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How to Organize Your TODO List as a Blogger

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I’ve had a love / hate relationship with “TODO” lists and time management / priority management systems ever since I became an entrepreneur.

On one hand I love the idea of keeping things more organized so that I don’t forget to do things, and so I don’t have to constantly try to maintain a mental TODO list which can be very mentally taxing…

… and on the other hand whenever I try to organize my life and my business with any sort of planning system, I always end up giving up on it within just a few days or weeks as it never works for me.

Recently though I discovered a pretty simple but powerful task organizer software that I’ve been trying out for the last few weeks and I really like it.

As a Blogger it’s been especially helpful in planning out what I need to do and helping me to have a clearer mind.

The software is called Wunderlist, and it’s available for pretty much every platform from a PC to a Mac to an iPhone to an Android device and more.

At the very basic level Wunderlist is just a task tracking software.

It allows you to create task lists, categorize them easily into various categories and it has a really neat “STARRED” feature which allows you to flag priority tasks of any category and then see them more easily in each of the category listings as well as a special “Starred” folder which shows all of your starred tasks.

The other cool feature is that you can collaborate with anyone else who is using Wunderlist…

 

As a blogger and an entrepreneur this can come in very handy if you’re going to be working with a team or outsourcing any of your work.

Wunderlist is a free software, with a Pro version available for those people who need a much bigger system of organizing things.

You can check out all the features of Wunderlist by clicking here.

As a blogger, I’ve been finding this software very useful for uncluttering my mind of tasks and ideas that pop into my mind while I’m working on my computer doing something else where it would be inefficient for me to stop what I’m doing in order to do something about those things that popped into my mind.

So now I just go into my Wunderlist app which is always running on my computer and I just type in the task really quickly and then I go back to doing what I was doing without worrying that I might forget about the task if I don’t write it down.

Try it out, and see if you like it.

 

 

Joe Rogan’s Advice – Do What You Love

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I came across this awesome video from Joe Rogan today, where he really nails what’s wrong with our thinking as a society today.

We have been conditioned to believe that we have to have these jobs where we hate what we do for our entire lifetimes, just to pay the bills each month.

I’m not saying that jobs aren’t sometimes necessary in life, but I don’t believe in spending all of your life working doing something you hate.

Some people LOVE their jobs, and what they do, and that’s perfectly fine – I’m not referring to those people.

There are even people who LIKE their jobs, and that’s perfectly fine too – I’m not referring to those people either.

I’m referring to people who hate their jobs, and who spend all of their spare time bitching and complaining about their jobs, but they won’t do anything about it.

In this video Joe Rogan calls out people like that:

The reason I really liked this video is because I used to be one of those people.

When I started working in the corporate world back in 1999 I actually enjoyed it at first.

I was in the tech sector and I loved it.

But by the time it was 2008 I had lost all my passion for working in the corporate world, for publicly traded corporations.

One day I realized that this passion was gone, and so I made the decision to leave the corporate world and my cushy six-figure salary as well.

Dec 31st, 2008 was my last day of working in that type of job setting and it was a turning point in my life.

It was videos similar to this one which lit a fire under my butt and made me uncomfortable enough to start pursuing my passion for entrepreneurship and I’m grateful for being exposed to them.

If you’re feeling stuck in a dead-end passionless job in the corporate world, I recommend joining Empower Network and taking the first step towards your freedom.

5 Mind Hacks For Living a More Awesome Life

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Here are five very simple mind hacks that you can use to live a more awesome life.

All of these things are simple to DO, but unfortunately they are also simple NOT to do and that is why most people don’t do them.

If, however, you make a conscious effort to do these 5 simple things more often through your week, you’ll notice that you life becomes more and more awesome.

Here are the 5 things…

#1 – Laugh and Smile Often

Go out of your way to laugh and smile.

Tell jokes, listen to jokes, make fun of yourself or the situations in your life if you have to, but just find something to smile and laugh about every day.

