Let’s Get It In!

It’s currently 5:45 am and I’m writing a blog post. “Why is that? o_O” you might ask. It’s because I just woke up and my mind is CRISP!!! >:D .. Firing on all cylinders. Ready For Action.. Kickin’ Ass and Takin’ Names.

I had this conversation with my friend Jeff the other day. He was saying that it takes him a long time to get started once he wakes up, but as time goes on, he gets more and more productive, until it gets to the point where he doesn’t want to go to sleep because his brain is working so well and he’s getting so much done.

Of course.. That’s probably why it’s tough for him to put it together when he wakes up.. Because his mental activity and productivity overrides some sort of natural sleep initiative, and he ends up sleeping at the wrong times (for his own personal body cycles).

Meanwhile.. When The Kid wakes up, I start out mentally “so fresh and so clean, clean”, and “ain’t nobody dope as me! >:D”

I can do practically *ANYTHING* when I first wake up, and my powers diminish as the day goes on, and eventually, I can feel the slowdown.. The sluggishness.. I can feel that I’m not getting as much productivity out of my mind as I was getting before, and eventually, I shut ‘er down and deliberately conk out.

I have techniques to avoid going to sleep if I need to press on and get something done, but for the most part, once I start losing it, I hit the deck so I can reset the system and make it happen a few hours from now, fully recharged and ready for action.

This is one of the reasons (besides detesting the taste) that I don’t drink coffee and laugh my ass off at how many people are addicted to coffee but refuse to consider it a national epidemic.

Productivity

I don’t need to drink coffee because if I’m awake, it’s because I’m *SUPPOSED TO BE AWAKE*, Capisce? >:D

I don’t need stimulants to trick my system into doing things it’s not supposed to be doing, because when I wake up, it’s because my body’s ready to make incredible things happen.

I also don’t use alarms, unless I agreed to physically show up at a client’s site to work at a certain time.

I sleep when I sleep, and I wake up when I wake up, and that’s how my life works.

Having said that.. I drink beer. I drink a lot of beer.

Being buzzed helps me not feel bored with life. Not being bored helps me focus on what I’m trying to accomplish today.

Of course, people are going to complain that my beer use rivals the masses’ coffee use! :P

I agree and disagree. When I wake up, I’m automatically in the game. You can’t stop me as soon as my eyes open. I’m virtually invincible.

If you need to drink coffee to start your body up, you’re dead in the water if you can’t get coffee. o_O

Put us in the exact same situation and remove beer and coffee, and I wake up and kick your ass for hours before you’re even able to function at 75% of your potential.

As the day drags on, you get mentally stronger and I get mentally weaker, but I have tricks to keep myself in the game, so all you can do is catch up to me, not surpass me, and you can’t pass me to the degree that you EVAR make up the head start I got on you by being CRISP right out of the gate.

Pretty much, every day, I accomplish twice what you accomplish, because I roll with how my body works, and I’m productive when I’m supposed to be productive and I shut ‘er down when my body’s not doing what I need it to do to be who I am.

Scheduling

I wanted to talk about this because I’ve been doing some on-site work recently, and I’m having a really great time, doing great work with great people. :)

Actually, to give context, what I do is I’m a video editor, social media guru, dating coach, music mixer, etc etc, but let’s focus on the video part..

Primarily, what I do as a video editor is I receive projects and footage from clients over the internet, work on the projects when I’m fully-functioning, preview the work for them over iChat Theater or Skype, then either send them the finished product or post it to the web for them, depending on their desired outcome.

This means that right now, instead of writing a blog post at 6 am, I could be doing work and billing a client for the time I’m spending on his or her project.

In fact, I have a drive right here right now containing video I’m going to be working on after I finish my on-site gig in a couple of weeks.

The obvious difference being that I can’t do anything right now about my current project, because a) The producers I’m working with are asleep right now, and b) the drives are at their offices, so I couldn’t work on them right now even if I felt like it.

So.. The reason I wanted to talk about this is that I can currently feel the inefficiency of work that’s scheduled during “office hours” instead of work that’s done whenever I’m fully engaged, prepared and focused.

