This is a friendly reminder from your Jewish mensch friend.
A reminder of something that you and I both know and have
read and heard over and over, yet it is easy to forget.
It is a reminder to work smarter, not harder.
I interject this post instead of the dozens of others that I
intend to write soon. If you are
searching for ideas on what to write on next, I have thousands or maybe even
tens of thousands.
A few upcoming posts by Yours Truly include:
- Being a non-budgeter;
- Something bashing the FIRE followers as shallow entitled folks for whom financial independence is not much of a stretch;
- Learning to say "No";
- Emerging from the Muck on a Friday afternoon;
- Something about Sunk Costs;
- Something about being our own auditors and mental accounting;
- Something with some rude words a la "Fuck being a team player";
- Another post about frugality, margin of safety, not knowing future and the American Dream on an installment plan;
- Something about having a "gig" every day that pays about four hundred;
- About why I'm not White Trash (don't be highly or even slightly offended: this is based upon a book that I recently read);
- Something about being a grinder;
- A post about thinking too much with the title "Think, Thank, Thunk";
- Another post about taking action and suffering from the plague of inaction;
- Something about being entrepreneurial; and
- A post about older workers, stereotypes and working longer.
I could write hundreds or perhaps thousands of other posts that I have in mind, but the preceding are just fifteen out of the next several dozen that I intend to write.
The reason for me to write this particular reminder post instead of one of the above previously planned ones is that my
younger brother reminded me of it last night.
Mind you, he never uttered or probably ever even thought those words in
his life. He is not the type of dude who
needs to read or write about self-improvement.
He’s the type of dude that just does it.
Born when I was six-and-a-half years old, my brother has
been through a lot in his own life and has always found a way to bounce back
and persevere. Although currently forty
years old to my forty-seven, I admire him and look up to him in many ways. Not to sell myself short as I am wont to
do. I do several things better than he
does, but I will not go into those. I
love him and he is one of my six favorite people on this Earth.
He also happens to be a super sharp, aggressive rising
attorney with multiple offices. Although
the core of his work is in the legal system, he describes his practice to me
more as a small business, telling me about various expenses and potential
pay-outs on his many cases.
He may describe one case as dragging on for three years in
which he spent twenty grand on experts, reports, filings and whatnot without
any expected payout. Perhaps the lawsuit
was tossed out by a judge or he might even lose an occasional case in court here and there.
In other cases, he describes collecting thirty grand (thirty
percent of a hundred grand) on quick settlements with insurance companies in
which he spent a few hours. In early
2017, he told me that he settled three such cases in relatively short order in the first six weeks of the year.
So a few things about our conversation last night.
One, we mostly chatted about what's going on with our children. He had a few questions about an upcoming
zoning hearing for a variance that he applied for making some improvements to the house that he recently purchased. I gave him
the lingo and advice that I think will help him gain approval, not that he
needed it anyway.
Two, he takes great interest in the musical progress of my
two children, his nephew and niece, so we spoke at length about that.
He only told me about some of the cases that he is working
on after I inquired. Normally, he would not
volunteer the information and is not looking to toot his own horn.
I cannot and will not divulge any of the names involved for
several reasons that any reasonable person could surmise. What I will generally report is that he is
going to court to sign the necessary papers to distribute a final settlement next month while I am at RECon in Las
Vegas that will net him a six-figure commission. He mentioned that he has been working this
case for several years and it is about time.
Nonetheless, he will walk out of the settlement meeting holding a check for a larger amount than my wife and I will earn this year.
Nonetheless, he will walk out of the settlement meeting holding a check for a larger amount than my wife and I will earn this year.
Meanwhile, he told me some details about some other cases
that he is working on, one of which could net him upwards of a million dollars if successful.
Being used to hearing and talking about large dollar amounts in
my day job, I am nonetheless impressed with his ability to potentially make that
huge amount of money by utilizing his legal expertise, powerful personality,
gifts with logic and words, and general likability, even by opposing
counsel. If the defendant in this lawsuit elects to put the case before a jury, my brother will likely do that much better.