This sounds simple, and obvious, but most people don’t do this on a regular basis.

Or they only time they laugh or smile is like once a month when they watch a movie or something funny happens to them.

That’s a great start, but if you actually make an effort to laugh and smile every day, at least once, you’ll notice that your life starts to become more and more awesome because the more you smile and laugh at things, the more the Universe gives you things to smile and laugh about. 🙂

#2 – Stop Making Excuses

Another habit that most people are in is the habit of making excuses and feeling the need to explain yourself and your actions to everyone around you.

For example, this morning I was working with my personal trainer and the first question he asked me was “Did you do your workout on Monday?” and my answer was “No I didn’t.”

End of story.

There was a valid reason as to why I didn’t do a workout this Monday, as I had done about 7 hours of landscaping work in my front yard the previous day (which is normally my rest day) so I made the decision to not work out on Monday.

But my trainer wasn’t asking me what my excuse was.  He was just asking IF I did the workout so that he knew which workout we were going to work on today.

When people ask you a question, answer it, but don’t feel the need to give excuses and explain yourself.

Most of our excuses and “reasons” are just stories we tell ourselves, and they’re neither true nor untrue… they’re just STORIES we’ve invented for ourselves.

However, if we get out of the habit of always making excuses and inventing stories, our life becomes more awesome.

You’re an adult.  You’re not a kid anymore.  No need to explain yourself to everyone.

You can make decisions.  If you decide to do something or not to do something, you don’t need to explain yourself all the time.

Even if you just reduce your habit of making excuses by 10%, you’ll notice a powerful shift start to happen in your life and it will become more awesome.

#3 – Escape From Reality Once in a While in a Healthy Way

Being too “realistic” all the time numbs the mind.

Make a conscious effort to escape this reality we live here on earth, at least on a weekly basis.

This doesn’t mean going out and getting drunk, wasted or high.

That’s not what I mean.

What I’m referring to is escaping from reality by doing something that engages your imagination and allows you to transport your mind to another reality and another “story line”.

Some people do this by reading books.

Some people do this by watching movies.

Some people do this by playing board games or getting involved in tabletop gaming.

Some people do this by going to a show, or a play or things of that nature.

Find ways to just take a break from day-to-day reality and find something that can engage and expand your imagination.

#4 – Get Out in Nature

Nature has a way of grounding and detoxifying our energy.

Go out in nature at least a few times a week, and ideally on a daily basis.

If you’re lucky enough to live on a property with a yard, get outside and touch nature.

If not, find a nearby park.

Touch a tree, sit on the grass, smell a flower, put your feet in water, etc.

Even just sitting and staring at a tree swaying back and forth in the wind for 10 minutes can have a profound effect on your energy.

Try it out.

#5 – Do Something Different

Get it he habit of doing something different.

This doesn’t have to be huge, but just make the conscious decision to change something you’re doing in some way.

For example, today when I was doing my workout with my trainer, we finished off with a step up/step down exercise where I was stepping up on my Powerplate machine and then stepping down while holding some dumbbells.

Now, for whatever reason I noticed that when I was stepping up onto the machine I was stepping up with my right leg first, then my left leg second and then stepping down with my right leg first, and then with my left leg.

I thought about it for a second and realized that I probably unconsciously do that every time I go up the stairs.

So what I decided to do is to switch things up throughout my set of these exercises and I kept changing which leg I would step up with.

I started with my right leg, then switched to my left, then back to my right and so on.

Now this might not seem like a huge thing, but if you make a habit of doing at least one small thing daily in a different way, you’ll expand your awareness.

Have you ever driven in the back seat of your car when driving with your spouse?  Meaning, if there’s just two of you in the car, have you ever driven in the back?  Why not try it?

If you normally order certain types of food at a restaurant, why not try one new thing?

If you normally buy clothes at a certain store, why not try buying one piece of clothing in a new store?

These things don’t have to be HUGE.  Just do SOMETHING different.

