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I’ve had “the naming discussion” with entrepreneurs many times. It usually goes like this – I’ll be asked for my opinion on a new name or several variations thereof for a new product, service or business venture. Then often follows an explanation of the name or names which are being considered.

Title Should Equal Content

Here’s my take on naming – if you need to explain the name, to me that’s an automatic fail. Title should equal content. In other words, if the name doesn’t make it automatically obvious what the product, service or business is, then you’re starting from behind.

When I give people this advice some shake their heads in disbelief. What about great brands with unusual names like Nike, Apple, Skype, Amazon etc? Surely I must be missing something by giving such simplistic advice?

Here’s the thing. All of the big brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to educate people who they are and what they do. How much are you willing to spend to do the same?

Here we’re not even talking about advertising that sells or generates leads. We’re talking about advertising that merely tells people what you do. I can’t think of a bigger waste of money.

By using a non-obvious name, you start from behind and then have to make up for by spending a lot of money on advertising to rectify the situation.

All you had to do to avoid this colossal waste of money was call your business “Fast Plumbing Repairs,” which immediately explains what you do and what you stand for, rather than “Aqua Solutions,” where you then have to explain that Aqua is the Latin for water and that you provide “complete plumbing solutions” (whatever that means), hence the name “Aqua Solutions.”

If You Confuse Them, You Lose Them

So many times I’ve seen business or product names whose meaning is unclear. Sometimes it’s a corny play on words, other times it’s an obscure literary reference and still other times it’s some made-up word, the meaning of which is only apparent to the creator.

The reality is no matter how clever your name is, very few people will go to the trouble of trying to decipher its meaning or origin. These things may be important to you because it’s your baby, but rarely does a customer or prospect give it even a split second of thought.

What’s even worse is that being “clever” often creates confusion and works against you. One of the core principals of marketing is that confusion leads to no sales. If you confuse them, you lose them. It’s that simple. Always choose clarity over cleverness.

It’s hard enough to get a message read, understood then acted upon at the best of times. But intentionally adding confusion into the mix when you’re a small business with a modest marketing budget is madness.

Lastly, please don’t ask friends and family for their opinion on your clever new name. They’ll, of course, praise your idea and compliment you, which feels nice, but it’s unlikely to be truly helpful.

By all means test and get opinions but do so from objective people who are part of your target market – not from those who already know what you’re about.

Naming can work for you or against you and is expensive and difficult to change down the track, so give it thought, effort and above all else focus on clarity.

With so many people and so many things competing for our attention, just keeping up with all that’s coming in can feel overwhelming.

We may feel the need to keep up with it all to be properly informed and up-to-date.

Certainly, there’s a satisfaction in feeling like you’re across everything. Yet enormous chunks of time are taken up by consuming content from various sources including books, blogs, videos, email lists, magazines, news outlets, etc.

Information triage has become a vital skill. The late great Jim Rohn said it well:

Don’t spend most of your time on the voices that don’t count. Tune out the shallow voices so that you will have more time to tune in the valuable ones.

Lately, I’ve been doing just that. Reducing the number of “voices” I listen to so that I can spend more time going deeper with the voices that count the most. But more importantly, I’ve been working on BECOMING a voice of value.

What sets Apart Successful Entrepreneurs from The Wannabees?

One of the major distinctions between successful entrepreneurs and “wantrepreneurs” is that successful entrepreneurs are predominantly content creators whereas wantrepreneurs are predominantly content consumers. Even more than just content creators, successful entrepreneurs are often prolific content creators.

Finding Inspiration

To become a voice of value, you need to have valuable ideas and rarely do valuable ideas come from nowhere and interrupt you. By seeking out voices of value – thought leaders in and out of your industry, mentors, coaches and successful peers, you lay the foundation for building your own valuable ideas.

This type of self-education is the most valuable type of education I know of. Yet it’s important not to let too many voices in, however tempting that may be a few voices who speak from experience and first-hand knowledge are infinitely more valuable than a multitude of voices that speak from theory and opinion.