I would be *CRUSHING* my clients’ projects right now if I had access to them and we had agreed to middle-of-the-night/morning billing. >:D

We would have started on Monday (It’s Sunday morning right now) a day ahead of where we currently are, because I would have applied my personal “work hours” of extreme productivity and interest to putting their videos together.

I think it’s very important for people to recognize / realize how their bodies and minds function when they endeavor to create a business strategy for themselves.

For instance, it’s 6:30 am right now here in New York City, New York, USA, which means it’s around lunchtime in the UK. While I’m waiting for Americans to wake up, I’m brainstorming and collaborating with people in the full swing of their day in England or France, like this video I created with Phil Campbell for The Charity Shop in Nottingham, UK:

Get Busy!

Especially with the American economy being what it is at this point, it’s in everyone’s best interests to maximize their productivity.

Trying to fit your square peg into the round hole of 9-5′ing may very well lead to drastically negative consequences for you and your family.

If you consistently do your best work after 7pm, get a job that begins at 7pm.

Better than that.. If you have good and bad times that are sporadically dispersed throughout the day, do work where you have a definite deadline and definite objectives, but it’s left up to you which times you actually work on the project.

Of course, I realize that what I’m talking about only applies to specialized vocations that you can actually perform in a flex-time environment where you make up your own work hours.

If your job is putting a door on a car, you have to do that while the plant’s open, so you don’t have any options as far as the timing of your day.

However.. With the extremely high rates of American unemployment in October 2011, this is the perfect opportunity for people to reinvent themselves.

Think outside of the box. Push aside what people told you and figure out what works FOR YOU. Drink your beer or drink your coffee. Work when you wake up or when you should be going to sleep. Work in-person with people or over the net. Work with people in your country or abroad. Be a “Jack of all trades” or a “Master of one”. Lock down a wife / husband or stay single.

What worked for the previous generation isn’t going to work now. Nobody’s getting that gold retirement watch when they’re 65 years old and have worked for the same company since they were 35 years old.

Reinvent yourself. Make a new plan. Play to your personal strengths. Figure out a new way to forge a path forward for yourself and your family.

Figure out how to maximize your personal potential and MAKE. IT. HAPPEN!!! >:D

Related Posts

• Deadlines
• “Free” Time [Time, Part 10]
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”
• Time, Part 02

Reader “Justin” asked me what I thought about Net Neutrality the other day, and my response was basically “Not Much”.

His question and the ensuing conversation reminded me of a broader topic, which is “What about the proletariat?”:

The proletariat (from Latin proletarius, a citizen of the lowest class) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their children.

Essentially, he wanted to know whether I had sympathy for people that aren’t as well-established as I am in Video Editing and Social Media, who wouldn’t be able to easily procure alliances with larger groups that might be willing and able to pay whatever will be required if the telecom companies are successful in imposing a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline.

The answer to that is “Yes, I have sympathy for people that wouldn’t be able to pay.” and “No, I don’t think about this issue at all.”

There are two reasons I don’t think about the proletariat in this situation.. 1) If people are forced to pay for levels of internet access, that’s only a change of rules to the game, and 2) There are people more efficient in discussing and dealing with this issue than I am, so there’s no point in my throwing in my two cents on a topic I don’t care about in the first place.

The Game

There are already rules to the Internet Game that I’m playing by. Lots of people use free internet hosting solutions for their blogs. I don’t. Already, I’m paying more money than other people are in order to have more control over my site and more customization options.

Lots of people don’t even HAVE a blog. They post all their information on Facebook or Twitter and it just floats off into the ether. Both of those are free services as well.

I spend more TIME on blogging and replying to comments from my readers than most people. Every hour I spend on social media could have been billed to a client, so I can add that to my social media costs.

When I go places, I need to be in touch with my eMail & Foursquare, so I have to have internet service on my phone. That’s another charge that my particular social media lifestyle incurs.

These all add up to the price that I pay to be involved in the Social Media Game or the Internet Game. I’m not ranked #11 on Google for my first name and ranked #5 for my last name for nothing. It’s because I pay the cost to be the boss.