At the end of our long conversation, he told me that he was heading out to a local café, where he was going to work with his laptop on some briefs, demands and motions on various cases.
I asked if he drinks coffee that late at night and he told me that he
drinks herbal tea (as a pure side note from a coffee addict).
After our discussion, a few things struck me like getting
smacked upside the head.
One, it made me feel fairly lame for selling two small items for a total of thirteen dollars plus change on eBay the past week and taking the time to wrap them, mail them out and then contact the purchasers who had asked for tracking numbers to keep track of their oh-so-small purchases. One of the items was for three freakin’ bucks and the buyer emailed me twice!
Two, our conversation made me feel kind of bad for being too
tired out to even click out a few words on my laptop to post. After all, how can I extoll the virtues of
perseverance and creating more while consuming less if I could not summon the energy
to write five hundred words? Thus, I
cranked out one of the worst blog posts ever, Oh Behave, but I obviously did write something. It sucked, but those 758 original words definitely exist.
Three, I thought about a recent post that I wrote about
unexpected expenses, of which mine have continued mounting even since I hit the Publish
button on that one only a few days ago. I am now additionally in the process of purchasing a new trombone for our daughter to the tune of another three
grand.
As my late father often said, “There’s Always Room for More
at the Poor House.”
In the post, I wrote of my brother’s generous nature and the
way he would simply put my son’s new flugelhorn on his credit card without a second thought. He would do the same with a new trombone for my daughter. The forty-two hundred dollars in charges
would net him an $84 “bonus” with his two-percent cash back Citibank card and he
would pay it off in a month or two with many thousands of dollars' worth of additional charges
generated from his ongoing spending pattern including travel, dining, clothing and
other items for his wife and three children and whatever other expenses he
incurs.
I began thinking about how my brother does not necessarily work harder than I do or many other people who I know and work with. But he definitely works smarter.
One of my brothers-in-law would have to work at the auto
body shop nearly all year to earn what my brother would by settling one routine
personal injury case.
I do not wish for you to think I am diminishing what my
brother does or accomplishes. Quite the
opposite.
I recall him telling me and the rest of our family that he
was going to go to law school while he was employed as a trader with a firm in
downtown Chicago. He had scored off the
charts on the LSAT, in the top five percent, and was going to enroll in DePaul
while he traded mostly futures contracts in the morning.
This guy worked his ass off for years while newly married
and putting in many odd hours trading futures contracts and foreign currencies and
entire stock indexes against one another.
In his twenties, he had days when he made more than I would in a month,
but he also had those days when he told me he got “crushed” and lost thousands
or tens of thousands.
What he did by working his way through law school all those
years ago was laying the foundation that allows him to work smarter now. If you met him for the first time in an
adversarial setting while litigating against him, you might just see a big,
intimidating-looking and super smart Jewish lawyer who you may think all kinds
of negative stereotypes about.
Let me tell you, you would not know a thing about what he
went through to get to the point where he is today, with the potential to make a million dollars or more off of one case that will probably take years to wind its way through the system. The discovery and motions alone will probably take the next two years.
Our conversation reminded me that I should concentrate more
on projects with the potential to pay off at a later date. To spend less time trying to sell a book on
eBay for a few dollars when my time may be better spent doing something that I
am good at, that I like and that has potential to pay dividends for years to
come.
That thing is to write.
After reading about how Steve "SJ" Scott cranks out simplistic eBooks in a few
weeks and makes tens of thousands per month, I cannot get that out of my
mind. While I harbor no illusions of
replicating that kind of success, I sure would not mind making a twentieth of
that or at least a few hundred extra to help make my family’s ends meet.
So doing what I so often do, I went back and read several
articles that I had saved about working smarter rather than harder. I will share some of the highlights, although
I think that these points just skim the very surface of the topic. Also, many of the articles with that type of title that I came across tend to
look at the topic as job-related, however my interest is not very job-related
at all.
Far from being even able to dream about FIRE, my interest in the topic pertains to how to do better for yourself rather than how to be a better employee working for the Man.
Far from being even able to dream about FIRE, my interest in the topic pertains to how to do better for yourself rather than how to be a better employee working for the Man.