While neither theory or opinion are bad in themselves, rarely do I find voices of value from sources that haven’t been where I want to be.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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Becoming a Voice Of Value in Your Market

The days of high-pressure selling tactics are fast coming to an end, if they haven’t already. In an age where everyone is connected and everyone has access to almost all the available information, the most valuable commodity is reputation.

The reputation economy requires that you transform your marketing from just information and high-pressure sales tactics to education-based marketing. The point of education marketing is twofold.

Firstly, it’s about positioning yourself as an authority in your target market. Everyone wants to hear from an authoritative source. By being a content creator, you position yourself as an authority and expert in your niche.

Secondly, it’s about building relationships – becoming the trusted advisor to your target market rather than just a salesperson. By regularly releasing valuable, educational content to your target market, you lay the foundation for a relationship – and after all who would you prefer to buy from, a trusted source who has been giving you a lot of value or a stranger who wants to make a quick sale?

It's Time To Develop Your Voice Of Value

Becoming a voice of value is hard work and it takes time, but the time invested will pay dividends. In the reputation economy you can’t afford to be a commodity or another “me too” type of business.

What can you do to start being a voice of value in your market? Could you start a blog? A mailing list? A monthly newsletter? Regular YouTube videos?

Any one of these things could be the start of you becoming a voice of value to your marketplace. Certainly doing so will set you far apart from your competitors who are still stuck on the selling tactics that are no longer working.

I spend a lot of time each week looking through various local and national newspapers – not for articles but for advertisements.

Having done this for several years, with very few exceptions, I’m absolutely amazed at how boring, similar, and useless most advertising is.

The waste going on is staggering. Wasted money and wasted opportunity.‍

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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Marketing By Accident

You could summarize the structure of most ads from small businesses as follows:

• Company name
• Company logo
• A laundry list of services offered
• Claims of best quality, best service or best prices
• Offer of a “free quote”
• Contact details

Then they hope and pray that on the very day they run their ad, a prospect in immediate need of their product or service stumbles across it and takes action.

This is what I call marketing by accident.

A qualified prospect happening upon the right ad at the right time sometimes results in the happy accident of a sale taking place.

If these “accidents” never happened then no one would ever advertise. But as it happens the occasional random sale or lead will come from this type of advertising. It tortures business owners to death because while the ad generally loses them money, they fear not running it because some dribs and drabs of new business have come out of it – and who knows next week it may bring in that big sale they’ve been hoping for.

It’s like these businesses are visiting a slot machine in a casino. They put their money in, pull the handle and hope for a jackpot – but most of the time the house just takes their money. Occasionally they’ll get a few cents in the dollar back which raises their hopes and emboldens them to continue.

It’s time to start marketing on purpose – treating advertising like a vending machine where the results and value generated are predictable, rather than like a slot machine where the results are random and the odds are stacked against you.

To start marketing on purpose we need to look at two vital elements.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Ad?

When I ask business owners what the purpose of their ad is, I usually get a list like:

• Branding
• Getting my name out there
• Letting people know about my products and services
• Making sales
• Getting people to call in for a quote

These are all very different and you cannot possibly do all of these with one ad. In typical small business style they’re trying to get maximum bang for their buck.

But by trying to do too much, they end up achieving none of their objectives.

My rule of thumb is one ad, one objective. If something in the ad isn’t helping you achieve that objective then it’s detracting from it and you should get rid of it.

That includes sacred cows like your company name and company logo. Advertising space is valuable and these things taking up prime real estate in your ad space often detract from your message rather than enhance it.

Rather than trying to sell directly from an ad, my preferred objective by far is simply to have prospects put their hand up to indicate interest. This lowers resistance and helps you  – one of the most valuable assets a business could have build a marketing database – one of the most valuable assets a business could have.

Here are 10 other business assets you need.

Once your objective is clear, you need to communicate it to your reader. What exactly do you want them to do next? Do they call your toll free number to order? Do they call you or visit your website to request a free sample? Do they request a free report?

You need a very clear call to action – not something wimpy and vague like “don’t hesitate to call us.”

You need to be clear on what they should do next and what they will get in return.