Try eating with your non-dominant hand.

Open the door with your non-dominant hand.

Try it out.

You might notice that life becomes a little bit less boring and a lot more awesome when you’re willing to try new things and do something different each day.

Are People Vested in Your Success or Failure?

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Yesterday I was having a chat with my Mom about my new fitness program.

She stopped by shortly after my personal trainer Sam left, and I was just telling her how the workout I did really whooped my butt, but I felt so great having accomplished it.

So we got talking and she was asking me if this was one of my first sessions, and I told her that no, I’ve been working out now for over two months now.

Now, as soon as I said that I thought to myself “Holy crap, I’ve been working out for over 2 months now!”

The reason why that’s significant to me is that in the past, I have never been able to stick to a workout program for more than 1-2 months.

For example about ten years ago I joined a local gym with about three other friends of mine who all wanted to get in better shape.

We picked a gym that was more or less the same distance for all of us to go.

After a few visits to the gym, a few of my friends quit, and then after a few more sessions I gave up as well – mostly because the gym was always so busy during the times I wanted to go, and I had zero desire to work out at 5am in the morning! LOL.

Since then, I’ve tried various different exercise programs, both at home and at gyms.

Last year I joined yet another gym, fairly close to my house, and this time around I found a gym that was open 24 hours a day, so that I could go at night if I wanted to when it was really empty.

I found myself only going a few times, and just not really liking the experience.

Back in 2009 I did the world-famous P90X program for almost 2 months before giving up on that, firstly because of sheer exhaustion and feeling completely run down, and secondly because my business working hours changed and I didn’t have the time to dedicate to working out for 1-2 hours every single day.

Bottom line, I’ve never been able to stick to a strength training program for more than a month or two.

Perhaps you can relate? 🙂

Now here’s my point with this.

So I’m sitting there and talking to my Mom, and I’m thinking “Wow, it’s already been two months and I’m still going strong!  Why is THIS plan working where others have failed?”

That’s when it hit me.

Setting Up Plans Where People Have a Vested Interest in Your Success

See, in all the other plans that I was on before, the success of other people depended on me FAILING.

Meaning, other people technically had a VESTED INTEREST in my failure – energetically speaking.

What do I mean by that?

Okay, well, let’s use the gym scenario as the first example.

Most people don’t realize this but virtually EVERY gym out there oversells their memberships by like 90% or more.

Meaning, if the maximum capacity of a gym is that 200 people can work out at the gym at one time, they will sell 2,000 or more memberships EASY.

Why?

Because they know that 90% of people will not show up to the gym.  They’ll just pay for membership and never show up, or at the very most they’ll show up sporadically.

Gym owners know that they can easily sell hundreds, if not thousands of memberships MORE than the gym can handle because they know that most people will give up.

Their entire business plan, and the economics of the business ASSUME this to be true and if everyone they sell a membership to actually showed up and used their membership, the gym would be overcrowded, too full and they would have some serious issues to deal with.

Therefore, when the owner of a gym sells you a membership, they are ASSUMING that you won’t actually even show up.

The gym I signed up for, I prepaid for a whole year and I didn’t show up after the first month, and they NEVER called once to find out why I wasn’t showing up.

Why would they?  They probably have 1,000 other members also not showing up.

So my point with this is that the way the typical GYM business model works is that they make the MAJORITY of their money, selling gym memberships to people who don’t show up.

People like me. 🙂

Again, if everyone who they sell a membership to actually showed up to work out on a regular basis, their business would be in trouble.

Therefore, the gym has a vested, financial and business reason to HOPE and PRAY that you don’t actually show up to take advantage of the gym membership you purchased.

In other words, they are energetically VESTED in your failure to get in shape.

If you go to the gym and work out, they get paid, but now you’re using their machine and taking up space at the gym.

If you don’t go to the gym and you don’t work out, they STILL get paid as most gyms get people signed up to longer term contracts.

