All For You by Brian Keith

Is Tim Ferriss worth it?

The Four Hour Work Week is worth your time and your $20. My summary first, how I use it second.

Summary of the Four Hour Work Week

1. Low Information Diet- You are taking in more information that you have to. Stop. Decide what makes you the most money, using the 80/20 rule, and then cut the extra information out of your life.

2. Do only what is most important and outsource everything else. Market research to bill paying, Tim goes through the dos and dont’s of outsourcing and delegation. There is very little you have to do yourself- do that and nothing else.

3. Work less and get more done because you don’t do any meaningless crap and don’t waste your time on things someone else could be doing for you.

4. Tim also talks about how to start an information business. Yes, you can do it, and maybe you should, and if you want to you should read this section.

Happy Worker Bees:

For people like me who have jobs and want to keep working at them, here is how I am using the book.

1. Low information diet (Page 82): I read Tim’s book and then deleted 80% of my blog feeds. Well, no, I read Brian’s post about trimming the attention sails and then I deleted the extra feeds. (Brian’s post was inspired by The Four Hour Work Week)

The point is, do I really really need to read those extra blogs? What happens if I don’t? I get back a few minutes of my life each day.

I already don’t read the news much, but now that I have deleted Google News and Wikinews from my feedreader, I will be reading even less. If something important happens, I will see it in the headlines of some blog. Tim’s approach is to glance at the newspaper headlines in vending machines. Same approach.

2. 80/20 your work (Page 68): Tim has an 80/20 fetish, and it serves us all well. He applies it a few ways, one of them being, 20% of your work is creating 80% of the results. So, identify that 20%, and then stop doing the rest, and do that 20% really well. Part of this is also limiting the time you are at work, so you actually get work done. Why a 4 hour work week? So you can’t screw around doing stuff that doesn’t matter!

The way I use this is I take my Open Loops sheet, where I have one piece of paper that has all my projets and next actions on it (a la Getting Things Done), and highlight the 2 or 3 things that have to happen that day for that day to be a success (a la page 79).

First, I get to work before most anybody else, so I am not distracted. Then, I don’t check email (Tim has plenty to say on this as well). Then I do my one or two most important things for the day.

By the time 8am roles around and people start getting to work, I have at least one critical task done.

By 9am, when people start needing my attention, I probably have 2 or 3 critical things done. The other day, I had all of my work done by 10:59.

So figure out what the 20% is that gets results, and then do it first thing before you get distracted. IIRC, Tim says before 11am- works for me, as I am a morning person.

3. Train your boss to appreciate results, not hours at the office (Page 207): If your boss expects you to be at the office a certain number of hours per day, instead of creating a Results Oriented Work Environment, then Tim has some tips for you. As in, a fairly detailed plan for how to get out of the office more over a few months.

In my role as account manager, my job was to manage people and projects, so being available for questions from staff and clients was crucial. As I move in to a sales role at my company, I expect I will be in the office less and less, so Tim’s advice doesn’t apply so much to me, but for engineering types or people who can do their work in relative isolation, you should read this.

Fin

And I wanted to write sections for self-employed, business owners, and students, but I am done writing for now, so maybe later. Oh, and Tim has great info on outsourcing, which I will be trying shortly for the market research side of my job.

Thank you Tim for such a great book- a good balance of “well duh” principles and “oh THAT’S how you do it!” insider information. Too bad for my friends who are asking to borrow it, I will be rereading it shortly.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime go here and buy the book.

Lenora Edwards just launched her new 8 page website to promote her business consulting practice.

Copy combines with good design (which is focused on who Lenora is) combines with good conversation marketing techniques like the Blog to make a strong, simple site. See how much you can get into an 8 page site, especially the client list and testimonials list, by looking at her site here.

If you want a similar site built, tough, because we don’t build sites to be carbon copies of sites we have already built. A site has to talk about you, and what you or your company offer.

That said, look at Fred Janssen’s site, and you will see some similarities- notably the strong headline, photo as the center of the page, and testimonials featuring prominently on the site. We follow the same basic design and marketing principles even as we tailor sites to individuals.

Disclaimers: Well, where to begin. My Mother hired Lenora as her business coach, and was very pleased, and Lenora introduced me to Ian which is how I got this job, and Lenora also was Ian’s business coach, and I have found Lenora a client, and she is finding me clients, and I managed the building of this site… so I may be a bit biased. Click here and have a look for yourself.

Looking at last week, we can see that my blog is really getting popular!

One problem: that is just one week of results, and you shouldn’t start buying stock in my blog just because I had a stellar week.

