June BlueCloud 3

Question #8: How many hours a day do you spend on unproductive things, e.g. Reddit, YouTube? Sometimes I'll set aside two whole days to work on y business, but 48 hours go by and all I've done was read every page of Reddit. How can I avoid getting sucked into that vortex? The reason I do it is because when I think about the business, I get anxious because I don't know which app to focus on or if what I'm focusing on will have a greater impact than another doing something else. [:41]

Answer #8:

·       So first of all, this happens to everybody. I mean it definitely happens to me a lot or it doesn't happen to me anymore as much as it used to, but when I first got started I wouldn't necessarily procrastinate by watching YouTube or Reddit, but I'd freeze and I wouldn't tackle things. What I really want you to know is this happens, it's a very, very common thing and that there's a clear solution for this. If you don't listen to Tim Ferris' podcast, he's huge on productivity. That's his thing. I would definitely recommend that. He's good, especially the one about what's his name, Noah Kagen, the guy who does [unclear 1:20] That's a really good one.

·       So to answer your questions, what should you do? First of all, I don't really do that sort of stuff during the day anymore. I definitely do it at night for something when I want to relax and Reddit's got some great stuff. YouTube has some hilarious videos, but during the day I'm pretty focused and I'm pretty dialed in. I don't really mess around during the work day. I'll go on Facebook, but mostly because I want to respond to people's comments or buy some traffic or something like that, but that's about it.

·       A few things that have really helped me: download Chrome Extensions. There's one called Facebook, gosh what's it called? Facebook Kill Feed or something like that and it just [unclear 2:00] your news feed. So you open up Facebook and it just eliminates it. It says "go back to work" or something and a lot of that is because it's really, it just becomes a habit to type in that F and Facebook fills in and you go right to Facebook. So go to extensions that I'm assuming you're using Chrome. I'm sure the other browsers have stuff like this that will block the websites for you.

·       Second thing you want to do is get a time tracker. RescueTime is an awesome one where it basically monitors everything you do all day and spits out a report at the end of the day. It forces you to be really honest with yourself and like they say, what gets measured gets managed. I would get RescueTime and just fire that up and just watch yourself. When you see that report, you're going to look at yourself and say "oh my gosh. I can't believe I'm doing this". It makes it very real.

·       The third thing that I've done is don't focus on the apps themselves. Focus on the systems that make those apps [unclear 3: 02] will then go forward with and that seems like a small thing, but it very quickly addresses something I'm going to talk about in a second, which is the apps have the ability to fail and systems won't fail or systems can always be tweaked and that's a huge piece of it. Think about that. Instead of saying "I have to pick key words for this one app. Oh gosh what do I do", stop and go back and say "how do I create an operating procedure to train someone to pick the key words for all my apps moving forward so I never have to do this and feel like this again". That's a good example.

·       Here's some actionable stuff I do, like actual day to day things that I do. One or two days a week, I do not do this all five days a week because it is very taxing, but I block off every hour on my Google calendar from 7am-10pm and every hour and it can be take an hour and read a book or take an hour and chill out or listen to music or it's like spend one hour writing this, spend one hour doing this and you take a five minute break after each one or whatever it may be, but you'll see that that is a really, really powerful and very exhausting exercise that can be really effective.

·       Chad [unclear 4:25], a great, great friend of mine, he taught me something that's really pretty incredible, which is the idea of accountability partners and I've known about accountability, you guys all know about accountability stuff, but what he and I do, we did this when we were launching a few courses back in the day is that when we would say we got something done, we would write each other like a check for a couple thousand dollars, which was a ton of money. Even now it's a lot of money and I'd put it in a sealed envelope with his address on it and if I didn't get it done, that letter would go in th email and Chad would go cash it and vice versa. I mean if you want to get a fire lit under your ass, that's the way to do it. Do it with someone you know like in your family or a friend or whatever that will hold you to that. So that's a really good one.

·       Third, spend 30 minutes prioritizing what you're going to do for the day. Often not having a priority schedule can lead to a lot of these feelings of paralysis or whatever it may be, but if you stop for 30 minutes and go "what are the three things I want to get done today, by the end of the day, what are three things I need to get done that will make me feel successful" and at the end of the day, write down the three things that you did and see if those match up and if they don't, ask yourself why and keep doing that every day.

·       You definitely need to have stakes involved. You can't, self motivation is kind of a farce in my opinion. I think you need to have some line, some kind of accountability.

·       I would ask you where you work? What does your environment look like? Is it your home? Your office? Whatever it is, try changing that up. Try getting a new space. Invest in a new place. Go to a new coffee shop, whatever it may be. Change your schedule. Just mix it up. You'll find that you're going to, that's going to make a big difference.

·       Finally Perry Belcher, a good buddy of mine. I was talking to him last week and this guy is just I mean [unclear 6:32] sales machine. This guy makes $50-$60 million a year, just a complete tank and he's an awesome dude. Super smart. We were talking about something along these lines. How do you get through business obstacles and he said 95% of inaction and procrastination in business comes down to either the fear of failure or the fear of success. When you look at why you're not doing something and you frame it in that sense and say "I'm not doing this because I'm terrified of something happening" and then you identify what that fear is. You define that fear and then you start to break it down and say "why is this still stopping me" and you're open about it and you talk to people about it and you are honest about it, you'll start to feel this energy come back and you'll start to feel this procrastination and the most amazing thing that happens is that the time, the feeling of time in your life starts to feel much more valuable, much more like an opportunity and it only comes when you say "I'm scared of working on this app because I don't want to bomb again. I don't want to work on another app and feel like I'm putting all this work and then it gets no downloads. I can't deal with that anymore" and once you realize that you're just scared of that happening, you start to say "how do I make sure it doesn't happen? What do I need to put in place to make sure that this won't fail and I won't feel this again" and so that's something I would really recommend is defining and getting to the core emotional reason because that is you know, whenever someone has a productivity or procrastination issue, that's what it always comes down to every single time for all of us, entrepreneurs especially.