's Zen Habits methodology - worth a read.]

I’ve recently been working on the marketing for a new documentary film featuring over a dozen experts in health, wellness and personal development as they explore the ancient symbol of “The Wheel Of Life” (and its predecessor, The Circle Of Life) and how this metaphor can be used to bring about positive change in our lives and in the world.

The documentary footage is under lock-and-key at the moment, so I haven’t see the entire movie myself, but it’s looking extremely promising.  If you liked The Secret or What The Bleep, you’ll be right into this.

The official launch is scheduled for Thursday November 13, with both physical DVD or Vividas Pay-Per-View options.

I’m a huge advocate of Tony Robbins and I strongly endorse his Unleash The Power Within and Date With Destiny seminars and other materials. People sometimes ask me to describe what Tony is about, but as the shortest seminar he does is 50 hours long, it’s pretty hard to provide a succinct answer

Below is a fantastic 22 minute presentation by Tony at the TED conference which explains some of his core principles…check it out, and look out for the interaction with Al Gore in the audience.

I attended a very interesting presentation by Roger Hamilton last night on the recommendation of several people I respect [thanks Kris, Ray and Therese <-- no website?! What are you like?]

Roger has developed a fascinating and instructive “Wealth Profiling System” that combines
Jungian psychological models (think MBTI tests etc) and the I Ching as it relates to individuals’ wealth attraction styles. I have done my wealth profile here and discovered that I am predominantly a “Mechanic”.

Roger also shared a couple of seminal distinctions that resonated with me. Here they are:

On taking action:

To know, and not to do, is not yet to know.

On traps for smart people:

One of Roger’s mentors once told him,

You think you’re smart. You try to do everything yourself. That’s why you’ll never be really wealthy. I know I’m stupid. That’s why I employ smart people like you to do everything for me.

Food for thought…

Two Types Of Leverage

I have recently been focussing on employing two types of leverage to increase my personal effectiveness and productivity.

Systematic Leverage: Using systems to do the heavy lifting for me. These include CRM automation, automatic billing systems, automated data backup systems and so on.

Personal Leverage: Engaging people who are much better qualified to do specific tasks than myself – designers, bookkeepers, technical people and so on.

So far the results are pleasing — I’ll report back with some more detailed results at a later date.

I’ve recently come to the realisation that the concept of “productivity” is especially vital for professionals, consultants or indeed anyone involved in time-for-money income generation.

Where your time is your main productive asset, getting more done in less time – and having more than enough time for fun and relaxation – is hugely important (then there’s the issue of shifting from a time-for-money model to a more scaleable model, but that’s a whole other discussion).

In the past 2 weeks I have literally doubled my productivity by following a few simple rules.

I now work fewer than 40 hours per week and am earning 300% more than the same time last year, when I was working 60 hours per week.

Here are my…

7 Simple Productivity Tips

1) Only check email at 12 noon and 4pm (thanks to Tim Ferriss for this tip). This one simple step has been massively powerful and liberating all at the same time. This one saves me an hour a day, minimum.

2) Every evening I write a “For Action” list for the next day, outlining my 20% items that produce 80% of the results for the next day. Every day I attack my most important item first.

3) I keep my “For Action” list on my desk and when small “to do’s” or distractions pop into my head I make a side note so I can deal with small items in batches later on and not break my focus from the task at hand.

4) When checking email or attending to other smaller tasks, if a task will take 2 minutes or less I do it then and there (thanks to David Allen of GTD fame for this one)

5) I’ve replaced my mobile phone message with the following:

“Hi, you’ve reached Will Swayne’s phone. I’m unable to take your call right now. Please leave your name and number, plus the reason for your call so I can get to work on it before I call you back. Thanks for calling.”

This simple distinction avoids the common scenario of playing phone tag just to find out the reason for a call before you even get around to doing something about it.

6) Being mindful of non-value adding steps in processes and working to reduce or eliminate them. In the past, when I was working on, say, a 5-step process, I might have been responsible for sequential steps A, C and E and a designer responsible for B and D.

I would often find myself supplying step A only, creating an extra communication loop in the process when C was required later on. Now I try to supply ALL information to eliminate the non-value adding steps in the middle.

Obviously this can’t always be achieved (for example, proofreading has to take place at the end), but just being mindful of this and taking action where possible has yielded some positive results and cut down on wasteful back-and-forth emails.

7) I’m in the process of implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. While this is very much a work-in-progress (and something that I’ll write about in greater detail in future), some of the concepts have already come in useful for freeing up mental RAM. For example, I’ve closed off a few outstanding projects (what David Allen calls “open loops”) that had been occupying my headspace for some time, leaving more mental bandwidth for the important stuff. I even surprised myself the other day when I located 4 separate documents for my accountant in less than 5 minutes!

