Oops!

I’ll have run off the yellow-brick road with my walking goal by the end of today. That means that I’ll have to take out a contract with Beeminder to continue the goal.

I could easily have stayed on track because to do so would only have required me to walk 5 miles or so, which I would have no problem doing. But I have two excuses (they don’t qualify as reasons):

1) The temperature has been below freezing with snow on the ground. This has encouraged me to sit at home in my nice centrally-heated house - at least it did until the heating broke down on Thurday night!

2) I want to see what happens when there is a contract, i.e. I pledge real money in order to stop myself from going off-track. Is this a good motivating method which might have other applications?

Beeminder Goals Report

The more I use Beeminder the more I like it - though of course it’s early days yet.

So how am I getting on with the two goals I set myself originally now that I have five days worth of data?

First the walking goal is going very nicely. I am slightly on the wrong side of the “yellow brick road”, but this will solve itself the next time I do a long walk. Having the goal has certainly encouraged me to keep walking and has also encouraged me to do a good length every day. I took a day off yesterday. Days off are necessary but sometimes it’s difficult to get going again the next day. Because I needed a good result for Beeminder, I didn’t have any trouble at all.

The actual data points are the unjoined dots, while all the other lines and lanes are various types of average. As long as I stay in the broad yellow path I’m all right.

The weight goal is even better. I have lost 3.5 lbs already! Actually quick loss of this type is not uncommon when one starts a weight loss program. The real battle comes further down the line when the initial rate of gain slows down.

Because this type of goal gives a week’s level start to get acclimatized I am well ahead of the game.

It remains to be seen whether the slice of delicious chocolate cake I had in Dorking to reward myself after my walk this afternoon will effect my weight tomorrow morning.

Update on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 20:16 by Mark Forster

For those who have a burning desire to follow my progress more closely than the occasional updates I will be posting, I’ve made the two goals publicly accessible.

You can follow them on:

https://www.beeminder.com/mforster1uk/goals/miles

https://www.beeminder.com/mforster1uk/goals/weight

Beeminder.com for keeping your goals going

I’ve just started with Beeminder.com, which is a great website for giving yourself the maximum motivation to achieve a goal, whether it’s weight loss, exercise, blogging, book writing or reading, or anything else you can think of.

What I particularly like about it is that it gives you some very sophisticated ways of keeping on track, including some very nice coloured charts with lots of different bits of information.

I’ve started two challenges for myself today. The first is to work myself up to being able to walk 24 miles in a day (I could do 16 before Christmas but have regressed since then).

Here’s the graph that goes with that:

Basically I have to keep myself within the yellow brick road, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

The second challenge is to lose some weight, and here is the image for that (I’ve removed the incriminating evidence for this one!)

Note that in this sort of goal you get a period of grace at the beginning in which you aim to keep your weight flat.

I’ll post these images again in a few days time, so you can see how I’m getting on and how Beeminder deals with my results.

Day Zero Project

One of the readers of this blog has drawn my attention to the Day Zero Project. The idea is to identify 101 things to do within 1001 days. Sounds fun!

Why 1001 Days?
Many people have created lists in the past - frequently simple challenges such as New Year’s resolutions or a ‘Bucket List’. The key to beating procrastination is to set a deadline that is realistic. 1001 Days (about 2.75 years) is a better period of time than a year, because it allows you several seasons to complete the tasks, which is better for organising and timing some tasks such as overseas trips, study semesters, or outdoor activities.

Video Interview with Mark Forster

Here is video from December 2008 of me being interviewed by Amanda Malloy of Videofocus. It’s mainly in a “Do It Tomorrow” context, but contains many good points and is in my humble opinion well worth seeing. It lasts just over 30 minutes.

Keeping one's markers aligned

I was interested to read in the papers recently that some research had shown that people find it very difficult to walk in a straight line in uncharted territory. Most of us in such a situation would aim for a landmark in the distance, but this still results in considerable wandering off the straight. The result is that when you reach the landmark you may be pointing quite a few degrees off course, and the next landmark you pick will not be on the original line.