So now that you thoroughly understand my inspiration and thoughts on
the matter, below are a dozen of the tips that I liked best in the “Work Smarter,
Not Harder” articles that I have read of late.
Delegate.
Delegate tasks that you should not be doing or are not a productive use of your time. Then you can prioritize your own tasks and take care of more important and lucrative matters. If you learn to schedule your time more effectively, as I have been striving to do, it will allow you to get more work done.
Improve Your Habits.
I know what habits I should be trying to start, maintain or quit. I could write about them until the cows come home and you could read about it even more than that. However, until you can force yourself to commit to positive actions every day, it is all for naught. Try to gain more control over your time by maintaining habits that improve your time management and communication skills.
Concentrate on One Thing At a Time.
Just by the nature of my job, I constantly have people coming at me with requests and demands from all directions. My boss wants me to do one thing while a developer asks me for help with another. A colleague in another department requires my assistance or input in what is the most important matter to them while a business calls me with a crucial issue that may determine the future of their business. Meanwhile, I receive ten emails per hour and messages via Facebook and LinkedIn, all while my voice mail fills up.
Rather than trying to accomplish ten things at once and multitasking to the nth degree, I need to focus on fewer goals, but obsess over them to make sure that they are done right and up to standards that I would not be reluctant to stand by if scrutinized by elected officials, bosses, residents or news reporters in the future.
We should all strive to reduce the number of activities that we perform and then reallocate that time to intensely improving upon what we do work on.
Take a Step Back.
Sometimes when I have requests and demands coming at me from all directions for that core time of the day, from about 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. most mornings, I feel a high level of stress and my anxiety starts rising. It's like everyone wants something of me all at once.
My running joke with my wife when I call her during the day or at home at night is to tell her that, for some reason, people kept bugging me about [the town that employs me] all day.
Scientists and bloggers wiser than I am have written that your brain is able to remain highly focused for only about ninety minutes, and then you need at least fifteen minutes of rest. By taking breaks roughly every hour and a half, you allow your mind and body to renew and ready yourself for the next ninety minutes.
This is something that I not only preach, but I practice. And I always feel better and refocused after taking a short break, and it can be for two or three minutes if you cannot afford to putz around for fifteen, like I can't.
Prioritize.
Again, I have stuff being thrown at me from every direction and every form of communication from messages through social media to people walking in uninvited into my office several times per day to plop down in a chair and take a half hour of my precious time.
Must I respond to the two advertising reps that called and left messages for "special deals" if I act right away? Hell no! I'll call them if and when I want to and most likely I will not. And if they're so-called "special" is no longer available, well then neither is my community's business with them.
If one guy leaves me a message because he wants to open a hookah lounge, but another leaves me a message who wants to put in a new 300,000 square foot manufacturing facility with two hundred jobs, who do you think I will call back? That is a very obvious example, but I face dozens of inquiries per week that I must prioritize.
Common wisdom dictates that eighty percent of our accomplishments come from twenty percent of our efforts. I have found that to be true in my own profession. So once we determine what those things are, wouldn't it make sense to concentrate more of our time and energy on those things?
If our community's Council is going to berate me and ask who brought that hookah lounge to our town, do you think I want to give the guy the time of day? I might refer him to our Code and application forms and tell him to have at it. But for the manufacturing guy, I will help investigate various sites, answer any Code-related questions that he has, discuss possible tax incentives and roll out the red carpet. Offer to take him on a personal tour of the community and spring for a nice lunch too.
Complete the Most Important or Difficult Tasks First.
I wholeheartedly buy into the popular "Eating the Frog" notion.
What this means is to complete your worst and/or most important task first. This would be the thing that you are most likely to procrastinate on or hope just goes away. The report that is due or the deadline that is looming. A presentation or memorandum or reply to a difficult question or whatever it is that you would rather not do.
Author/guru Brian Tracy calls this "eating your frog" quoting Mark Twain. Twain is attributed as having said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then you can proceed through the rest of your day knowing that the worst is behind you.
For Yours Truly, that entails grunt work involved with contacting every property owner, manager and broker in our community and then entering the information of what space is available for lease or sale and at what price so I can enter it or have one of the younger guys in my department enter it into a GIS map-based database.