Try the 7 steps

I’ll wager that these 7 steps will yield big results for you too when you try them. Do you have any additional low-effort, high-reward productivity tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment!

Like many people, I’ve fallen into the bad, bad habit of over-checking email. A While email is a great tool (although some people like Dan Kennedy would argue, a non-essential one) – it is a huge time-waster if not managed carefully.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been experimenting with a new email management strategy:

Don’t open your email program until 11am

The theory behind this is that if you check email first thing (as I used to do), you tend to get caught up in a range of non-essential, non-urgent busywork that can take up most of the morning and get your day off to a bad start.

By getting started on your most important item first thing, you make real progress and build up unstoppable momentum for the rest of the day.

Although this tip sounds simple, I estimate this one idea alone has boosted my productivity by at least 10% (although I was a heavy user to start with Your mileage may vary.)

Give it a go and let me know how you get on. A  If you have other simple 1-minute productivity ideas, leave a comment.

Sheesh, it’s already half way through January already. I’ve just taken a few weeks off, including a visit to NZ for Christmas (and seeing Jimmy Barnes live at the Coroglen Tavern!)

At the start of each year I like to take stock of the previous year and set some new goals for the year ahead. Last year around this time I set out in this post how I planned to double my income while working 30% less.

Here’s a followup on that post about how it went…

The good news: in 2006 I did in fact manage to double my income (from a faily modest base, I’ll admit).

The bad news: The while working 30% less part didn’t really work out that way. I probably worked about the same number of hours in 2006 as 2005 (around 50-60 per week).

Drilling a little deeper…

Here are some of the specific strategies I laid out to achieve my goal, plus how things actually turned out…

Redesign my workspace

Nope, it’s still just as cluttered as ever, although my online data management systems (e.g. CRM systems, email management, Google desktop, online storage etc.) are much improved.

Move to a home office

Yep, I did this, and cut 1.5 to 2 hours off my daily commute.

Check email and blog comments no more than 3 times a day

Compulsive email checking is a massive productivity sink. I’ve been pretty good with blog comments, but my email checking got pretty out of control over the last couple of months of 2006 – but now I’m much better!

Reorganise project management systems

We did achieve some good results in this area, but eventually decided to ditch the project model in favour of an ongoing consulting model… more about that in future posts!

Training, systems and procedures

A lot of time was put into this one too, and I’m sure some productivity gains were achieved as a result… but I have to admit that I found it a challenge to get tight systems in place because (a) how do you systematise copywriting? and (b) our systems are constantly changing and evolving, making procedures out of date faster than we can patch them up.

Delegate project management

Phil started early last year as my project manager and has done a stirling job – thanks Phil! Nick Schoonens has also been a great help over the past 8 months or so. Gavin was also with us for about 6 months and made some valuable contributions to the team.

Keep a desktop “to do” list

This has worked pretty well – I either use the simple and functional Google Desktop list tool or plain ol’ pen and paper.

Less multi-tasking – structuring work in longer blocks

This is still something I need to work on. Just as important as strucuring work in blocks is being able to get into the zone “on demand”. This is a skill I’d like to have more control over.

The Scorecard

On balance, I’d struggle to give myself much more than 5 out of 10 in the areas I committed to focus on, but the results were OK, which is the most important thing.

I could have been much more structured in my approach as well. One way to assist this would have been simply to print out a copy of my previous post and place it somewhere visible to remind me of what I committed to do.

Conceptually, goal setting is pretty straightforward. i.e.

1. Have written goals

2. Look at them every day

3. Keep track of your progress

…yet it’s amazing how few people are able to do in practice. Funny thing, the human mind.

Goals for 2007

My goal in 2007 is to double my income again while working 40-45 hrs per week and taking 4 weeks vacation.
Wishing you success in everything you set out to achieve in 2007,

Will

Over the last couple of years a number of colleagues have mentioned the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as a useful tool for analysing and understanding yourself and others.  (Looking back at the wording in that last sentence, it’s hardly surprising that I’m an INTP, also referred to as the Architect type.)

While I don’t have much experience working with this metric, I felt that the description of my type was for the most part accurate.

If you’re up for an intesting exercise in self-analysis, why not take a free MBTI test here? Do you agree with the results? Did you pass? =D

I was just talking a peek at Steve Pavlina’s new forum and I came accross this snippet of wisdom within this thread:

Life really began flowing for me when I finally let go of that ego junk, pride, and feelings of doubt and said to myself, “I’m just going to focus on making the best contribution I can. If I go broke doing that, I go broke. My fears and worries are just not that important compared to the difference I could make if I really gave this life my very best. If I’m here to make a contribution, then the universe had better back me up.”

Inspiring stuff!