According to the United States Census Bureau, in 1984, the proportion of households with a computer was 8 percent. In 2001, that number went up to 56 percent. Then in 2003, it was reported that approximately 70 million American households (or 62%) had one OR MORE computers. Data collected also shows that during that time, Internet usage didn’t really come into play until 1997 with about 18% of American households using it. by 2003, the number of households using the Internet had almost tripled since 1997.

Not everyone uses computers, however. Despite the increased popularity of owning a computer and/or using the Internet, it was discovered that 35% of households with people ages 65 and older did not have computers/Internet access. Also, 45% of Black or Hispanic households did not have it either, while another 28% of households with people who had less than a high school education didn’t have computers/Internet access.

In 2003, 45% of households did not have Internet access at home. The three most common reasons as to why this was so included:

• “We don’t need it and/or not interested.” (appx. 39%)
• “It costs too much and/or I don’t have a computer.” (appx. 23%)
• “We have access to the Internet elsewhere.” (appx. 2%)

There is also the thought among many parents that they do not want access to the Internet for fear that their children will use it inappropriately. Interestingly enough, there is a correlation of disinterest in the internet with age. Of the 20 million household members that the U.S. Census Bureau interviewed, who stated that they weren’t interested in the Internet, over 60% were 55 years of age or older.

Overall, the results show that the Internet has become a valuable source of news and communication. For example, there are statistics which show that more people send emails versus talk on the phone or text message. Additonally, the Internet has become a valuable economic tool with more Americans looking for jobs, shopping and selling things online, and it’s continuing to grow! For more information about Internet marketing, visit Create Business Growth.

Tags: Using Technology, Time Management, Social Networking by Janelle - 2 Comments »

Like many of you, I have HUGE goals and ambitions for 2008. For months, I’ve been both anticipating and dreading the beginning of the New Year, because I’ve been wondering how in the world I would ever be able to accomplish all of the things I want to do this year.

A few weeks ago, I got Dave Navarro’s 30 Hours A Day audio coaching program and decided that I would begin my virtual coaching session with Dave on New Year’s Day.

I’ve always enjoyed Dave’s posts on Freelance Folder and expected his coaching program to be just as great - but having 4.7 hours of his insight has proven even better than expected. After listening to just the first of the 11 coaching sessions, I had an a-ha! moment that really changed the way I’m going to tackle things this year.

There was one sentence that Dave said that REALLY stood out to me. He says:

If it’s not worth making time for, what’s it doing on your list anyway?

Duh.

Why didn’t I think of that? I have spent every night of both of these 4 day holiday ‘weekends’ irritated with myself for not crossing more off of my ‘to-do’ list. Instead of crossing them off, I’m going to knock them off.

What makes Dave’s program different and refreshing, is that he is not suggesting that you learn how to cram more crap-tasks into your day by becoming more ‘productive.’ His philosophy is that when you’re in ‘the zone,’ the state of being where you can make massive amount of progress in record time, THAT is where you achieve true productivity.

How I’m Going to Knock Crap Tasks Off of My To Do List

I have only had hours to think about how I’m going to do this since listening to Dave’s coaching program, but immediately some ideas came to mind:

• Use Camtasia to create screen capture videos of all of the boring repetitive waste of time tasks that I do and outsource them

• Set up monthly phone meetings with clients to gather all of the content topics and ideas for the entire month and use Audacity to record phone calls with clients when I talk to them about content ideas so that I can either refer to them later or outsource the writing to a freelancer without losing the client’s perspective. This is an awesome idea introduced to me by Kevin Dykes of Forest for the Trees.

• Hire someone to do all of the things that I despise doing so much that I put them off far too long such as doing laundry, scrubbing bathtubs, dealing with taxes, etc.

• Hire someone to handle new business inquiries

• Create a ‘perfect introduction document‘ that explains exactly the type of client that I’m looking for so that I don’t waste time with leads that aren’t right for my business.

• Outsource the jobs and projects that I’ve taken on, but been procrastinating about doing - even if I don’t make a dime on them. I just don’t want them taking up any more of my mental real estate and blocking my flow.

So far, I’ve only finished the first CD of Dave’s 30 Hours A Day coaching program. After I listened that far, I felt compelled to start digging in and getting some things done. I know I’ve found something really good when I can barely stand to listen to it any longer because I’m itching to get started.

