Blog Course

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on December 21st, 2007 | Filed under Uncategorized | Comment now »

Better Sleep Tonight

Getting a good night’s sleep is a major concern for a lot of people, including myself. In the past I’ve used sleeping tablet most nights. And even then I’d lie awake, unable to shut-down my busy mind, looking at the clock and calculating how much (or how little) sleep I was going to get.

Sometimes I’d get angry or frustrated by not be able to sleep - then I had even less chance of making it happen.

Ok enough about my story. Suffice to say, I’ve been there.

And with qualifications in mental health I should know better. Problem is, like many professionals I haven’t always practiced what I preach. Not any more.

I made a few of the changes - the ones I’ve always recommended to others, which together have made all the difference to my sleep.

Hey it’s great to know my advice works!

Here’s my first simple tip on improving your sleep. If you have an alarm clock or clock-radio, turn it around or put it somewhere out of sight. Maybe you have difficulty falling asleep, maybe you wake up during the night or maybe you wake up earlier than you want to. They’re all forms of insomnia and there are lots of different possible reasons. But one of the things that can make sleep problems worse is worrying about them.

Nothing feeds your sleep anxiety like lying awake at 2am, in a house that is completely silent - except for the sound of a ticking clock…

…or completely dark, except for the glow of your bedside alarm.

We all know we are supposed to be getting a good 8 hours of sleep. And you’ve probably experienced the misery of trying to cope at work after a sleepless night. So you know that not enough time asleep = pain the next day.

If only we could control time.

Obviously we can’t. But here’s the question:

Does worrying about time help you get more done? Maybe sometimes, but definitely not when it comes to sleep.

Because going to sleep and staying asleep requires a quiet, relaxed mind. The fact is if you can’t sleep, looking at the clock and counting the hours until you have to get up will only make it harder for you to get to sleep and result in less total sleep.

Put your clock out of sight and out of mind. If you don’t know what time it is, you haven’t got anything concrete to latch on to. True you may still have problems sleeping but you will have one less thing to worry about.

This all comes down to the whole accept-what-you-cannot-change thing. If you can’t change it then stop worrying about it.

Not all worries are that easy to sort out so I’ll cover more about sleep and worry-control in a future post.

Note: Ok, let me just clarify something here. If you have chronic or very severe insomnia you may need medical treatment. You could have an anxiety or depressive disorder, sleep apnoea or many other things. I suggest you see your doctor. You can also speak to me online via Kasamba if you want to get more personal advice on sleep issues.

---

Life Shortcut #3 - Hide your clock - Put it out of sight & out of mind.

If one of the things you do at night is calculate how many hours of sleep you are going to get, or if you look at the clock while trying to get to sleep, then get rid of it. This one change can make a big difference to your ability to sleep better.

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on May 25th, 2007 | Filed under sleep, insomnia | Comment now »

Leverage Your Time - It’s almost as good as cloning yourself!

You only have so many hours in a day. That’s why the last thing you want to do is limit yourself to making money as an employee.

If you get your income as a paid employee the only way you can earn more money is to either:

a) Work longer hours or

b) Ask for a raise

But there will always be a limit to how much you can earn. And in one way or another you will pay for every extra dollar you make.

For example if you work longer hours so that you can bring home more money then you will pay for this extra income by having less time to spend with your family or less time doing things you like doing - like spending your money.

It’s a horrible catch-22, that some would say is just a fact of life.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You need to escape the whole swapping time for money game and start leveraging your time.

That means developing passive income streams and using other people’s effort to accelerate your earnings.

Let me give you an example. If I earn $30/hour from paid work and it takes me 2 hours to write an article for my online business then I have effectively used $60 worth of income producing time.

Now that’s not crazy if my article is going to start making me money. It’s a one off investment of time that will continue to pay me over the long term. That article may make a few dollars every week for years to come. That alone won’t make anyone rich, but replicate it several times and you have a passive income stream that delivers much more than the once only wage you receive for working a couple of hours..

But you can do better than that. You can pay other people to do the work for you. Why would you do this, when you are trying to make money? Because there are people out there who can do this stuff more efficiently and at lower cost than you can. This is good free-market economics in action.

For example, if you can find someone who specialises in writing articles, can type at 90 words per minute and is an expert at article research, they can probably write your article in half the time. Better still, because it’s a competitive market out there, you should be able to pay less per hour than you earn at your own paid job.

Now if I can earn $30 from my paid job and get someone to write 4 articles for me for the same amount of money, I have managed to get 8 hours of article writing done for the amount of money I earned in one hour!

I work for one hour and get 8 hours work done for me. Now that’s leveraging your time!

Where can you get this kind of service?

---

Life Shortcut # 2Use other people’s effort to dramatically multiply your results. Why DIY if you can get someone else to do something faster, better and cheaper? Don’t waste your time. Focus your energies on only the things that you do best.

Check out Need-An-Article - when I first used this I was blown away that I could get articles custom written for me for only $6 - Amazing!

(Please use my affiliate link, you get your articles for exactly the same low rate and I get a few extra dollars to motivate me to write free advice for you!)

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on May 25th, 2007 | Filed under time management, success, productivity, wealth | Comment now »

Remember it’s a five year plan, not a five week plan!