There's nothing fun about it or particularly exciting about it. It just is. Even though much of the information is available to economic developers such as myself through LoopNet and CoStar, our community has just as many spaces that are not listed in those databases and thus the frog that I do not want to eat, but will begin at least nibbling on it tomorrow morning bright and early.
Learn to Say "No"
Back to my brother for a minute. When he first hung his own shingle, he would accept any case that would walk in his door or call him. He had DUI cases, divorce cases, evictions, and some petty shit that you would not believe.
If you have ever needed a DUI or divorce lawyer or lawyer to help you evict a tenant or stave off your own eviction, I feel a little sorry for you but I also feel a little sorry for your lawyer who had to delve into your problems with you and try to help you out of a jam or a very upsetting situation. You probably paid him or her a few thousand bucks. You felt that it was well worth it if you prevailed in your case. If you lost your case, you probably blame your lawyer a bit and you may not have even paid him or her.
I can tell you that my brother would no longer handle a DUI, divorce or eviction case unless it was for someone he knows personally. As he became more successful, he no longer needed to muck about in the mud squabbling over blood alcohol content, who was cheating on who or how many months the rent was overdue.
I, myself, have striven to say no any time that I am able to and have said that to seven people this month alone, with two more work days to go. Next month, I hope to say no seven more times. This will most likely be the subject of my next post. I try to say No nicely, which will probably figure into the title.
Remain Flexible.
I just completed my first annual performance evaluation with my new and young boss this afternoon. Besides being a tad bit humiliating for me, I was graded extremely high including when it comes to my flexibility.
Now, my daughter can bend her body into a pretzel shape and is physically as flexible as they come. Me, I am more like a slab of peanut brittle ready to break. So I do not mean literal physical flexibility.
What I mean is that all the planning that you can do won't mean diddly squat if you do not have the flexibility to veer from your schedule. Crises inevitably come up and your boss, if you have one, will undoubtedly have a project that is more pressing to him or her than the one that you want to work on.
I could tell stories until the cows come home, but suffice it to say that flexibility at work is one of my strengths and one that I could not thrive and survive without.
I may come into the office tomorrow morning ready to work on updating our community's inventory of available commercial space, but chances are that something deemed more important will crop up and I most likely will not get around to working on that project until next week.
Where's the Passion?
Continuing with my policy of honesty, I confess that the projects that I take on or are assigned at work tend to end more successfully if I can find some spark of passion.
When a certain business that I personally like and believe to be great for my community shows some spark of interest, I typically latch on like a leech and will not let go until the ribbon cutting. By the same token, a business that my boss or some elected or appointed official wants in the community, but I do not feel any passion for, does typically not work out so well.
In that way, I suppose that I exercise some discretion over who I call, how often, if I go visit their existing business in person, if I call them back right away every time, the language that I use with them, if I will take their call five minutes before I am supposed to go home and so on and so forth.
In general, after eighteen years in economic development and thirteen years with the current community, it is hard to feel any passion about any project at all.
What I do feel passion about are blog posts like the one you are reading, reading books, magazine articles and blog posts of others, spending time with my family, walking my sweet Baby around the neighborhood, good food and things like that.
If anything, I want to spend more of my passion pursuing my own interests outside of work, while still trying to at least maintain the amount of passion that I have for my job. My job, after all, does pay my family's bills. It just that it's such a...well, job. There is not much to like about it besides some occasional interesting business projects and collecting a paycheck every other Friday.
In writing, I feel that I have a higher purpose and can create some value for others in a way that is personally meaningful for me. It is easy to feel passion for something like that.
Don't Forsake Nature.
One of the ways that I recalibrate and get my head back on straight is simply by walking in nature. Like most other points that I make, there is ample literature online and elsewhere extolling upon the many virtues of walking in nature.
Like the nine points above, it seems too simple to even mention, but if you are a worker bee like me or a city dweller who has been going back and forth between work, home and various tasks, you may go days, weeks or even months on end without taking a leisurely stroll through a natural area.