I’ve decided to set aside to listen to the audios every day for at least one hour and am quite certain that I’ll have more a-ha! moments to report!

Tags: Time Management by Adam - 4 Comments »

I wanted to share with you some amazing information that I just found from Dave Navarro - not music rock star Dave Navarro who was married to Carmen Electra - the blogging rock star Dave Navarro, a contributing writer to Jon Phillips Freelance Folder.

Dave has an awesome writing style and always offers tons of great ideas on Freelance Folder.  Today I found an excellent resource that he has created on time “management.”  The reason I say “management” in quotes is because Dave has a completely different perspective on this this overused term:

It (time management) is just a poor choice of terms because it implies that you can have leverage over time … which you can’t.  What you can manage, however, are the results you get from your time. You can manage those like crazy. And when you get it right, you can do practically anything.

He promises that by the time you finish this special report, you’ll know

• Exactly How To Create a “30 Hour Day”
• The #1 Commitment All Master Time Managers Make
• What Your Next Step To Success Is

You can get the report called “How To Get 30 Hours A Day” here.  You will also have access to other pieces of his 30 Hours a Day audio coaching program including an MP3 called “The 10 Critical Skills Of Painless Time Management” as well as access to the 30 Day Challenge members forum.

All free to help you get more out of your life and reach your goals faster

Dave clearly states on his report that “you Will Not Be Sold Anything In This Report. So Open Your Mind, Remind Yourself Of Your Potential & Get Ready To Learn.”

So enjoy - hope to see you over at the 30 Day Challenge Forum where I am signing up as soon as I finish this post!

Tags: Time Management by Adam - 3 Comments »

I’m officially deeming this week Tim Ferriss week. Tim Ferriss is my new hero and the author of The 4 Hour Work Week. The current chapters that I’m slowly devouring are about outsourcing with Virtual Assistants.

If you’re thinking “boring,” hold on to your hats…

I’ve read about outsourcing… but never in the way that Tim Ferriss and his guest writer AJ Jacobs, editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, talk about how they use them.

It was during the part “My Outsourced Life” by AJ Jacobs that begins on page 113 that I got up from my comfy reading position, grabbed a pen and started underlining. This part actually had me laughing out loud and was too important to be forgotten. I thought about including some of my favorite quotes from this part, but I think you need to read the whole 5 page story for it to really have an impact.  You can read the entire excerpt on Ferriss’s website under Outsourcing Life.

The Mastermind Behind Your Life

In this “Automation” portion of the book, Ferriss is talks about leveraging the power of Virtual Assistants to handle tasks that you don’t really NEED to do. Surprisingly, this could be just about everything. Think about it… with the right Virtual Assistants, you could literally be a master puppeteer in the play of your own life as you spend your time doing only what is truly most profitable and most valuable to you.

At first I thought there wasn’t much I could outsource. But the more I read and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could outsource a heck of a lot of tasks that would make my life a LOT more enjoyable and give me the time to put more ideas into action – the ideas I always think that I don’t have time to breathe life into.

I realized that I could outsource the tasks to a Virtual Assistant like:

• Finding people to interview
• Scheduling interviews
• Research for articles and press releases
• Finding supporting images for web content and articles
• The writing of the book I’ve been saying I was going to write for the last 10 years
• Background research on a new business idea
• Dealing with things that stress me out beyond belief like the traffic ticket I have to pay and taxes
• Generating sales leads
• Sending out samples and info to prospects
• Much more that I haven’t yet realized yet

What Could You Outsource?

Suppose that you could ONLY spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work. What things that you do are so critical that only you can do them? What did you do all day yesterday that someone else could have done for you if you absolutely could not work that day but had to finish everything you had committed to?

Replacing yourself is a strange thought. I think we resist the idea because it is a blow to our pride. But is it really? What if you could spend more time doing what you are brilliant at and letting other people handle the details? What could you accomplish?

Share Your Experience!

Do you outsource some of your tasks that you once handled yourself? What could you outsource if push came to shove and you could only spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work? What’s holding you back from outsourcing?

Tags: Time Management by Adam - 8 Comments »

I’ve been reading the 4 Hour Work Week… Wow. If you haven’t purchased this book, I would highly recommend doing so. This book really is unlike any other that I have ever read. Ferriss’s blunt, unconventional, down to earth, tell-all style is refreshing to say the least and life altering if you try even one of his suggestions.