The secret, known to people like the Native Americans, is to line up two landmarks. When you do this you can easily proceed in a straight line just by keeping the two landmarks aligned. When you reach the first landmark you know you are facing in the right direction so all you have to do is to pick another landmark.

It struck me that this applies to how we go about getting to our goals in our business or personal life. If we aim for just one landmark we are likely to wander about and end up facing in the wrong direction. If we line up two goals then we are much more likely to proceed in a straight line to our desired result.

Let’s give an example of this. We often hear that networking is very important for building a small business. So some people go overboard with networking. They join networking associations, attend lots of events, talk to loads of people, and may even organise their own events.

Then they become disillusioned because their business, far from expanding, is suffering from the amount of time they spend away from it at networking events.

What has gone wrong?

The answer is that they have only lined their actions up on one landmark. They have taken on board that “networking is good” and have therefore lined up on the networking landmark:

——————-> Networking

The result is that they have just concentrated on doing more and more networking without really considering what the purpose of it all was.

If they had remembered that the purpose of the networking was to expand their business they would have approached the networking in a different more focused way:

——————-> Networking ——————-> Business Expansion

As an exercise, you might take a look at some of your goals to see whether they are properly lined up. For instance what might the difference be between these two?

——————-> MBA

——————-> MBA ——————> Promotion to Higher Management

or these two?

———————> Going to gym

———————> Going to gym ———————> Increased energy for work

Wherever you suspect that an activity which should be supporting a higher goal is taking on a life of its own, it’s a good idea to carry out this lining up exercise.

Back to Autofocus

Three days ago I decided to stop experimenting with new systems and to concentrate on using Autofocus. I know Autofocus works, and I want to see just how far it will take me. I’m particularly interested in how well the auto-focusing aspect of it (after which it’s named) will work in the long-term. Just to recap, the theory behind Autofocus is that you can throw any ideas, brainwaves, pipe-dreams, etc, into it without prior evaluation and the system itself will sift them and enable you to concentrate on what is really important to you.

Of course we often don’t really know what is really important to us. Even if we’ve gone through an exercise in writing down our important goals, the results are often contaminated by what we think we “should” have as our goals. Another problem is that we sometimes don’t know that something would be important to us because it hasn’t yet appeared on our scene.

My vision for Autofocus is that through its unique sifting process we will have our goals and vision clarified for us. Perhaps it would be better to express that as “we will be able to clarify our goals and vision”, because Autofocus is after all no more than a framework to allow our intellect and our intuition to work in balance.

After several months of experimenting with other systems I’ve succeeded in reducing my life to a satisfactory state of chaos. So what are the areas that I particularly hope Autofocus will now sort out for me? There are loads, but I think the top three would be:

1) I need to get simple business of running my daily life back on track. Many things are not too bad: my email is up-to-date; my finances are under control; I don’t have huge backlogs of work. But I do badly need to sort out my office which is in a mess; I need to get into a sustainable routine of blogging, tweeting, and writing my newsletter, and I need to take a lot more exercise.

2) I need to get a vision of what I am doing. I’ve been hovering around being “semi-retired” for far too long. I need to have a clear focus. My feeling at the moment is that I want to get my business going again. This needs testing and affirming, and progressing with some positive action.

3) I need to avoid taking on commitments without a positive vision of what they are for. People who are newly retired and still in reasonable possession of their faculties are particularly vulnerable to “commitment creep”, i.e. the steady accumulation of commitments for no other reason than that they seemed a good idea at the time. I’m beginning to notice this in myself and I want to be far more rigorous about it.

Just how much can I expect Autofocus to help with all this? I intend to find out, and my intention at the moment is to blog regularly on my progress. The real test of Autofocus is not statistics on how many tasks one has carried out, but how well it’s sorted out areas such as the three above.

Developing One's Vision

The instructions for the new Autofocus system are scheduled to be distributed at 1am EST tomorrow morning (Monday). That’s 6am GMT for those who live in the United Kingdom. Whether you live in America or the United Kingdom you should have them in time for work tomorrow. Go to the Quick Start guide in the instructions and you will be rolling!