Nor should you continue (or increase) (or decrease) advertising spend in one area based on one week of results. We can get so much data, so fast, that we sometimes assume that data means something. But put in to the bigger picture, one week’s worth of data may mean very little. In the case of my blog, I posted more often than I had been, and that resulted in a rise in views.

Yes, I still had a fast growing week, but put in to context, the results are not that impressive.

To avoid making bad decisions, focus on the longer term results on your internet marketing campaign. If you have a great week, it is time to pat yourself on the back, but don’t open the champagne until you have more data.

UPDATE: As of August 15, this post is #1 in Google for ‘how to use launchy.’ Want to know more about SEO and blogs? Email me at brian@portentinteractive.com

Launchy is a handy dandy application launcher. To start Firefox, instead of clicking on an icon, I open Launchy with ALT-SPACE, and then type ‘fire’, and the ENTER. This starts Launchy.

It can start anything on your computer.

I am cleaning up my desktop today, and wondering what really needs to be there, vs. what can be archived. And it hits me: NOTHING really needs to be there, as I access almost everything by Launchy, not by clicking on the icon.

When you use [ ALT-SPACE 'ac' ENTER ] to launch your action list, it doesn’t matter that you can see it on your desktop. Same with Thunderbird, Firefox, Trillian…

So why have anything on your desktop at all?

I have Recycle Bin, which I haven’t figured out how to remove yet, my Calendar folder, Client folder, and Odds and Ends. That’s it.

And this picture to help me stay focused.

Goodbye cluttered desktop!

It is 10:59am, and I am finished with work.

Not really- there are a multitude of small tasks that await me. But all of my major projects are moving forward, my inbox is empty, my desk is clean, my clients are happy, and I am at peace.

This is not how it was 3 months ago.

Some things I have started doing over the last 3 months to get me to my current state of effectiveness and happiness, many of them from David Allen’s Getting Things Done:

• I keep my inbox empty- using the 2 minute rule, items are completed, deferred to an action list, delegated, or trashed.
• I capture all ideas/notes for later review (excel + a moleskine)
• I keep all of my projects and their next actions on one sheet of paper, so I can track where I am at at all times.
• I have a physical inbox on my desk, where everything goes that I am not working on at this very moment.
• I put more thought in to what I do best, and what I should delegate, and try to delegate everything I can.
• I do my most important task of the day before coworkers arrive.

When I get in at 7, no one is here to distract me- so this morning, I could get my 2 have-to-be-done today tasks complete before an 8am meeting. (True, the boss is usually here at that hour, but Ian is also enjoying the bliss of getting work done, so we don’t bug each other too much.)

Because all of my most important tasks are done, delegated, or waiting for a reply, I can spend this afternoon thinking about how to make my clients more money. Or how to sell more of our services. Or how to be a better coworker. Or… any of those things I wish I had time to think about but don’t.

Read Getting Things Done. Read Merlin’s blog which puts GTD into practice at 43 Folders.

And start enjoying the happiness that comes from working on what really matters. (that sounds so canned, but it is so true.)

Anti-littering sign in Washington: “Litter and it will hurt”

Anti-littering sign in Idaho: “Idaho is too great to litter”

The pro-seatbelt sign in Washington used to say ” Buckle up, we love you.” Now it says “Click it or ticket: $101 fine.”

Everything you say sets the tone for the conversation you want to have with your customers. From load time, to quality of graphics, to size of text. It shows when you care enough to consider all of these things in advance.

One of the projects I have been working on for the last while is live- there are new day planners for moms available at momAgenda.com.

The new planners run from August 2007 to December 2008.

Enjoy!

Now that I am #4 for Brian Keith in Google, I can’t very well stop there, can I?

Still to beat: Wikipedia, IMDB, and Frank’s Reel Reviews.

But I haven’t been blogging

Here’s the thing- I have been blogging very rarely the past month, and now I am rising. This shows that you can’t make a change one day and see results the next. SEO is a long term deal, and if you are not willing to wait for results, you shouldn’t be playing.

But it’s ugly

Also, SEO may require you to make your site less pretty. Just now I changed the title from All For You, which I like, to All For You by Brian Keith, which sounds narcissistic and no fun. But, I bet I will be #3, and maybe higher, as a result of this change.

Would you rather have the prettiest site, or the one that brings in the dollars? Ian always says that the designers want an image-only design, while the SEO people want a page of only text.

You have to decide

You as the decision maker have to decide the balance. For now, the coolness (and proof that I know something about what I am talking about) of being #1 for my name is more important to me that the aesthetic appeal of a clean, simple headline.

The balance between aesthetics and high rankings is up to you.

These past couple of weeks I have been working on doing less multitasking. One tactic is to keep that image on my desktop to remind me to stay focused. Puts it in perspective, don’t you think?

(thanks to Merlin and Tim Morgan)