Part of that cost is applying my thought-processing time to roadblocks that I personally need to hurdle to move forward towards those #1 slots, while simultaneously remaining relevant and current. So.. While I definitely have sympathy for people that this Net Neutrality issue will affect if it goes the wrong way, it merely represents a change in the rules of the game for me. If it happens, I’ll either a) align myself with a larger group that’s willing and able to pay the fees, b) pay the fees myself if they’re low enough and I care enough to do that, or c) take my toys and go home, finding a new game to play.

One of the reasons I feel this way is that I was putting shows on television for years before I even became aware that you COULD put video on the net. Internet Video is only 4 years old, as far as I’m concerned (I got involved in 2006), so if the ability to create and distribute shows on the internet becomes something only available to the elite, I’m one of the elite, so I won’t have any problems whatsoever with making the proper alliances.

Play Your Position

Meanwhile.. There are people who are very passionate about this subject and expend a lot of their time and energy (as well as earning potential) discussing, blogging about and protesting about this issue.

My uninterested, dispassionate two cents isn’t going to help much, as I’m not willing to research the issue or even think about it unless I see a microblog post about it somewhere. So, Even if I decided to dedicate processing cycles to this issue, it wouldn’t add to the proletariat’s bottom line more than it would subtract from mine, which is actually less than worthless.. It’s wasteful.

The bigger picture here is that a lot of people waste a lot of their personal thought-processing time blathering on redundantly about issues that other people are better-equipped to debate and offer solutions to.

My friends Charles & Dan are VERY, VERY into politics. I’m not. When we hang out, I drink my beer while they argue and debate and agree and argue and debate and agree and I just STFU. :D

I don’t have anything to add, except maybe “I saw a photoshopped picture of Sarah Palin in a bikini“, which is absolutely WORTHLESS when an intelligent discussion is going on between guys that eat, sleep and drink politics.

If more people would realize they have nothing significant to add to the conversation and opt out of the redundant commiseration, they would see more productivity in their own lives, which they MIGHT be able to use to a significant advantage to make things happen when someone smarter than they are (or more passionate about the subject or more diligent in studying it) figures out a viable solution.

Wasted Time

Too many people waste their time talking about water-cooler nonsense that they heard about on the news instead of applying themselves to their own particular strengths.

Consider something that you spend a lot of time thinking about… Is the time you’re spending actually helping anybody, or are you just keeping up with the Joneses and making sure your elevator-conversation drivel game is on-point? Is it putting you in position to make power moves when the time arises?

What would happen if you stopped wasting your time on things you’re not efficient at? How many hours would you add to your day that you could be working out, billing clients, enhancing your social media presence, lampin’ with a significant other, or working on your startup?

How much time do *YOU* spend worrying about other people’s issues?

How’s that workin’ for ya? o_O
–
Connect with Bill via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Email Subscription, RSS

Related Posts

• Time And Productivity
• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Are You Still Relevant? [Part 2 of 2]
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”

People think that freelancers have all this “FREE TIME” to frivolously throw away on things that enhance the handout-asker’s career and does nothing at all of value for the freelancer.

It’s like they think the word freelance equates to “Never works much” like as if we’re hanging out on the beach every day with an umbrella-drink in our hands watching girls surf all day. It makes perfect sense that we’d rather work for you for free, right? :D

Maybe it’s the other way around… Maybe y’all think that freelancers are living large already since we don’t have to work 9-5, so we should somehow feel like doing charity work on the humanitarian tip and donate our time to helping YOU achieve your goals in life.

Permanent Vacation

I probably used to feel the same way before I became a freelancer myself. I can’t remember thinking about the concept much. There were people that had jobs and people that didn’t. When you got off work, you were suddenly ejected into FREE TIME, and until you walked back into the office the next day, you did whatever you wanted or nothing at all.

Same thing for weekends. When you work every weekday, the weekends are your sanctuary… Your time to be YOURSELF! :) .. Your time to do whatever YOU feel like doing. Rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées and all that… Hands in the air, as if you don’t care.

In fact, the concept of “Free Time” is a LUXURY that’s afforded to people that have their lives already planned for them.