Ok this is something I’ve been guilty of many times. Maybe you have too…

It starts with an uncomfortable feeling that things aren’t right; that something needs to change.

Maybe you’re unhappy at work or unhappy with your weight.

Whatever it is, you resolve to make some changes in your life. You make a plan and start doing things differently.

So far so good. Your motivation and energy levels are high. Just what you need when you are trying to get things done.

But how long does it last? Usually not very long. Yes you make some progress, which is great, but all too often you find the good habits start to slip back into the old way of doing things.

Maybe you’ve heard this quote before “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year, but underestimate what they can achieve in ten years”. We could rewrite that to be one month and 10 months.

Now I know this is a blog about Life Shortcuts, but here’s the problem. A year will pass whether you spend it working towards a 5 year goal or spend it just getting through each day. Without long term goals where will you be in 5 years? You can be sure of only one thing - and that is that you will be 5 years older. Will you have the same problems you have now? Where will you live? What will your relationships be like? How happy will you be?

It may seem strange to be talking about 5 year plans in a blog about Shortcuts, but think about it. You can achieve far more in the next 5 years than you have in the last 5 years - just by having the right goals and taking the right steps towards achieving them. If you don’t know where you want to get to there is no way you’ll be finding any shortcuts to get there. In fact you can be pretty sure you’ll be taking the long road!

Start planning now. Choose what you want from life and then we can start looking at how to get you to where you really want to be. And more quickly than you can imagine.

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on May 25th, 2007 | Filed under success, motivation, goals | Comment now »

Are There Any Shortcuts in Life?

I love a good shortcut. The feeling of satisfaction you get from knowing that you have cut past all the other fools who choose the long way. Being able to sit back & relax with the free time you now have available to you.

The problem is that it’s far too easy to find yourself taking the scenic route as you search for the shortcut. You’re not quite sure what you are looking for, you get distracted, admiring the view - and the result is that you didn’t save any time at all!

Hey, I think it’s essential to admire the view - that’s really what life’s all about, isn’t it. Unless it’s a view you’d rather not see. If that’s the case, then a shortcut to a nicer view is worth the trouble of finding.

Some things in life are tedious & boring, some are depressing & anxiety provoking. On the other hand there is plenty of satisfying & energising things in life too. I’m quite happy to find ways to reduce the dull bits. My aim is to increase my comfort, enjoyment, happiness, wealth & generally get more of the good things, less of the bad. If there’s a fast track to achieving these things I’m going to find it. Even if it takes me all day!

Despite the belief many people have that there are no shortcuts in life, I’m certain that this isn’t the case. Here’s some of what I hope to show you through this blog:

- How to be free of worry
- How to reduce anxiety & depression
- How to sleep better
- How to be more productive
- How to get things done & eliminate procrastination
- How to save the planet
- How to get what you want
- How to have more money
- How to improve relationships
- How to make everyday tasks easier

And the overriding principle of everything I’m going to post here will be how to get what you want in life with the minimum amount of effort - I’m talking Life Shortcuts.

A lot of sites may be able to help you with these types of problems, but I’m going to show you how to sort them out quick-smart! Less effort - bigger results.

If you’re interested in this kind of stuff then subscribe to my RSS feed. Hope to see you back here soon.

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on May 25th, 2007 | Filed under productivity, problem solving, personal development, purpose, sleep, time management, success, motivation, insomnia, business, balance, consiousness, courage, goals, entrepeneurship, wealth | Comment now »

Too Many Ideas!

Don’t tell me you can’t find a good idea for a business!

There are ideas everywhere. I saw a program on TV the other night about ways people have made their fortune. Some of it just blows my mind. 

I mean how does someone make millions of dollars from ‘inventing’ plastic boxes to put shoes in, or toys to put on the end of your crocs?

What blows me away is not their idea, but the fact that they ever got it in their heads that these were ground-breaking, fortune-making ideas!

And it blows my mind even more that they turned out to be right!

If anything I have too many ideas. I must have come up with at least 20 good ideas for businesses over the past 10 years.

I researched them, gave them some serious thought and they all seemed to have had great potential for profit.

So why did I not achieve my success 10 years ago?

The problem is I was addicted to the thrill of the new idea. Too many times I’d find that a new and just as exciting idea would come to me just as I was getting down to business with the last one. The end result was that I would dilute my efforts and my thinking time across two or more ideas. Or just drop the first idea and move forward with the second idea. Until yet another idea came along. You get the picture.

I’m an ideas person and I’m proud of it, but it can really be an obstacle to success if you don’t combine your ideas with concrete, consistent and persistent actions.

No, what is needed, at least for me and maybe you if you are an ideas person, is not more ideas but more action. More focused action.

See the trick with the success of many ideas that make millions is not in the idea, it’s in the delivery. It’s in the marketing. And it’s in the follow up.

Spend some time coming up with the best ideas you can. Write them down. Then choose something and take action. If you come up with new ideas along the way, pause for a moment to see how they fit into your current plan and implement them if they complement your plan or write them down and put them aside for later if they don’t.

Coming up I’ll have some thoughts on evaluating ideas, making a plan (and sticking to it) and taking regular, winning action toward success.

Powered by Gregarious (42)Share This Shortcutter on May 25th, 2007 | Filed under Uncategorized | Comment now »