Usually, I’ll tear through a book this size is a day or so, but not this one. I really have to stop and think about what he’s saying. I’m almost afraid that if I read it too quickly and absorb too much too fast, that I’ll be so unsatisfied with my current work-life balance that it will be too much to bear. That’s how good it is. I love it.

So how do you find 2-10 extra hours per week?

Stop obsessively checking email!

I am so guilty of this and would venture to say that my email habits prior to reading this book were costing me about 10 hours per week in completely wasted time.

Are You Checking Email Just to Feel Important?

The first point I’d like to talk about that has already made a huge impact on not only my work, but also my stress level and my life, is managing email. Ferriss says that for the last 4 years, he has only checked his email once per week on Mondays – that’s it!!

Though many of us believe that our businesses and our lives would fall apart if we weren’t to tend to our email constantly, Ferriss says that this simply isn’t true. In fact, he says that his business became more profitable once he removed himself as a bottleneck!

He calls email an enormous time waster – a task that we engage in that keeps us busy but that often is completely unproductive.

And here’s where it really gets uncomfortably true…

He basically says that those of us (including his former self) who constantly engage in time-wasting unproductive activities for the sake of keeping busy are doing this to gain some sense of false importance. Ouch. But so true.

He doesn’t recommend that you go from serial email checker to once per week right away. Instead, he recommends shutting down email and checking it once at noon and once again at 4:00.

Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong!

David read this book while he was on vacation a month ago and limiting email checking was his first action toward a 4 hour work week. David and I are both self-proclaimed email addicts. Before reading the 4 Hour Work Week, we were serial email checkers and instant responders.

This was the first action that both of us attempted to implement and promptly failed. We’re getting better though and constantly trying new to eliminate the unnecessary burden of email that is holding back our lives for no good reason. There were several problems that sucked us right back in to being email addicts:

Pretend problem #1

The first problem was the fear of missing something. After shutting down Outlook for several hours at a time, I realized that I wasn’t missing anything critical. But for some reason, I started shutting it down less and less, until it was open all the time once again.

Pretend problem #2

Then a technical problem: how do you SEND an email to someone without opening your email and getting caught up in your inbox? David’s solution was to open a separate email account for sending emails only. My solution will be to continue sending all of my email to Outlook, setting email to delete from my web based email upon delivery to Outlook, and sending email only through web mail. This way, even if someone replies to me, I won’t see it until I check Outlook at my predetermined times.

How Email Can Destroy Productivity

This weekend I shut down Outlook all day Saturday and checked it once on Sunday. When I did open it, 200+ emails poured in, 63 of which landed in my inbox and the rest in junk. Handling those emails took me about 25 minutes. However, if I had responded to them as they rolled in, they would have cost me so much more time it is almost inconceivable.

Though each email may only take seconds or a minute to deal with, the cost of stopping what you are doing, losing focus, allowing stress into your life, and changing your train of thought to reply can set you back an immeasurable amount of time and cause a project you’re working on to take multiple times longer than it needs to.

Share Your Experience!

Are you an email addict? Have you overcome an email addiction? If so, how has it changed your life? Have you read The 4 Hour Work Week?

Tags: Time Management by Adam - 22 Comments »

You’re starting off right, you’re reading this post. 

I know some of you will disagree with me on this post.  Some of you will say that the most important thing you can do is to spend time with your family.  In general I believe that spending time with family and loved ones is the most important thing, however, sometimes you need to do something different right now in order to spend more time with them later.

The most important things you can do right now is to come up with a plan to make more “smart money” come into your life.

I can already hear some of you saying, “money is the root of all evil”. I will point out that the quote is, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  Others of you are asking, “What is “smart” money?”

First, let me say that money will NOT bring you happiness. Second, the lack of money has caused more harm than the abundance of money. You can’t truly enjoy life is you are in constant worry about how you will pay your bills.

“Smart Money” (the definition): Money that comes to you over and over again for doing work once. Money that is gained by doing something you love to do.  Money that continues to come in after you have stopped working.

If you are not working to bring “smart money” into your life, you will be working for a very long time.  “Smart money” will give you more time to spend with family.

An example of “smart money” could be writing a book on a subject you love. The writing of the book will go easier and faster because you love the subject.

If you can sell the book and get recurring income for each additional sell.