I was talking to someone on Friday who asked me what I had planned for the 4th of July (which is today, and it happens to be 7:30am on a Sunday right now and I’m writing a blog post that will be live on my site later today, so get a clue where this article is going), and I shrugged my shoulders and said “Doesn’t make a difference to me.. I’m always on vacation.”

The longer explanation of that statement is that MY concept of “vacation” is probably way different from yours. When I say I’m on vacation, that means I do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it. If I’m partying, I’m goin’ all out! :D .. However, If I’m not partying, I’m “working”. I’m never *WASTING* time.

Besides actual work I do for clients, I have a ton of stuff to do every. single. day., not the least of which is managing my online presence. Self-Improvement takes time as well, while I teach myself to RAWK new apps, software & hardware, increasing my arsenal of what I’m bringing to the table for clients. Even partying falls under the category of business, because I’m networking with potential and/or current clients.

Even if I *AM* “sitting on the beach watching the girls surf”, I’m STILL not “doing nothing” because that’s the time that I need to recuperate from whatever I was working on, learning or managing before that and I need to build up strength, determination & reserves for the next round of work or self-improvement.

Grindin’

I remember the exact day and time when I recognized what time it was and hopped up and turbocharged my GRIND! >:D

April 14, 2007 (3 years ago), I was hanging out with a bunch of friends after a day of ultimate frisbee, dinner at a Mexican restaurant and finally drinks @ NYC’s Rodeo Bar.

Somewhere around 3-3:30am, we decided to call it a night and went outside to hail our cabs home. My friend Mike received either a text or voice message on his phone, reads or listens to it and immediately calls someone…..

Next thing I know, Mike’s having a real-time conversation with whomever was on the OVERNIGHT SHIFT of his company, explaining to them that blah blah client has an issue with this and that and it needs to be dealt with immediately.

So I’m standing there like :O because first of all, it’s 3:30 in the morning. Second of all (not that I have anywhere NEAR the level of responsibility that Mike has, but) I don’t answer my phone AT ALL, forget about in the middle of the night, much less actually DO SOMETHING about what the message was, immediately, standing on some NYC street corner.

The issue was quickly dealt with and we all went in our respective directions. As I’m in the cab home, I’m thinking “What am I going home TO DO? O_o”. I suddenly felt lazy that I had no plans in mind… at 4am. Friends of mine were working hard, LITERALLY around the clock, so long as they were physically awake, and I was doing whatever amount I was doing, which was a very low percentage of my actual potential.

There was no way I was going out like that and getting left behind, so I amped it up. My time is spent very efficiently now, which is why none of my time is “free”. I never make plans, but something always comes up. Since something always comes up, I never make plans. I do whatever comes naturally at any given time because my ultimate strength lays within my natural focus.

If I feel like tracking guitar, it’s not the time for drums.

If I feel like writing a blog post, it’s not time to do music.

If I feel like reading and commenting on my friends’ Facebook updates, it’s not time to write a blog post.

If I feel like creating a “how to” video, it’s not time for Facebook.

Similarly.. If I wake up at 3am and feel like putting in some billable hours for a client, that’s what I’m gonna do.

I might be half a day into their project by the time they wake up. I might still be working on their project 16 hours later while they’re out to dinner with their families. I might put in two days’ worth of work during the same 24-hour period where 9-5ers put in one day’s worth, so there’s no such thing as “free” time.

There’s only MY time.

Don’t Get It Twisted

If I appear to be doing nothing, I’m either relaxing/recouping, socializing or trying to THINK or feel out what my next ultra-efficient power move is going to be. It’s not an invitation for you to attempt to interrupt my flow with discussions about whatever YOU happen to need right now.

If my schedule appears to be clear, it’s because making future plans hinders my ability to pivot on a dime and do the best thing I could do right now…. Actually, that’s not true…. More accurately, my ability to pivot on a dime and do the best thing I could do right now is *NOT* hindered by plans I made in the past (unless it’s a block of time that I promised to accept money from someone for working on a project of theirs, in which case, Business is Business), which is why I don’t make plans.

If I make a plan with you on the 3rd to do something on the 12th and then the 12th comes around and I feel like doing something different, “something different” is what I’m gonna do. Therefore, there’s no point in making plans with you that I don’t intend to keep. All I can do is thank you for the information or the invite and let you know one way or the other when I positively commit to your event, which will definitely be on the day-of and might be an hour before the event begins.