Now, contrast that with my current setup with my personal trainer.

My personal trainer shows up to my house, and we train.

When he shows up, and we train, he gets paid!

If he doesn’t show up, and we don’t train, he doesn’t get paid!

It’s a different setup as compared to something like a gym membership.

My trainer has a VESTED INTEREST in my success because he knows that he only makes money when I’m training, and so guess what?  He always shows up, and whoops my butt! 🙂

Which is awesome and exactly what I need to achieve success.

He also knows that if the workouts are too easy, and I don’t produce results, I’ll get discouraged, and if the workouts are too hard, that won’t work either, so they have to be personalized to ME.

Again, even when it comes to what kind of workouts I do when he’s here, he has a VESTED INTEREST in me having a successful workout.

Which is an awesome thing as well.

In the past, when I bought various exercise machines, the company that sold them to me wasn’t really vested in my success.

They were just vested financially in selling me the machine.  Once I bought it, it’s my problem if I get results with it or not.

Same with exercise DVDs and training programs.  Once they sell you the program, whether you succeed or not is mostly irrelevant to them, as the sale has already been made.

Now I’m not saying that gym owners and exercise equipment stores or exercise DVD producers are bad people, or that they don’t care about their clients.

I believe that they DO want their clients to succeed…

…HOWEVER, most of their business models are specifically organized on the assumption that you WON’T succeed.

It’s kind of like a dentist’s business model…

Dentists make money when people don’t brush their teeth, and don’t floss.

They don’t really make a lot of money on people who have perfect teeth – right?

Same with doctors.  Doctor’s make money by treating people who are sick, or hurt.  Their business model and the way that they get paid and put food on the table is based on treating people who are sick.

It is not structured in a way where they PREVENT people from getting sick in the first place!

Again, I’m not saying that dentists or doctors are bad people or anything like that.

I’m just saying that the business model they are involved in is NOT based on getting paid for preventing disease, it’s based on treating disease.

There are so many situations like that in life, where we do business with people and in some situations those people make more money when we succeed – and so they are VESTED in our success – and in some situations they actually make more money when we don’t succeed – and so they are VESTED in our failure.

Does that make sense?

So going back to my conversation with my Mom and my personal trainer, what I realized is that I have now setup a situation where my personal trainer is VESTED in my success, and this is helping me tremendously to stick to my program!

For example, yesterday I accidentally double booked my schedule with a slight overlap, and I wouldn’t be able to do my regular training session with my personal trainer from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm because I had to leave for another appointment at 12:00.

So I made the suggestion to my trainer to postpone my session until Friday instead.

If this was a gym membership and I called them and said “I can’t come to the gym today, but I’ll show up on Friday” what would they say?  They would be like “Sure, we’ll see you Friday, or whenever, or never…:)”

What did my trainer do?

He just showed up 30 minutes early, so that I could still do a workout and be done by 12:00 pm on the dot and make it to my appointment.

I don’t usually double book like that, but when it did happen, he still had a vested interest in showing up and training me, so that’s what happened.

When people have a VESTED INTEREST in your success like that, you get that extra little push that you don’t get from people who are vested in your failure.

Make sense?

This is also why I love the Empower Network business model for Blogging.

Do You Have Someone VESTED in Your Blogging Success?

What’s cool about the Empower Network business model is that it’s setup in a way where your sponsor / mentor has a VESTED INTEREST in your success.

For example, I have a growing team of bloggers who I work with daily and I’m ALWAYS doing whatever I can to help them succeed as bloggers!

Why?  Because THEIR success is MY success.  I am mentally, emotionally and financially VESTED in their success.

I’m not just selling someone a WordPress Blog or hosting solution and then ditching them to figure everything out on their own.

No, I’m constantly focused on trying to help everyone on my team to be more and more successful as bloggers.

I share from my own experience, I help them out, I constantly visit and read my team member’s blogs and offer suggestions on improvements, etc.