Also, give them multiple ways to take that action. For example, if the call to action is to order your product, give them the ability to do it online, over the phone or even via a mail-in coupon.

Different people have different preferences when it comes to modality of communication. Give them multiple means of response so they can choose the one they are most comfortable with.

What Does Your Ad Focus On?

Have you ever been to a party or gathering and been seated next to someone who just spends the whole night talking about themselves? It gets old pretty fast. You keep giving half-hearted smiles and polite nods but your mind is elsewhere and that exit sign is calling your name.

Similarly, most advertising by small businesses is inwardly focused. Instead of speaking to the needs and problems of the prospect, it is focused on self-aggrandizement.

The prominent logo and company name, the laundry list of services, the claims of being the leading provider of that product or service— all of these things are shouting, “Look at me!”

Unfortunately, you’re in a crowded market, and with everyone shouting “Look at me!” at the same time, it just becomes background noise.

By contrast, direct response marketing focuses heavily on the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the target market.

By doing this, you enter the conversation already going on in the mind of your ideal prospect.

You will resonate at a deeper level with your prospect and your ad will stand out from 99% of other ads that are just shouting and talking about themselves.

Don’t be the advertising equivalent of that guy at the party obliviously talking about himself the whole night while his uninterested audience looks for the exit.

Also don’t leave anything to chance. Know exactly what you want your ad to achieve and the exact action you want your prospect to take.

Have you tried using humor in your marketing?

They’ve been many occasions I’ve sat starting at my computer screen. I've agonized over whether to use a witty headline or go for clarity and say exactly what I mean.

Sometimes it’s a genuinely funny one-liner. But more often than not it’s a lame play on words. The type that you roll your eyes at when you see them with nauseating predictability in newspaper headlines.

“Telecom Giant Rings In Record Profits”

“Mining Company Digs Itself Out Of Trouble”

Ugh!

Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves even when we know how bad it is. Yet it’s not limited to bad puns, it can also be visual humor in the form of pictures or videos.

Using Humor in Your Marketing To Make Your Ad Go Viral

We embed humor into our advertising because we hope the ad will go “viral.”  So people start spreading it for its comedic value.

While this can and does happen, the chance of achieving this is very low. Even if it does happen, the commercial benefit of this is dubious. Yes, funny gets attention but the question is attention on what?

I’m always surprised by companies who tolerate ads from their high priced agencies where clearly the entire objective is to win some creative award. It's all about bringing attention to the agency rather than the product or service they're advertising.

Whether or not the ad generated any sales seems secondary. Sometimes you even struggle to figure out what product they’re actually advertising.

But great headlines are only the start. You need  to create a winning campaign. And you need an unmissable offer and great copy to create a winning campaign.

6 Questions To Consider Before Using Humor In Your Marketing

The question I like to ask myself when writing ad copy is: Do I want to be funny and famous? Or do I want to be a business success? Does it add to or detract from the message?

These are one and the same if you are John Cleese or Ricky Gervais. But for most other business owners these are generally going to be mutually exclusive.

Here are some important questions when considering adding humor to your marketing:

1. Does it add to or detract from the message?
2. Will it send the reader/listener/viewer on a tangent trying to figure it out?
3. Could it frustrate and alienate readers/listeners/viewers who don’t understand the humor or reference?
4. Is it offensive to anyone in my target market?
5. Does it distract from the flow of the ad?
6. Will some people reading it not bother trying to figure it out?

The answer to one or more of the above questions is usually yes, which is why I often recommend steering clear of humor in marketing.

Humor varies wildly between people of different race, age, demographic, education, and cultural background. And this is why it can be extremely difficult to pull off.

My advice is usually: choose clarity over cleverness.

It’s hard enough to get a message read, understood then acted upon without adding potential confusion into the mix.

Is There Ever A Time To Use Humor In Marketing?

As with most rules, there are exceptions. There are certain situations where using humor can strengthen your marketing message.

Take Nando's. This brand has nailed humorous marketing. It's what their customers expect.

You can build rapport by using “insider” humor.

For example, if you're targeting a very narrow market that have a similar demographic profile (e.g., doctors, mechanics, florists) and they're likely to understand your references.