So keep these things in mind next time you decide you’d like to ask someone to donate some of their “free time” to a project of yours without a) offering to properly compensate them or b) offering them anything that might be of commensurate value to them to the amount of time of theirs that you’re wasting when they could otherwise be relaxing, enjoying themselves, thinking, planning, improving themselves or putting in billable hours for their actual clients.

Related Posts

• Time, Part 02
• Time And Productivity
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”
• Time, Part 03: “Office Hours”
• What About The Proletariat? [Time, Part 11]

The year is now 2010 AD. Doing business in person is OVER. It’s completely unnecessary, as well as a waste of time and billable hours. Let me explain to you how things work now.

Virtual Collaboration

When you go to work, what do you do? You sit in your cubicle and you type on your computer. How do you interact with your coworkers? O_o Do you get up and walk over to where they’re sitting and start running your mouth? No. You don’t. You click on your instant messaging program, such as AIM, iChat, gTalk, whatever, and you type directly to them.

If they’re logged in, looking at their screen and interested in chatting with you, they’ll return your communication at their earliest convenience. If you can’t get to them that way, you send them an email. If you can’t get to them *that* way, you send them a voicemail.

The point is that the people that you’re in the same office with don’t actually need to be in that office with you. They COULD have been on a different floor and you could have communicated with them exactly as efficiently. They could have been in a different BUILDING and you could have had the same interactions. They could have been across town or in another city, state or COUNTRY and you could have interacted with them exactly as easily as you did with someone that currently shares your physical space.

When you’re working on your computer and you want to show somebody something, what do you do? Print it out? Wait by the printer for your pages to be served? Walk your pages over to where your coworker is sitting and discuss them? Welcome to 1990. Nice business you have.

No. You share information with your coworkers via computer. You share documents, images, audio files, videos… It doesn’t make any sense to create something on a computer and then take it offline to show it to someone that has an online connection. Plug this into the aforementioned business model and you can share files and concepts with people in another neighborhood, borough, city, state or country just as quickly as you can share files with someone that shares your physical space.

Video Conferencing

Another technological advance that you should be aware of and taking advantage of is video conferencing. With the press of a button on your end and a press of a button on your coworker or client’s end, you can video chat with them, f2f (face to face) as if they were sitting across a table from you. You can hear them. You can see them. They can see and hear you. You can send them files or images for their review. You can collaborate with each other in real-time on sites like Google Wave and drop.io. You can exchange large files directly or via Usendit or FTP servers.

You can also share your screen with whomever you’re chatting with. This comes in handy so that you don’t have to send anyone anything. You give them access to your screen and they watch as you bring up images or documents or even edit a video while they give their opinions remotely from their own office or wherever they happen to be.

If you’re both on Macs and using iChat, you can even utilize machine control to “take over” the other person’s computer. The other day, I used machine control to change some effects on a client’s Final Cut Pro project on their own computer while they sat there and watched. I didn’t need to go to their location. I didn’t need to even see them, as they shared the screen with me directly and we communicated via iChat audio.

In fact.. Since I work via computer, *most* of my clients, I don’t see at all. They either send me physical materials or I receive them via internet. I work on them and then either post the new version of the video to the internet and send them links so they and their coworkers & clients can review it or I open a screen-sharing window and play it down for them while we discuss it.

Time Is Money

The work I do is based on deadlines. If something’s due next Tuesday, I might very well put in 14 hours on it for two days in a row and knock it out. I also might put in 2 hours a day for 7 days in a row. This means that I can make money at any time of the day that I’m physically awake. It all comes down to when I’m in The Zone and I feel energetic and efficient about knocking projects out.

As a freelancer, any hour, half hour or quarter hour of the day is potentially billable time. I might wake up at 4am and put in 3 hours of work before the client even wakes up. I might be ready to go party at 7pm and get an emergency call for a last-minute revision from a client and end up putting in two billable hours calling up their project, making the changes, rendering and uploading the new version.