THE PLAN

1. Step one, get a piece of paper and a pen.
2. Step two, really, go get a piece of paper (and the pen).
3. Write down 5 things that you love to do.
4. For each thing, write down two products or services that could be created around these things that could bring in “smart money”. Remember, work once, get ongoing money. (Book, e-Book, online automated service, website, blog)
5. Research (more to come later) the products and services.
6. Pick the one that most interests you that passed the research.
7. Make a real, committed, “I will do this!”, decision to product the product. A gut wenching, tear jerking commitment.
8. Set a completion date.
9. Tell someone about it. The more people that know the more likely you are to finish it.
10. Get affiliates to sell your product or service. The affiliates will market your product for you. You can get affiliates by putting your product on sites like ClickBank or Commission Junction.

THE RESEARCH

A product or service has to pass a few tests in order for it to produce “smart money”. 

Something you love! You can make ongoing income by selling insurance, but, if you hate insurance and insurance salesmen you will not make any sales in the first place. 

The product or service has to be something you do once and can get ongoing money. Services need to be able to be automated so that you do not have to be the one providing the service.

“It don’t mean a thing if it don’t go Ca-Chink.”

Other people have to want the product or service. You may think it is the greatest thing you have ever heard, but, if other people do not want it, it will not sell. You can do some research by going to Google’s Keyword Tool and entering words that relate to your product or service. If there are many people doing searches, you might have something. You can also go to Google’s search page and visit the top 10 real sites that match your keywords.  See if they are selling the product or service you came up with. If so, you might be able to sell their product.

Check news sites to see if there is any information you can use to see if there is a market for your product or service. Look at current trends to see if you can modify your product to make a currently increasing trend.

Talk to other people to see if they like the idea. You may need to get non-discloser and non-compete documents for them to sign. This will protect you from someone stealing your idea.

Good luck!

Tags: Time Management, Business Building by Fred - 7 Comments »

Everyone knows the benefits of email. It’s easy, quick, global, easily stored, it allows you time to think before you speak, but is it also a distraction?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been working on a project when that little “you have mail” screen pops up. Hmmm…Is there an important message in there? Is it something more important than what I’m currently working on? What if it’s a new client? There’s no way to know until I check those messages! This is when I run into my dilemma. Do I check, or do I finish what I’m working on? I used to always check, you never know, there could be a life changing email in there. . . ok, that’s a little extreme. More often than not it’s just another “urgent” message about getting cheap drugs or that now infamous little blue pill. By checking my messages I have not only interrupted the flow of what I was doing, but I have wasted precious time. I feel like I should keep working, but I just can’t contain the curiosity to see what has come to my inbox; and it seems I’m not alone.

In the ClearContext 2006 Email Usage Survey 41% of the respondents stated they are checking their email “constantly”. In fact, they found that even though we are getting the same amount of email as last year we are spending more time managing the email we get. They also found that 25% of the people responding to the survey are spending 4 or more hours every day managing email. That’s half the work day! How are you expected to get anything else done when email is taking up half of your day?

I asked myself the very same question and came up with a few strategies that can easily be implemented to keep your email under control and help you better manage your workday, while still staying in contact with clients, and feeling like you accomplished something by the end of the day.

The first thing is to stop checking your email as soon as you start work. I know it seems impossible, but it will wait. Spend the first hour of your day getting small tasks completed. After the first hour go ahead and check your messages, even if you get wrapped up in your email you will have already accomplished something.

Turn off your email notification. GASP! This works too. Without the notification screen popping up every few minutes you will be able to focus on the task at hand. How do you know if someone has sent you an email? That’s the third step.

Set up a schedule to check your email, and an amount of time you are willing to spend on it. It could be at the top of the hour for 15 minutes, every two hours or maybe only once or twice a day for an hour at a time. Whatever works for you. By implementing even one of these suggestions you will be able to gain control of your email management. You will be less distracted by your email, and last but not least, your clients will still have your attention, and you will still have your sanity.

~Jennifer Rai
Today’s Administrative Solutions

Tags: Time Management, General Business Issues by Adam - 2 Comments »

This is the first post in our new category “Time Management.” Unfortunately, I don’t have time to finish the post because I’m headed to see Shrek 3 with the family

Did you get it?

More to come in this valuable Category.

Tags: Time Management by David - 1 Comment »