When one of my team members makes their first $1,000 blogging, I will be compensated for that by Empower Network, just because of the way that the compensation structure is setup.

It’s virtually IMPOSSIBLE for someone on my team to become ultra successful and make a lot of money, without me also making a lot of money in that process as well.

Therefore, I have a VESTED INTEREST in the success of every team member I sign on!

This may not seem like a big difference to some people who think to themselves “Well why would I join Empower Network?  Can’t I just setup my own Blog on like WordPress or something?”

Sure, you can do whatever you want, but will that put you in a position where you have someone like me having a VESTED INTEREST in your success???

No, it won’t.

You’ll have a Blog, but you won’t be a part of a team, you won’t be a part of a group, you won’t have other people cheering you on and wanting to see you succeed, and you won’t have a mentor who has a vested interest in your success working with you.

You’ll have a Blog, but you’ll be setting yourself up for failure, right off the bat.

This is why for people who want to start a Blog or who want to make money online, or to develop a second income outside of their job, I recommend that they sign up for empower network now and get the support they need.

My New Blogging Plan

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At the end of last year I made the decision to start blogging daily no matter what.

I created 5 simple rules that helped me to blog daily now for over 6 months.

In fact I have now blogged daily on this blog for 195 days straight.

I have actually REALLY enjoyed the journey of blogging daily and pushing through all the barriers and excuses that have stopped me from blogging consistently in the past.

As awesome as daily blogging on this blog has been, however, there have been some downsides to it.

Too Much Content for People to Keep Up

Firstly, monitoring my subscriber engagement rates and email list click-through rates and chatting with some of my readers has revealed to me that most of my readers on this blog simply can’t keep up with the amount of content I am producing.

I mostly blog about personal development, entrepreneurship, blogging and making money online, and although most of my readers enjoy reading or watching videos about those topics, there is only so much of that content they can consume at one time before needing to take a break to actually IMPLEMENT what I’m blogging about.

Most blogs in the same niche I’m blogging in don’t blog on a daily basis – they usually blog monthly, weekly, or at most 2-3 times a week.

I’ve actually gotten a few fairly successful bloggers in this niche recommending that I slow down my posting schedule and just do 2-3 posts a week so that people can keep up, or even slow things down to 1 post per week but invest a lot more time into making the content even longer and more impact-full with more graphics and illustrations etc.

So that’s been one of the downsides of daily blogging – too much content for people to keep up.

Too Much Focus on Teaching

I’m a huge believer in teaching through the clarity of my example.

What I mean by this is that I don’t like teaching theory that I haven’t tested myself.

I prefer to take things that I have learned, then apply it in real life, produce results with it (good or bad) and then share what I have learned from that perspective.

As someone who has been focused on personal development for over 20 years I have a LOT of content that I could share which comes from this place of sharing real-life examples of what has and hasn’t worked for me.

However, at the same time, no matter how much I’ve learned in the last 20 years, I’m still predominantly a student of personal development, and not just a teacher.

Over the last six months I’ve shared a lot of content from my 20+ years of experience, but I haven’t had a lot of time to invest into testing out and experimenting with some of the NEW things I’ve been learning in the last 6 months.

To be a good teacher, I believe you always have to also be a good student, and I’ve been finding myself feeling a bit imbalanced in this area of my personal development due to constantly being focused on trying to come up with something new to share and teach in my daily blog post.

So the second downside of daily blogging on this blog has been that I’ve had a lot less time to experiment and test out some of the latest and newest things I’ve just learned in the last 6 months.

Too Much Focus on Free Traffic Sources

Another downside of daily blogging has been that I’ve been putting too much time and energy into relying solely on SEO, social media and email traffic being generated from my daily blogging.

I haven’t had the time to invest a lot of energy into exploring some of the awesome paid traffic sources available out there, especially when it comes to growing my Empower Network business.

Don’t get me wrong, I love free traffic from blogging, but I don’t like the idea of putting so many of my eggs into this one basket.

