It’s time to take action.
There’s something you’ve been putting off. Something that is very important to you and that will benefit your life tremendously.
Instead, you’ve been catching little bits of pleasure here and there, but nothing with lasting value.
It’s time to climb that mountain!
Bluebarb is a set of iGoogle widgets that a friend and I coded up. These widgets simplify ordering Amazon products and keep users up to date on hot new items.
You can see an example widget here, and the complete list here. Try them out!
We developed these and let it alone to see what would happen. Let’s assess this business and make a business plan for the future.
(more…)
You’ve been developing a website for some time and you’re getting close to launch date. You’ve decided to contract out to somebody to write the user’s manual. But now that the task of specifying what you want is coming up, you’re starting to have doubts.
You think "By the time I spec it out, I’ll have put in almost the same work as writing it myself." Or: "They may not even do a good enough job, and I’ll have to send it back and ask for a rewrite. That’s more trouble than doing it myself."
You know what?
You’re probably right.
You know what else?
(more…)
You have a process in place in your life. It is a machine that is run entirely by you.
On the left are the inputs. These are time and resources.
On the right are the desired outputs. This includes pleasure and satisfaction.
As it runs, it produces side effects, ranging from tiredness to annoyance to pain.
Like any machine, your Life Process runs in a particular environment. Like any machine, it requires maintenance and adjustments.
In the past, when I thought about building a web application, I had a huge resistance to the idea of outsourcing 100% of the development work. The first fear that pops into my mind: What if I pay for all this work and the application is not a success?
Thinking about that, I started to develop a new question: Why do I worry so much about the payoff when my investment is money, but I worry a lot less about the payoff when the investment is my time and energy?
What have you done for your business in the most recent hour that you put into it? In the last eight hours of work? In the last 40 hours?
Let’s get more specific. Look at the last 10 hours you’ve put into your business. If somebody else had done that for you, how much would you pay them for the results they produced? Is it worth $1,000 to you? $500? $100?
Divide that number by 10 and you have your hourly rate.
How well are you performing at that rate?
In a previous article I discussed making your business modular. Let’s look at one task and see how we can modularize it.
Every week I buy groceries. It’s easy to look at this as one activity but actually it involves a lot of different tasks and roles.
(more…)
Imagine a person who is living his dream life. For him, living the dream means waking up early and exercising, eating a leisurely breakfast with his family, working on his home business for six hours, having dinner with a friend or a client, practicing the piano, and then having several hours of family time.
He also saves money and goes on mini vacations every quarter, and a long overseas trip once per year.
He’s done this successfully for two years now and he’s loving it.
One day he wakes up with a terrible flu. His body aches and he’s dizzy with a fever. He spends the entire day in bed, unable to move.
Suppose that five people approached you right now and volunteered to work on your project. Could you fit them into your process right away?
It’s worth it right now to split your work into processes that can be performed by different roles, even if you don’t have any employees (or volunteers) yet.
Why?
This is the goal I’ve set for myself: to be making $10,000 per month from my web ventures one year from now.
It’s going to take everything I’ve got. And it’s going to take a plan. My plan is to start by making $5/month and double it every month until it reaches $10K.
Powered by WordPress