I took such a stroll through nature just last Sunday with my two children and my Baby. My daughter saw me picking garbage up out of the park across the street from our house and they saw me working on a post about it later in the day, prompting her to ask me to take her and our dog to the Forest Preserves to enjoy Earth Day. My son being home from college for the weekend, I urged him to join us.
The simple act of walking through the Forest Preserves for ninety minutes or so was very refreshing to both mind and body.
So how does that relate to working smarter? Funny you should ask.
Spending time in nature helps us reset our attention spans and relax our minds, so says guru Daniel Goleman. You do not need to be a guru like Goleman to recognize the value in that.
Most of the best ideas that I have come up with, whether it was how to solve a problem that I was having at work or on a particular project or a blog post or eBook that I intend to write have come to me while on a walk in a peaceful setting while out of my office and ignoring my phone.
In one study, researchers worked to deplete participants' ability to focus. Some participants took a walk in nature, while others took a walk through the city, and the rest just relaxed. When they returned, the nature group scored the best on a proofreading task.
In another study, when college students were asked to repeat sequences of numbers back to the researchers, they were much more accurate after a walk in nature. This finding built on previous research that showed how nature can restore attention and memory.
In another study conducted by psychologists from the University of Utah and University of Kansas, the researchers found that people immersed in nature for four days — significantly more time than a lunchtime walk in the park — boosted their performance on a creative problem-solving test by 50%.
"This is a way of showing that interacting with nature has real, measurable benefits to creative problem-solving that really hadn't been formally demonstrated before," co-author Professor David Strayer of the University of Utah said in a statement.
"It provides a rationale for trying to understand what is a healthy way to interact in the world, and that burying yourself in front of a computer 24/7 may have costs that can be remediated by taking a hike in nature," he explained.
Put Down The Phone
Many a night passes in our house where my wife is on one device, I am on the laptop on which I am writing this and our daughter is perusing her phone. When our son is home, he is often on a fourth device, his iPad.
At least when I am working on a long post like this one, it is time spent creating rather than consuming content. These words will live on in several forms for many years to come and will generate some dollars, to boot.
Time spent following what the Money Mensch or anyone else including the Tweeter in Chief is tweeting or spent watching Downton Abbey (like my wife is right now) or mindlessly scrolling through your Facebook feed or watching some asinine so-called "reality" show about idle rich bitchy housewives or a pretend matchmaking show is all time wasted.
Now, I have spent thousands of hours watching the Cubs lose over many many years prior to 2016, so this is something that I have only recently come to embrace. It could be argued that my hours of reading every day could be better spent working on my own eBooks to publish, and I would not argue with you.
The point here is simply that time spent playing video games, watching TV, obsessing over social media or watching the Bears and Bulls lose game after game could be better spent doing something more productive.
While some people are vegging on a couch watching sitcom reruns, others are working on building up themselves, their business, their brand and their bank accounts.
Use It Again
To elaborate a little further on what I mean by these words making dollars over a period of years, this happens in several ways including by using it again.
When a successful lawyer such as you-know-who writes a legal document for one of his cases, he does not necessarily write the document from scratch. He may use a letter or motion or what have you that previously helped win a case and then change some names, numbers, litigants and dates and then fire it off. Not quite a template, but not starting from scratch either.
I am not in the successful financial blogging realm, not even close. Yet. How I make a few extra dollars here and there is by a combination of those lovely responsive AdSense advertisements that I have recently learned to incorporate in my posts, along with the Amazon affiliate links here and there.
I do not write posts bragging about the extra two dollars that I made this month because after spending something like thirty hours on my fifteen posts so far this month, I am making only a few cents per hour.
That does not mean that this very post will not be re-posted in a new, improved and updated form again in the future on another blog or website that I start. It does not mean that it will not be incorporated in some type of eBook that I crank out about self-improvement, making more money or both. It does not mean that I would not sell the rights to every word in this post to you for ten or twenty bucks, then you could improve it and claim it as your own. Whatever the case may be, I will make at least a buck in the future from these words. I will use them again, but they will be better next time.