Too Much Focus on Other People’s Passions

Finally, the last downside of blogging daily on this blog has been something that I just realized a few days ago.

As I mentioned above, on this blog I predominantly blog about personal development, entrepreneurship and making money online.

The intention behind my blog posts is to help people out there to get inspired and to start a blog around whatever their passions are and to teach people how to make money blogging about those passions.

When people join my Empower Network team, I’ve also been producing a private training course to help people make a full time income blogging about their passions.

The challenge has been that while I’ve been focusing so much of my energy on helping OTHER people to blog about their passions, I haven’t actually been doing a lot of blogging about MY passions!

In other words, I’ve been so focused on helping everyone else, that I forgot to enjoy the process of blogging about my passions myself.

There are two dangers in spending too much of your time “teaching” and not enough time actually “doing” what you teach.

Firstly, the first danger is burnout.

By not connecting to MY passions, and always focusing so much of my energy on helping others, I’ve been feeling a bit disconnected from my passions and a bit burned out.

Secondly, the second danger is losing touch with the very thing you’re teaching.

By not focusing any of my energy on blogging about MY passions, I risk eventually getting to the point where what I’m teaching starts to become outdated.

I find this is a common thing among a LOT of gurus out there ‘actually’.

They do something once, and make a lot of money online, and then for the next 5-10 years they teach that ONE way to make money online that worked for them.

There’s nothing wrong with that at first, but over time the stuff that they teach can become stagnant and outdated if they are not constantly testing out and doing NEW things.

I never want to get to that point where what I’m teaching is outdated or stagnant.

I don’t feel like anything I’ve taught on my blog fits into that category YET, but I do know that if I don’t start blogging about MY passions, and I just say in “teaching mode” 100% of the time, then this will eventually happen.

To me, that is NOT the best way to serve YOU – my community of readers.

Therefore, as of today I’m making some changes to my blogging schedule.

My New Blogging Plan

As of today I’ve decided to scale back the amount of content that I produce on THIS blog by about 50%.

In other words, I’ll still be producing the same great content focused on helping YOU – my readers – to get inspired, to start a blog, and to learn how to make money online, but I’ll be releasing it on a slower and easier to digest schedule of approximately 1-4 blog posts per week (instead of 7).

At the same time I’ll be reconnecting with and getting more focused on ramping up my blogging schedule on my TabletopGamer.com blog.

In other words I’ll still be blogging daily, and sometimes maybe even twice daily if I’m inspired to post on both blogs on the same day, but the blog content I generate will be split between the two blogs.

I’m not sure yet how the content breakdown will look yet.  I don’t know if it will be along the lines of 50% / 50% on each blog or 40% / 60% or what, but whatever the breakdown will be I will continue to focus on providing the highest quality of content that I can on both blogs.

The cool thing is that I think me focusing some of my time on my TabletopGamer.com blog is actually going to help me deliver BETTER value here on this blog as I’ll be more connected to the most effective trends and techniques in becoming a successful blogger TODAY.

The other benefit of this will be that I will also be able to demonstrate to my audience that I can build content, a blog and a loyal following of fans and subscribers in a niche unrelated to the “make money online” niche.

My students, my Empower Network team-mates and my blog readers here will be able to look at my other blog and see how I’m applying the things that I’m blogging about here.

In essence, my TabletopGamer.com blog will be my guinea pig and it can serve as a great learning tool for me and my team. 🙂

I think this will be the best plan of action for me to take at this point, so that I can continue to deliver high-quality content here, and at the same time re-connect with one of my passions on my TabletopGaming.com blog, AND at the same time be able to maintain my habit of daily blogging at the same time.

And for those of you who enjoy hearing from me every single day, you can simply subscribe to both blogs and still get your daily dose of content from me. 🙂

 

 

P.s. If you want to learn how to build a blog where you can make money while blogging about your passions, click here now.