Work is done, invoices are sent, money is paid… ALL without any of us ever being in the same physical space. Not only is it unnecessary, but movement wastes billable hours, and Time is Money. There’s no reason for us to TRAVEL somewhere to have the exact same exchange of ideas we could have just as efficiently remotely.

The only exception to that is when I need to do an on-site supervised edit. There are times when it’s not efficient for the client to send me tons of footage and I need to go to their location to sit with producers to create the show.

In that case, travel can’t be avoided. In other circumstances, the clock starts and stops when I begin and end concentrating on your project. If we decide to video conference for 30 minutes, you’re billed for 30 minutes of time. If you’re calling me on the phone, you get billed for that time. If I’m reading and responding to your emails, you get billed for that time.

WHENEVER it is that I’m doing something for the benefit of your project, you’re getting charged for it. It’s in your best interest not to add preparation and travel time to that. If I have to break down equipment, pack it up, transport it and set it up at your location and then do the entire process in reverse when we’re done, all that goes into your budget.

Wasting Time

Anything that falls outside of the categories of “What I feel like doing” and “What I’ve agreed to accept money to do” is most likely going to be completely ignored. I currently have 11,498 unread email messages and 2,388 unread Facebook messages. Unread.. As in I never clicked on them. (As a side note.. Some of my friends would have had WAY more unread emails than I do, except they declared email bankruptcy and created an “inbox zero” condition by deleting all the emails they knew they were never going to go back and deal with)

I have too many people asking me for too many things to concentrate on the vast majority of them for more than the time it takes me to read the name on the message and the subject, which is approximately 3 seconds (entirely without sarcastic exaggeration). If I can’t figure out why I should read your email from the title, I’m not going to waste my time reading it.

Spending even 20 seconds per email, reading 3 of them wastes a full minute. Reading 30 of them wastes 10 minutes. In yesterday’s 24-hour period, I received 189 emails. At 20 seconds per, reading all of them would have wasted more than a billable hour of my time yesterday. That’s not considering the time it would have taken to think about and reply to all of those.

There’s too much going on with my day for me to waste time reading emails. This is the same thing I said about Twitter more than a year ago as far as people that claim to follow tens of thousands of people. It’s absolutely impossible because that would mean they were spending every waking minute reading and/or replying to Twitter posts, but that’s a different article.

Future Plans

Other than scheduling work, I don’t make plans. There are two reasons for this. The first one is that I don’t know what I want to do until I want to do it. The second is that if I agreed to do something with you on XYZ day and then something different comes up ranging from doing work for a client to having drinks with my best girlfriends to being asleep, that’s what I’m going to do during that time that I told you I was going to meet you. In fact, I probably won’t even remember that I agreed to do whatever it was you wanted to do when the time arrives.

Everybody that actually knows me knows that I’m EXCELLENT at doing what I want to do and HORRIBLE at doing anything I don’t care about or don’t feel like doing. I can’t tell you today what I’m going to want to do three days from now. When that day arrives, I’m most likely NOT going to feel like doing whatever we talked about. I’d rather do something else or nothing at all.

For that reason, I don’t waste other people’s time making plans with them that I might veto at the last minute. I might have a new client or a new girlfriend before that time arrives and whatever you mentioned to me exited my mind a long time ago.

Welcome To 2010

There’s a new format of business & social interaction going on, whether you’re aware of it or not. There are people I communicate with every single day via computer or text messaging and we’ve been doing this for years. There are people I do business with entirely efficiently & professionally without ever having to go somewhere to physically be in their presence.

The ability to multitask and switch gears on the fly when I feel my attention shift from one zone to another is what makes my days four times as productive as most people. I stay on my grind twice as long and achieve twice as much during each hour I focus on something.

Much of my efficiency is derived from NOT wasting time all day. I don’t waste time traveling places. I don’t waste time meeting with people in person when we could do it on the phone or via video conferencing. I don’t waste time doing things that I don’t want to do. I stay in my zone and when my focus switches, I apply myself to whatever the best current use of my time is. I don’t waste billable hours reading and answering random or irrelevant email.

I party hard and do my best to enjoy my friends to the fullest. I stay in touch with people in England, Japan, Israel, Hawaii, Texas, California and lots of other places around the globe on a weekly basis. The time of being limited to your current geographical region is OVER. We now have world-wide opportunities to do business with and socialize with anyone with whom we share ideas and/or ideals.