I am sure that you have done some type of project, written something, made something that you could easily replicate or some other creation that you could tap to continue reaping rewards from it for years to come.
When I ultimately include a shorter version of this post and another one that I will write soon (part two so this one does not get crazy long and boring) in a future eBook, I do not know exactly who will buy it, but I know that people will. Hopefully while I am sleeping, which will also be part of a future post about the importance of sleep and, just as important, making money while you do.
Thanks for reading and don't forget that the above 5,079 words (written in about two and a half hours) could be yours for the low, low price of just $19.99.
Delegate.
Delegate tasks that you should not be doing or are not a productive use of your time. Then you can prioritize your own tasks and take care of more important and lucrative matters. If you learn to schedule your time more effectively, as I have been striving to do, it will allow you to get more work done.
Improve Your Habits.
I know what habits I should be trying to start, maintain or quit. I could write about them until the cows come home and you could read about it even more than that. However, until you can force yourself to commit to positive actions every day, it is all for naught. Try to gain more control over your time by maintaining habits that improve your time management and communication skills.
Concentrate on One Thing At a Time.
Just by the nature of my job, I constantly have people coming at me with requests and demands from all directions. My boss wants me to do one thing while a developer asks me for help with another. A colleague in another department requires my assistance or input in what is the most important matter to them while a business calls me with a crucial issue that may determine the future of their business. Meanwhile, I receive ten emails per hour and messages via Facebook and LinkedIn, all while my voice mail fills up.
Rather than trying to accomplish ten things at once and multitasking to the nth degree, I need to focus on fewer goals, but obsess over them to make sure that they are done right and up to standards that I would not be reluctant to stand by if scrutinized by elected officials, bosses, residents or news reporters in the future.
We should all strive to reduce the number of activities that we perform and then reallocate that time to intensely improving upon what we do work on.
Take a Step Back.
Sometimes when I have requests and demands coming at me from all directions for that core time of the day, from about 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. most mornings, I feel a high level of stress and my anxiety starts rising. It's like everyone wants something of me all at once.
My running joke with my wife when I call her during the day or at home at night is to tell her that, for some reason, people kept bugging me about [the town that employs me] all day.
Scientists and bloggers wiser than I am have written that your brain is able to remain highly focused for only about ninety minutes, and then you need at least fifteen minutes of rest. By taking breaks roughly every hour and a half, you allow your mind and body to renew and ready yourself for the next ninety minutes.
This is something that I not only preach, but I practice. And I always feel better and refocused after taking a short break, and it can be for two or three minutes if you cannot afford to putz around for fifteen, like I can't.
Prioritize.
Again, I have stuff being thrown at me from every direction and every form of communication from messages through social media to people walking in uninvited into my office several times per day to plop down in a chair and take a half hour of my precious time.
Must I respond to the two advertising reps that called and left messages for "special deals" if I act right away? Hell no! I'll call them if and when I want to and most likely I will not. And if they're so-called "special" is no longer available, well then neither is my community's business with them.
If one guy leaves me a message because he wants to open a hookah lounge, but another leaves me a message who wants to put in a new 300,000 square foot manufacturing facility with two hundred jobs, who do you think I will call back? That is a very obvious example, but I face dozens of inquiries per week that I must prioritize.
Common wisdom dictates that eighty percent of our accomplishments come from twenty percent of our efforts. I have found that to be true in my own profession. So once we determine what those things are, wouldn't it make sense to concentrate more of our time and energy on those things?
If our community's Council is going to berate me and ask who brought that hookah lounge to our town, do you think I want to give the guy the time of day? I might refer him to our Code and application forms and tell him to have at it. But for the manufacturing guy, I will help investigate various sites, answer any Code-related questions that he has, discuss possible tax incentives and roll out the red carpet. Offer to take him on a personal tour of the community and spring for a nice lunch too.
Complete the Most Important or Difficult Tasks First.
I wholeheartedly buy into the popular "Eating the Frog" notion.
Author/guru Brian Tracy calls this "eating your frog" quoting Mark Twain. Twain is attributed as having said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then you can proceed through the rest of your day knowing that the worst is behind you.
