If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you don’t have much trouble getting stuff done once you actually start doing stuff.
Doing stuff is rarely the problem. Now, starting stuff, that’s hard!
There are just too many distractions helping us put things off. How many times have you said, “I’ll get onto it right after this”? Then there is another “this” followed buy another and before you know it, you’ve watched two hours of gorillas throwing poo at zoo visitors on YouTube and nothing you were supposed to do ever happened.
I find that when I look at the whole project in front of me, it all looks a little overwhelming. There is just too much to do! The thought of tackling a big project in one go is something I avoid at all costs.
Then one day whilst watching gorillas throwing poo on YouTube, I noticed how most YouTube videos are around 5-20min long. Just the right amount of time to hold my attention.
What if I applied that to the projects I had to take care of? No, not throwing shit at it, but breaking the project down in small chunks.
Selling websites is a perfect example of a project that can be broken down into YouTube sized chunks.
Almost everything, starting from research, back linking, website installation, etc…. can be broken down into 30 min chunks.
That hard part was to get in the habit of removing distractions. Unplugging from the online world can be tough at first, but you know what?
Twitter somehow survives without my musings for half an hour, my email inbox doesn’t explode if I don’t check it every 5 minutes, and the gorillas are still waiting for me, poo in hand, ready to take aim at unsuspecting tourists, the second my 30 minutes are up.
The simple habit of breaking everything down into little half hour projects resulted in stuff just getting done!
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Very true. I don’t know if you got this 1/2 hour idea from Ed, but I did and thank him for it. Stuff is getting done now. I think I got that suggestion from him for free too.
My biggest distraction now, learning more stuff. It is taking discipline to set down and get to the best proficiency level with what I’ve learned before moving onto the next thing.
There’s no end to what you can learn about Internet marketing, but you have to decide how much time to spend learning and how much time to spend working.
The half hour chunking was something taught to me by my first drum teacher, who would always say: “Kid, you can take on the world, just do it half an hour at a time”
Ed’s CFT is something I do apply every day though. It’s a game changer!
You’re right. There comes a time when you need to spend some time doing instead of learning.
Just study what you need to know now and implement it before you move on to the next thing.
Sounds like you’ve worked it out.