I am going to be away all day tomorrow, so please don’t expect any immediate replies from me to comments or emails about the new system. Don’t let that stop you sending them in though!

One thing that’s become very clear to me throughout the preparation for Autofocus has been how the vision for it has developed through working on it. I didn’t draw up a plan at the beginning and I didn’t even have a very clear idea of where I was heading. In fact at the time I thought I had just succeeded in retiring from work - that didn’t last very long!

What I did was to take what seemed to be the next action. As I progressed more actions became clear and I took them. Some of the actions which I dreamed up, died a natural death once I started looking at them more closely. So for instance there are no elaborate videos on how to work the system, nor are there any onerous forms for testers to fill in. If I had done these things, we would be waiting until Easter for the testing to begin and all momentum would have been lost.

The Autofocus system fits naturally into this way of working. Because it encourages a “little and often” approach and an intuitive sifting of possible actions, it is an ideal system for riding the crest of a wave - and also for spotting likely waves as they approach!

How to Get Any Project Up and Running

Here is another article I wrote some years ago. This formed the basis for the concept of the Current Initiative in “Do It Tomorrow”.

Do you have lots of great ideas for projects but never get round to starting them?

Do you have a host of old projects that you got so far with and then ran out of steam?

Or do you find yourself saying things like “I really must do some more marketing, but I can never find the time”? (Translation: “I’m not doing the really important work because the less important work is more important!”)

I’m going to tell you a method now which will enable you to give any project your best shot. I can’t of course guarantee that your project will succeed, but at least if you use this method you won’t fail because you have let yourself down.

But be warned: you can only use it on one project at a time!

The basic idea is simplicity itself. You can keep any project moving powerfully forward if you take some action on it first thing every day.

Let’s analyse that a bit further. There are three elements:

1) Take some action

2) First thing

3) Every day

Let’s deal with each of those in more detail.

1) Take some action

You need to take some action, not just think about taking some action! It doesn’t matter how small the action is. The important thing is to get started. I’ve written before about how a simple phrase like “I’ll just get the file out” can be the trigger for getting into a difficult or daunting task.

How much action do you need to take? It doesn’t matter. Just as long as you take some action, it will keep the project alive. When people come to me with writer’s block, I usually set them the the target of writing for at least 10 minutes every day. Al Secunda in his book “The 15-second Principle” makes it even less — he says a minimum of 15 seconds work a day on any project will bring it to fruition.

Of course Al is not telling you to work for only 15 seconds. He is telling you to work for at least 15 seconds. Once you have succeeded in getting started, most days you will go on and do some significant work on the project. But even if you don’t do more than the minimum, you will have kept the project alive in your mind and you will find that you naturally get into the swing of it in the next day or so.

2) First thing

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I give an exercise in which you are asked to select one task that you are going to do the next day. If you succeed, you then select a slightly more difficult task for the next day. If you fail, you select an easier one.

This sounds an incredibly easy exercise, but the truth is that most people find it almost impossible to keep it going for more than a few days. Yes, it’s rather a horrifying thought — most people are incapable of selecting just one new task a day and doing it without fail!

Your project is going to get lost in the same way unless you make sure that you do it first thing before doing anything else. You know exactly what will happen if you don’t do it first thing. You will find yourself late in the day saying: “It’s nearly time to stop work and I haven’t done a thing about that project yet. It’s not worth doing anything now. I’ll give it a really good go tomorrow.” Guess what happens tomorrow!

I have learnt the hard way that if I want to carry out some particular task every day over an extended period — such as writing, going for a run, whatever it may be — it has to be got under way before I have my breakfast, before I make a cup of tea, before I look at the newspaper. If you work in an office, then the task needs to be started before you check your e-mail, before you talk to your colleagues, before you listen to your voicemail. The second that you say “I must get started on that project, but I’ll just check whether there’s anything new in my in-box” you’ve lost the battle!

Once you’ve got going, you will find that most days there is a natural tendency to keep going. And if some days there isn’t, so what? As long as you’ve done something, you will find it is easier to do more the next day. And that brings me on to my next point.