There’s too much to be done with our days to waste time on old business models of sitting down for drinks or traveling to conferences in other states or countries. Create and maintain your online presence. Stay in touch with current friends and meet new ones via Social Media. Propagate your business & social brands. Reduce the amount of time you waste every day and increase your efficiency.

Get with the program. Recognize the opportunities available to you TODAY. Work smarter, not harder. Open your mind and realize your true potential. Your friends & clients aren’t just down the street from you.. They’re EVERYWHERE now.

Welcome to the new world, Neo.

Related Posts

• Email. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Phone. Not IRL…
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”
• Guide To Dating The “Internet Famous”

I already went over this in Shilling Away Your Social Capital, but it’s actually worse than I originally thought.

I discussed wasting time in Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”. I mentioned how small interruptions in your day can stack up and completely blow your efficiency.

For instance.. If someone sends you an email and you have your mail app running in the background, you have to:

1. Recognize that that sound you heard was a new email
2. Decide that you’re going to check it out
3. Click over from the program you were using to your mail app
4. Look at the title
5. Look at the name of the sender
6. Click on the email and wait for it to open
7. Read the text until you have the gist of the communication
8. Think about whether you’re going to do anything about it
9. [Maybe] Take the time to respond, including possibly researching links
10. Click back to the program you were initially using
11. Get your head back in the game and get efficient with your project

Now.. That process can take you anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes or even MORE, depending on how much time you’re willing to donate to that person’s query.

Let’s assume you spend 3 minutes responding to someone’s email. If you do that 20 times, you’ve just spent 60 minutes = an entire HOUR helping other people out and falling behind in YOUR work. Besides that, these people are all begging with their hands out, not paying you to be on retainer to them as technical support or even offering you ANYTHING of value WHATSOEVER for you wasting your time helping them out.

So what happens is that people become known for certain things. You can count on certain people to send you certain messages. You know who’s always shilling for a company. You know who’s always inviting you to stuff that they want you to pay for that you didn’t ask them about in the first place. You know who’s advertising their latest project, seminar, webinar, meetup or conference THAT. YOU. NEVER. ASKED. THEM. ABOUT in the first place.

These people become Google Ads.

Did you ever notice how once you’ve seen something you’re not interested in enough times, you virtually ignore it? It’s like you don’t even have to try. You literally don’t even SEE the ads in people’s sidebars, because you know they’re there.. you know you’re not interested.. and you know where the actual content is. The ads become like borders or art that has nothing to do with the reason you clicked on a page.

This is what happens to people who constantly shill for the same things and never offer ANY valuable content to you whatsoever. They become invisible. There’s no reason to read their emails. There’s no value in wasting your 10-30 seconds reading what they have to say this time, because it’s the same thing they had to say last time and every time before that.

So what happens is, as soon as you get to phase #3 or #4, where you read the title or the person’s name, you automatically click on it so it’s marked “read”, but you never actually look at it. You make sure it goes from bold (unread) to regular (read) and go back to whatever you were doing without missing a beat. This way, you spend about 3 seconds going back and forth from program to program instead of 10 or more, and your efficiency for the day skyrockets.

I suppose there are people that take it a step further and completely filter out people that send them bacn all day, every day.

Is this your goal in Social Media? Are you so interested in trying to push a product on someone that you’re willing to relegate yourself to the junk folder?

Do you really think you’re providing value for your client by making yourself a pariah? Who’s going to hire you to shill for them next year after you blow all your social cred this year?

The funny thing about all this is that people have come up with all these plots and scams to get more Twitter followers, and then they proceed to demonstrate to these people that they have nothing valuable to tell them. Why publicize your own lameness? Why not keep it to yourself?

Social Media is constantly changing. There’s no telling what the next iteration’s going to be. I think you’re better off regarding Social Media as a conversation instead of an opportunity to push products and services on people that didn’t ask you about that so that when the next fad shows up, people are willing to follow you there as a valued resource instead of blocking you on it because they don’t want more of the same garbage you served them this time around.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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