I am so glad you have joined me on 11strategies.com’s journey. It is still very early days, but I can promise you, 11strategies has a lot in store and I won’t forget those who joined up in its early stages.

By now you will have learnt that I love to share powerful and practical strategies with you for a productive and profound living.  More specifically you can expect to find practical ideas on the subject of time management and meaningful productivity, practical spirituality and wealth creation.

I also want to grow this site into a place where other people share their strategies, tips and techniques. In my opinion everyone is different and therefor has their own ‘optimal’ approach to productive and profound living. Don’t let it go unshared because others (and I) can learn from you. I hope 11strategies can become a platform of discovery to do just that.

In the month of June I posted 30 posts and 2 articles on 11strategies as part of the 30 day blog challenge. I covered a lot of content, like:

The Wealth Dynamics Bootstrapping Experiment

11 Timer Techniques To Boost Productivity

Transformational Time Auditing Method + Custom Time Sheets

This was a lot of content at a fast pace which is hard to keep up with. You might be pleased to know I won’t be keeping up that frantic pace, I will instead be posting 3-5 posts a week.

So what else is on the horizon?

Well a new blog design for starters, which should be up in a week or two.

I’m going to recap the month that was as the Mechanic Profile and also introduce the second experiment in a few days.

I want you to know I’m building this website to be a leading resource. I am in it for the long run. I’d love to hear your input. I also want you to know I put my subscribers first: you will be getting unique content and be notified of big news in advance of everybody else.

What big news for example?

Well for starters, I am getting ready to BETA test a brand new, breakthrough time management system.  This you don’t want to miss.

Stay tuned!

Best,

Peter Knight

If you have been following this series you will know that as a Mechanic, it is really important not to think too much like a Creator – who wants to build products, services and spread ideas. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel and you don’t want to create entirely new products. What you should aim for is to think in terms of systems and processes. What can scale, what can be simplified, what can be made more efficient? How can you improve a process?

Making money online is all about solving peoples problems, needs and wants and monetizing it. There are so many ways to do that. A mechanic can do that by fixing and maintaining systems, creating new systems or modifying existing systems.

Mechanics are great a breaking things apart and learning how things work from the inside out. There are an endless amount of systems already out there, that  are already producing results. If you are starting out online looking to start a new business, the easiest way to get results is to simply copy a working system and then tweak it. In fact, the areas of marketing, application development, design and analysis all depend on this process:

Step 1: Test

Step 2: Interpret Test Results

Step 3: Improve

Step 4: Repeat Step 1

These industries embody what a mechanic does best: which is to look for continual improvement. Take the Google search engine for example. Probably the best search engine out there, but did they stop improving? Not at all, it is a continual work in progress.

Every single time a user types in a query, Google is testing. Every user query is part of test. Google is always measuring and tweaking. Every single day it makes adjustments to its search algorhythm. It is always looking for improve the search experience by making search results more accurate, relevant and valuable.

Even if you are not a mechanic, this is a fundamental to doing business online:

Test – Improve – Test – Improve – Test – Improve

Mechanics often struggle getting started. Taking something that already exists comes far easier for them. Starting a new business, inevitably means starting something new, but you can take an existing system that is already proven to work and improve it. That is the easiest way to get results in a short window of time.  You can extend this even further by looking to leverage existing architecture to multiply your results. Mechanics often look for ways to automate and multiply distribution. They are intuitively geared toward finding a way to have minimal human input while geting maximum output, by letting automatic systems and processes do all the work.

So if you are starting out, find a system to apply, start testing and tweaking, make it a better system. And use existing architecture so can you spend less time creating things from scratch. Focus on the process, the system and improve that.

Another way you can get a headstart starting out fresh is joining an existing business to improve their systems. You can help another business with your strengths by helping them streamlining their systems and processes and helping them scale and multiply their results. There are a lot of creators out there that already have a good product but they aren’t that good at running the day-to-day operations, they don’t know how to systemize and scale and they don’t know how to multiply their results through systems. A Mechanic could make a great compliment to that persons business.

(btw we’ll get to the psychic part at the bottom of the article)

Recently I created a time sheet system that got me excited. Time tracking + exciting? I know it sounds like a reach, but hear me out.

There’s no better way to really get an idea of how the week was and plan the following week, unless you have an accurate idea of how much you can deal with. And that has been a problem of mine in the past and I think I’m not alone…you see most people overestimate what they can get done. It’s one of the problem areas in time management I like to address. I think it’s critical to establish an accurate feedback system that signals us if we are overworking or overcommitting.

We do already have such a feedback system built in. They are your body signalling the state of your energy levels (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional). For example, if you’re tired, mentally weary, feel apathic, disconnected, your energy levels are telling you something is out of balance. But many of us – thanks in parter to a ‘hard-worker’ mentality – have learnt to override these signals.

While I created a system that acts as a fine-tuned feedback system (like having your own life coach), there is an old school way of getting an audit of your time and activities. It’s something peak performance and time management coaches often use as a tool with their clients: time sheets.

By recording in detail how you spend your time for a day, a few days or a week, you can acquire an accurate report on where you are with your time management. Regular time sheets typically consist of you writing or typing what you’re doing and logging the time along with it.

I wondered if I couldn’t get in a great more detail, so I could have students of my upcoming course track their progress in  richer ways. I wanted to give people a way to assess how they were doing with their progress. So I asked myself what are the hall marks of a quality activity?