3) Every day

When someone tells me that they are stuck on a project, the first question which I ask them is “When did you last do some work on it?” Invariably it turns out to have been weeks ago.

Once you stop working on something, it will start to die. Think of your projects as house plants which need watering daily. They don’t need a lot of water, but they do need some. If you forget to water them for one day it won’t be fatal, but forget to water them for several days in a row and they will start to wither. Yet sometimes even the most dead-looking plant will revive if you resume the daily watering. And so it is with projects. If you have a project in your life which is really stuck, try doing some work on it first thing every day and you will be amazed to see how it starts to move forward.

When I say “every day” I mean every working day. For some personal projects you may want to do seven days a week, but for most work projects five days a week is fine. There may be days during the week when you know you are not going to be able to do any work on the project. You might for instance be away at a business conference. The important thing is to identify these days in advance. And what’s the first thing you do when you get back into your office after your conference? Yes, you’ve got it!

On days which you haven’t identified in advance don’t accept any excuses from yourself. The most common justification that I hear is that an “emergency” came up. I’m not saying there aren’t occasional unforeseeable life-or-death situations in which you have to take immediate action to avoid a catastrophe. But be honest with yourself: how often does that really happen? Most of our so-called “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. They are simply situations which we have neglected so long that they have come back to bite us.

********

So there you are: that’s it. Follow the principle of taking some action on your project first thing every day, and you will be amazed to see how the project comes to life and progresses almost like magic. But remember what I said at the beginning: you can only do this with one project at a time!

So how do you decide which project you are going to use this method on? Ask yourself some questions, such as:

What’s the project that I have been putting off longest?

What am I most stuck at?

What would make the greatest difference to my life and work?

What would really take my life or business forward if I took action on it?

Concentrating on one project at a time is a very good time management principle. You may remember that old music-hall turn, the Chinese spinning plates. The performer has a huge number of bamboo rods and the aim is to get a plate spinning on the end of each rod. A good performer can get thirty or more plates spinning at the same time. The way it is done is to get one plate spinning properly, then to move on to the next plate, then to the next. Go back to an earlier plate only when it starts to wobble.

It’s exactly the same in your life or business. Get one project up and running properly before you take on the next. That is far the best way to move forward.

********

Reading this article won’t make the slightest bit of difference to your life unless you do something about it. What you need to do now is to decide on one project which you are going to do first thing tomorrow and every day thereafter until it is fully up and running. If you want to reinforce your decision, feel free to e-mail me ( mf@markforster.net ) to tell me what it is, and I will e-mail you in two weeks time to ask how you got on!

What do you really want out of life?

A very good way of getting your mind to go deeper than usual into a problem or question is to keep coming back to it regularly over a period of time. I made extensive use of this in my book “How to Make Your Dreams Come True” (sadly now out of print). The distinguished psychologist Nathaniel Branden also used it in his Sentence Completion Programs. He recommends completing a sentence like “To me, self-responsibility means…” every day for a week with six to ten answers, without consulting what was written on previous days. At the end of the week, the answers for each day are reviewed. Usually the answers at the end of the week differ quite considerably from the answers at the beginning of the week.

We can use a similar technique to tackle the problem of goals. The problem of goals? I thought that we were always being told that we should have clear goals - goals are definitely seen as a good thing in the self-improvement world.

Yet goals can be a problem. For a start, a lot of goals are externally imposed, whether it’s by our boss or our friends or our loved ones. Mind you, they aren’t anything like as bad as the ones which we impose on ourselves. Only too often, people give themselves “exciting goals” and then give up after a burst of enthusiasm because the goal has become a burden rather than a joy. If you give yourself a goal like earning £1,000,000, it can wreak havoc in your life - especially if you haven’t really thought out why you want to earn £1,000,000.

Here’s the exercise. Start by writing out ten completions to the sentence “Something I really want out of life is…” Don’t censor yourself, and go for the full ten and no more. The next day, without looking at your previous list, do the exercise again. Repeat this for a full week and then look at the results. Is each day’s list much the same, or are they different? How much does the last day overlap with the first? Can you identify any progression in your thoughts?