For Yours Truly, that entails grunt work involved with contacting every property owner, manager and broker in our community and then entering the information of what space is available for lease or sale and at what price so I can enter it or have one of the younger guys in my department enter it into a GIS map-based database.
Learn to Say "No"
Back to my brother for a minute. When he first hung his own shingle, he would accept any case that would walk in his door or call him. He had DUI cases, divorce cases, evictions, and some petty shit that you would not believe.
If you have ever needed a DUI or divorce lawyer or lawyer to help you evict a tenant or stave off your own eviction, I feel a little sorry for you but I also feel a little sorry for your lawyer who had to delve into your problems with you and try to help you out of a jam or a very upsetting situation. You probably paid him or her a few thousand bucks. You felt that it was well worth it if you prevailed in your case. If you lost your case, you probably blame your lawyer a bit and you may not have even paid him or her.
I can tell you that my brother would no longer handle a DUI, divorce or eviction case unless it was for someone he knows personally. As he became more successful, he no longer needed to muck about in the mud squabbling over blood alcohol content, who was cheating on who or how many months the rent was overdue.
I, myself, have striven to say no any time that I am able to and have said that to seven people this month alone, with two more work days to go. Next month, I hope to say no seven more times. This will most likely be the subject of my next post. I try to say No nicely, which will probably figure into the title.
Remain Flexible.
I just completed my first annual performance evaluation with my new and young boss this afternoon. Besides being a tad bit humiliating for me, I was graded extremely high including when it comes to my flexibility.
Now, my daughter can bend her body into a pretzel shape and is physically as flexible as they come. Me, I am more like a slab of peanut brittle ready to break. So I do not mean literal physical flexibility.
What I mean is that all the planning that you can do won't mean diddly squat if you do not have the flexibility to veer from your schedule. Crises inevitably come up and your boss, if you have one, will undoubtedly have a project that is more pressing to him or her than the one that you want to work on.
I could tell stories until the cows come home, but suffice it to say that flexibility at work is one of my strengths and one that I could not thrive and survive without.
I may come into the office tomorrow morning ready to work on updating our community's inventory of available commercial space, but chances are that something deemed more important will crop up and I most likely will not get around to working on that project until next week.
Where's the Passion?
Continuing with my policy of honesty, I confess that the projects that I take on or are assigned at work tend to end more successfully if I can find some spark of passion.
When a certain business that I personally like and believe to be great for my community shows some spark of interest, I typically latch on like a leech and will not let go until the ribbon cutting. By the same token, a business that my boss or some elected or appointed official wants in the community, but I do not feel any passion for, does typically not work out so well.
In that way, I suppose that I exercise some discretion over who I call, how often, if I go visit their existing business in person, if I call them back right away every time, the language that I use with them, if I will take their call five minutes before I am supposed to go home and so on and so forth.
In general, after eighteen years in economic development and thirteen years with the current community, it is hard to feel any passion about any project at all.
What I do feel passion about are blog posts like the one you are reading, reading books, magazine articles and blog posts of others, spending time with my family, walking my sweet Baby around the neighborhood, good food and things like that.
If anything, I want to spend more of my passion pursuing my own interests outside of work, while still trying to at least maintain the amount of passion that I have for my job. My job, after all, does pay my family's bills. It just that it's such a...well, job. There is not much to like about it besides some occasional interesting business projects and collecting a paycheck every other Friday.
In writing, I feel that I have a higher purpose and can create some value for others in a way that is personally meaningful for me. It is easy to feel passion for something like that.
Don't Forsake Nature.
One of the ways that I recalibrate and get my head back on straight is simply by walking in nature. Like most other points that I make, there is ample literature online and elsewhere extolling upon the many virtues of walking in nature.
Like the nine points above, it seems too simple to even mention, but if you are a worker bee like me or a city dweller who has been going back and forth between work, home and various tasks, you may go days, weeks or even months on end without taking a leisurely stroll through a natural area.
I took such a stroll through nature just last Sunday with my two children and my Baby. My daughter saw me picking garbage up out of the park across the street from our house and they saw me working on a post about it later in the day, prompting her to ask me to take her and our dog to the Forest Preserves to enjoy Earth Day. My son being home from college for the weekend, I urged him to join us.