I came up with a short list of ‘yes/no’ answers and adopted them into a specially designed time sheet as checkbox columns. I’m going to devote separate posts to each of these questions, but if you want to download the time sheets and/or see what the questions are, go to the dedicated page for the ‘Advanced Time & Activity Audit Sheet‘ (it’s a free download).

What I’ve found though, that these questions give an incredibly accurate diagnosis of how one is managing time and how to improve it. The information it gives is priceless.

A Psychic Experiment

If you are planning out your week today, why not see how accurate you are in predicting your own productivity. Write down what you think you will have done 7 days from now. You don’t need to write them down as a to-list. Just write down what you think you will have done. What kind of results will you have created? What projects will you have tended to?

Then at the end of the week, write down what you actually got done and run a comparison. Are you overestimating your weekly goals? Are you getting side tracked? Are there areas that you are avoiding? Also note what you got done, but didn’t plan for. Why didn’t you plan that?

If you are daring enough, track your time with the time sheet provided here – and you’ll get an in depth look in to your own day-to-day experience in a new way.

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you are trying out this experiment yourself.

]]> http://11strategies.com/decision-making/are-your-if-thens-working-for-you/feed/ 3 http://11strategies.com/productivity-tips/the-not-do-list-for-getting-things-done/ http://11strategies.com/productivity-tips/the-not-do-list-for-getting-things-done/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:45:10 +0000 Peter Knight http://11strategies.com/?p=161 When you have goals you are working toward, time management is not just about choosing what to do, it is also about choosing what not to do.

Before I created a time management systemca that is still top secret (sign up to the newsletter for news around that), I had a little trick I would use: I would write down what I wouldn’t do the night before starting a new day.

The things I put on the not-do list would typically be things like:

• I will not check email before 12am
• I will not work on project x, y or z
• I will not visit any social networking sites in the morning
• I will not have an unhealthy breakfast consisting of sugary foods

The first thing that will come to some people’s minds is that when you phrase it the way I phrased it, it is bound to fail. (the demand resistance effect being one of the reasons and secondly, some say our subconscious minds disregard qualifiers like ‘not’ and just capture the topic of the sentence).

I’ve had varying results though. The most success I’ve had is with deciding not to work on certain projects. Why do I do this in the first place? If you have a lot of projects the mind wants to tend to all of them and that can get overwhelming. Deciding what not to work on can be very freeing. If you don’t make this decision, you may frequently experience yourself feeling ‘ought-should-could’ sentiments, trying to keep as much balls in the air as you can.

I tried two other variations and both resulted in interesting results.

First, I tried phrasing the ‘not-do’ list differently. Instead I committed to ‘deliberately procrastinate’ on certain things for a part of the day. For example: “I will procrastinate on checking my mail for the duration of the morning”. This worked well for me, because while I was keeping myself from doing certain bad habits for a portion of the day, my mind wouldn’t resist as much because it knew it could get round to those things later in the day, in a guilt free manner. When I would get the urge to something prematurely I would just remind myself to procrastinate. Strangely, this worked better for me than telling myself not to do something.

Another variation is to write down what you would like to not do, then simply forget about the list. Then check at the end of the next day what your results were. This time you’re not consciously trying to will yourself into avoiding things. This experiment is well worth trying out, the results may surprise you. Even in failure, it breeds understanding into our daily habits. And habits are important to be conscious of, because they determine so much of the quality of our day-to-day experience.

The Not-Do list on a grander scale.

While the not-do list ideas mentioned up will have varying mileage depending on a case by case basis, I think the following idea can apply to just about anybody. And that is to write a Not-Do list for life, or for your goals, or for your career and business. The choices we make that effect our long term career can’t help but limit what we can’t choose. Choosing is sacrificing. Having freedom, is having the ability to choose beyond automatic conditioning and circumstance.

To frame this in some practical examples:
You probably feel like there are some directions you would enjoy pursuing. Those ideas may even be nagging you from time to time. Or you might be trying to pursue two or more things at the same time.

When I knew no better I decided to enroll in construction engineering with the intention of progressing toward becoming an architect. It was an idea I had since childhood (among other things). The road would be very long and the road to being very good at it even longer. That is the kind of investment that would take a few decades. I didn’t enjoy most of what I was being taught, so after two years – even though I had okay grades, I decided I would not do something I wasn’t entirely passionate about. I also knew that even if I would pull it through it would mean I wouldn’t be able to do other things in the fashion I wanted to do them. I simply dumped the idea of being an architect and it has never nagged me again.

In my business, I have been more ruthless about the things I shouldn’t be doing . The things that take me a lot of time to do but I’m technically capable of doing. But just because you have the skills to do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. My productivity has literally jumped through the roof when I let go of activities that I decided to no longer do. The only thing that kept me from doing those activities were limiting ideas like: I know I can do it, I’m talented enough and somebody has to do it. Those ideas can sink you.

Do you have any of these thoughts in your head that say you should pursue something, or that you should do certain things in your business/life, simply because you are capable and may be even talented at? Are those things dragging you down? Letting them go might free things up in ways you never imagined.

Before I read Roger Hamilton’s book I had a different metaphor for money flow that I call the water well concept. We know that water wells are designed to tap into water below the surface. I find this very symbolic because before we acquire money, where exactly is it? Where does it come from? It seems mysterious in its location. We can’t really see how much there is under the ground.

Wealth = Value x Leverage