You might want to keep this exercise going for longer than a week. It’s good to keep doing it until the answers settle down. Then switch to repeating the exercise once a week. That way you can keep in touch with what you really do want out of life.

MindManager

Although I’m conscious of the limitations of Mind Maps, I’ve always kept a mind mapping program on my computer as a way of keeping a record of my developing thoughts on any subject which I want to think about over a long period of time. All three of my books started life in this way.

The program I’ve used up to now has been FreeMind, which contains all the basic functionality and has the great advantage of being a free program.

Lately though I’ve been trying out MindManager, which has a lot more bells and whistles but has the disadvantage of being quite expensive. I’m still undecided whether to buy the program, but I must say I do like a lot of its features and find it overall easier to use than FreeMind - at least once I got past the initial steep learning curve.

There’s one feature I particularly like and that is the Brainstorming function. This is brilliant for carrying out timed thinking sessions of the type I wrote about in my article Hard Thinking and elsewhere. They even include the timer!

The great advantage of doing this sort of session on a mind mapping program is that, when you’ve finished writing down your thoughts in random order, you can then order them, group them, prioritise them, edit them and extract tasks from them easily.

Joesgoals.com

In my posting Chaining: A Way to Keep Going I mentioned a useful website for keeping track of things you want to do every day: 

         Joesgoals.com

I’ve been using it quite a bit recently, and one thing it is absolutely brilliant at is keeping track of whether I succeed in finishing my Will Do list every day. As those of you who’ve read Do It Tomorrow know, I strongly recommend carrying out a diagnostic procedure if you fail to complete your Will Do list for more than a few days. The number of days depends on your particular circumstances, but I use 3 days myself. If you are using more than 5 days, you are fooling yourself!

Joesgoals allows you to have negative goals (i.e. things you don’t want to do) as well as positive goals. The chain then refers to the number of days you have refrained from doing the undesired behaviour (like smoking, eating chocolate cake, etc.). I put my Will Do list in as a negative goal - Not Complete Will Do List - so that the program shows up immediately if I’ve not completed the list for three days. I get a row of three red crosses!

Never underestimate the power of these types of visual reminders. I regard getting even one cross as a major disaster, and would do almost anything to avoid three in a row. Yes, I might even exercise discrimination in what I put on the list in the first place!

Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. (Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Working Week)

More on Parkinson & Pareto

I’m continuing reading The 4-Hour Work Week and came across this quotation which I absolutely love, so I thought I’d share it with you:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
   
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

Pareto meets Parkinson

I’m reading Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week at the moment, and I notice that he recommends using the Pareto Principle combined with Parkinson’s Law in order to focus one’s work so that one is achieving the maximum in the minimum time. This is very similar to what I have just been writing about in my posting DIT And Focus.

You may be more familiar with the Pareto Principle as the 80/20 Rule. This states that 80% of results are produced by 20% of the effort. This can be applied in many different ways. In a time management context you could say that 20% of your tasks produce 80% of your results. Or in a marketing context, it could be phrased as 20% of your customers produce 80% of your income. Note that the corollary is also true: 80% of your customers produce only 20% of your income!

By concentrating on the 20% that produce the results and jettisoning the other 80% you can greatly increase your productivity.

I expect most of you are familiar with Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

As I have often said, if you are struggling to fit all your work into the day, the solution is to set limits on your working hours. This forces you to be more selective in what you do and more efficient in how you do it.

The Do It Tomorrow system works best with set working hours. If you carry out the audit procedure correctly whenever you fail to complete your Will Do list within your set hours for more than a few days, then you will be forced to narrow and define your focus. Always try to identify the 20% of actions which bring in that valuable 80% of results.

And if you gradually reduce the length of your working day, the effect will be even more pronounced. I don’t expect many of us will get down to the 4-Hour Week Tim Ferriss dangles before our eyes - but do we have any real doubt that our focus could do with a bit of improvement? How far can we go in the right direction if we use these two principles - Pareto and Parkinson?