The simple act of walking through the Forest Preserves for ninety minutes or so was very refreshing to both mind and body.
So how does that relate to working smarter? Funny you should ask.
Spending time in nature helps us reset our attention spans and relax our minds, so says guru Daniel Goleman. You do not need to be a guru like Goleman to recognize the value in that.
Most of the best ideas that I have come up with, whether it was how to solve a problem that I was having at work or on a particular project or a blog post or eBook that I intend to write have come to me while on a walk in a peaceful setting while out of my office and ignoring my phone.
In one study, researchers worked to deplete participants' ability to focus. Some participants took a walk in nature, while others took a walk through the city, and the rest just relaxed. When they returned, the nature group scored the best on a proofreading task.
In another study, when college students were asked to repeat sequences of numbers back to the researchers, they were much more accurate after a walk in nature. This finding built on previous research that showed how nature can restore attention and memory.
In another study conducted by psychologists from the University of Utah and University of Kansas, the researchers found that people immersed in nature for four days — significantly more time than a lunchtime walk in the park — boosted their performance on a creative problem-solving test by 50%.
"This is a way of showing that interacting with nature has real, measurable benefits to creative problem-solving that really hadn't been formally demonstrated before," co-author Professor David Strayer of the University of Utah said in a statement.
"It provides a rationale for trying to understand what is a healthy way to interact in the world, and that burying yourself in front of a computer 24/7 may have costs that can be remediated by taking a hike in nature," he explained.
Put Down The Phone
Many a night passes in our house where my wife is on one device, I am on the laptop on which I am writing this and our daughter is perusing her phone. When our son is home, he is often on a fourth device, his iPad.
At least when I am working on a long post like this one, it is time spent creating rather than consuming content. These words will live on in several forms for many years to come and will generate some dollars, to boot.
Now, I have spent thousands of hours watching the Cubs lose over many many years prior to 2016, so this is something that I have only recently come to embrace. It could be argued that my hours of reading every day could be better spent working on my own eBooks to publish, and I would not argue with you.
The point here is simply that time spent playing video games, watching TV, obsessing over social media or watching the Bears and Bulls lose game after game could be better spent doing something more productive.
While some people are vegging on a couch watching sitcom reruns, others are working on building up themselves, their business, their brand and their bank accounts.
Use It Again
To elaborate a little further on what I mean by these words making dollars over a period of years, this happens in several ways including by using it again.
When a successful lawyer such as you-know-who writes a legal document for one of his cases, he does not necessarily write the document from scratch. He may use a letter or motion or what have you that previously helped win a case and then change some names, numbers, litigants and dates and then fire it off. Not quite a template, but not starting from scratch either.
I am not in the successful financial blogging realm, not even close. Yet. How I make a few extra dollars here and there is by a combination of those lovely responsive AdSense advertisements that I have recently learned to incorporate in my posts, along with the Amazon affiliate links here and there.
I do not write posts bragging about the extra two dollars that I made this month because after spending something like thirty hours on my fifteen posts so far this month, I am making only a few cents per hour.
That does not mean that this very post will not be re-posted in a new, improved and updated form again in the future on another blog or website that I start. It does not mean that it will not be incorporated in some type of eBook that I crank out about self-improvement, making more money or both. It does not mean that I would not sell the rights to every word in this post to you for ten or twenty bucks, then you could improve it and claim it as your own. Whatever the case may be, I will make at least a buck in the future from these words. I will use them again, but they will be better next time.
I am sure that you have done some type of project, written something, made something that you could easily replicate or some other creation that you could tap to continue reaping rewards from it for years to come.
When I ultimately include a shorter version of this post and another one that I will write soon (part two so this one does not get crazy long and boring) in a future eBook, I do not know exactly who will buy it, but I know that people will. Hopefully while I am sleeping, which will also be part of a future post about the importance of sleep and, just as important, making money while you do.
Thanks for reading and don't forget that the above 5,079 words (written in about two and a half hours) could be yours for the low, low price of just $19.99.
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