DIT and Focus

I’ve often remarked that I’ve never been able to take full advantage of the Do It Tomorrow (DIT) system myself because I am always experimenting with new time management methods. Each time I experiment with a new method I am letting go of DIT itself. The result is that I certainly sympathise with Edison’s famous remark that he had learned 10,000 ways of not making a lightbulb!

I’ve determined however that I am going to make DIT itself the subject of an experiment. What I want to find out is if consistent use of DIT over a relatively long period results in a virtually automatic focusing of one’s energies in the direction that is most profitable (using that word in its widest meaning) - even if one has no idea to start off what that direction might be.

The reason I think this is probably what will happen is that our minds are naturally creative - too creative in the majority of cases. We get sidetracked onto all sorts of fascinating byways, while what we should be focusing on gets neglected. But at the same time that natural creativity will be coming up with many new ways of being more productive. The problem is of course distinguishing which of these creative ideas are sidetracks and which are productive.

If one implements DIT conscientiously - especially the requirement to carry out an audit if one can’t finish the Will Do list for more than a few days running - one is virtually forced to identify what is really important and cut out the rest. My theory is that this will provide a concentrated focus on what is important which will propel us forward!

So I am going to stick to the rules exactly for the next few months and see what happens. Bear in mind that my aim is not to get through all my work but to monitor continually the validity of what that work should be.

Chaining: A Way to Keep Going

Most of us have some goals which we would like to keep going on a daily basis - it may be going for a run, or doing our piano practice, or tidying the office, or any of thousands of possible actions which we feel will leave us better off physically, mentally or financially.

Some of these may be negative goals, in that we want not to do something on a daily basis, like smoke cigarettes, eat chocolate or drink coffee.

So we are either trying to establish a new habit or break an existing one.

The trouble with these types of goals is that they often are very difficult to keep going. We usually start off with the best of intentions, keep going for a week or two and then miss a day. Then it’s a shorter period until we miss another day and that turns into two days, and before we know it we have given up the goal altogether. All we have achieved is to make ourselves feel guilty!

How can you motivate yourself to do better than this?

There is a simple method called “Chaining” which can greatly increase your chances of success. It takes the form of competing against yourself to produce the longest chain of days in which you succeeded with your goal. 

For example, if your goal is to practise the piano daily you manage to carry this out for two weeks and then miss a day. You have made a chain of fourteen days. Now your aim is to beat your record of fourteen days.

The great advantage of chaining is that it recognises that we are almost certain to fail sometimes, but this a positive as it allows us to compete with ourselves to get better and better.

So why not give it a try? Select one goal (positive or negative) which you would like to establish in your life and see how long a chain you can make. There’s even a website to help you do this:

www.joesgoals.com

Get your first goal well established before taking on another. Having too many goals going at once will dilute the effect.

Let me know how you get on!

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Dialoguing

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that. 

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

"Dreams" - the underestimated book

Some people consider How to Make Your Dreams Come True to be my best book. Others can’t stand it. This ambivalent response probably explain why the sales have never been as good as my other two books. Personally I think it is at least as good as many top selling self help books and a good deal better than many!

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can find out for yourself very cheaply because it is only £5.99 on Amazon UK at the moment. And to whet your appetite I plan to run a series of articles on this blog over the next few weeks on themes from the book.

Buy How to Make Your Dreams Come True

Getting Going Again: Day 2 Report

I finished my Will Do list today at about 12.30 p.m., just in time for lunch. Everything has been pretty effortless so far, which is encouraging.

The most important thing I did today was the item “Think about the future of my business”. That actually only took me about ten minutes, but generated a whole stream of other “Think abouts”, including:

Think about:

how to blog regularly
new subjects for seminars
collecting subjects for future articles
subjects for another book
increasing sales of existing books
using audio/video/teleclass formats
touring
publicity
joint projects
increasing website circulation
monetarising my website

I’ve scheduled these forward over the next two weeks in my Task Diary, and added at the end the all-important “Think about the future of my business again”.

The great thing about the Do It Tomorrow system is that it enables one to keep the momentum going.

Buy Do It Tomorrow