Positioning yourself as an industry “insider” is a powerful way to build credibility and authority in your niche.

Existing customers are another exception. At least with existing customers, the stakes are lower if they fail to understand your message.

Using humor with existing customers can help with retention. It can position you as the “fun” or “irreverent” alternative to your stodgy competition.

In Closing

Using humor in your marketing really depends on your customers. It depends on the product or service you sell and who you sell it to.

Humor can either bring significant goodwill to your brand or break it.

My wife and I were recently dining at one of our favorite restaurants. The food there is great, the staff are courteous and helpful and the location is spectacular – right on the beach. On a cold night they have a log wood fireplace going which really adds to the atmosphere.

We’ve been dining there for about a year or so – ever since we moved to the area. As I went to pay for the meal, I looked over and sure enough it was still there – a tattered hand-written sign near their credit card machine that says, “Sorry our credit card machine doesn’t work with PINs, please sign instead. Apologies for the inconvenience.”

I marveled at how such a high-end restaurant that has got so much right, has got this one fundamental thing wrong. As a business owner, if there’s one part of interacting with my customers that I want to be as smooth and frictionless as possible, it’s the part where I get paid.

Not only was this faulty credit card machine not attended to for at least a year (that I know of) but they clearly had no intention of implementing new, even more frictionless payment technology such as Visa payWave or MasterCard PayPass.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

‍‍When Technology Fails Us

The rate of technology innovation over the past few years has been nothing short of astonishing. Prior to August 2004 Google was still a private, relatively unknown company. Prior to September 2006 Facebook was still just an experiment and not yet open to the public. In mid-2007 there was no iPhone and in April 2010 the iPad was still just a rumor in geek circles.

We almost can’t imagine life without some of these technologies – yet a few short years ago they didn’t even exist.

While the pace of technology innovation has increased and continues to increase exponentially, the purpose of new technology has remained constant over thousands of years.

Plain and simple the purpose of any new technology in your business is to eliminate friction. We want the fastest and easiest path to the sale, while increasing customer satisfaction.

We also want to avoid situations where technology hinders rather than facilitates business:

As customers (of usually large institutions) we’ve all had the frustrating experience of trying to talk sense to someone who’s being held back by technology and responds with their version of “Computer says ‘No’...”

As small business owners we must ensure technology is being used in our businesses in ways that remove friction rather than creating it.

Getting technology To work For You And Your Customers

Technology makes our lives easier by doing the “heavy lifting” on our behalf, whether it’s doing a complex calculation, lifting a concrete block into place or searching through thousands of publications to find that obscure literary reference you’re looking for.

Yet sometimes it’s like we implement technology for technology’s sake. When helping business owners with their marketing, I often ask people what the purpose of their website, Twitter or Facebook page is. I rarely get a succinct and direct answer.

Back when the iPod came out, this was the only legal way to load new music onto it:

• Drive down to the local music store and buy a CD with the music you want.
• Insert the CD into the computer and import the contents into your computer hard drive.
• Sync the iPod with the computer so it copies all the music over.

Despite this painful process, the iPod was still a huge success, however when Apple introduced the iTunes Store, the success of the iPod exploded and it also laid the foundation for the iPhone and iPad.

No element of customer effort escaped the attention of Steve Jobs. As Roger Dooley describes in his book Friction, Apple paid Amazon for the right to use one-click ordering. Jobs knew that saving even one click would help his new music store succeed.

The technology Apple introduced greatly reduced the friction between consumer and merchant. The same can be said of Amazon, Google, Visa payWave or MasterCard PayPass and many other successful technologies.

Using Technology To Reduce Friction

By reducing friction, technology helps us do in a fraction of the time what would have taken us hours, days or years to accomplish without it.

So how can you use technology to reduce the friction between you and your customers? What tasks can you streamline and make seamless?

More importantly, how can you ensure technology isn’t hindering your relationship with your customers?

Here’s how I do it.

I like to think of each piece of technology as an employee. What am I hiring this employee to do? What are its KPI’s?

Take the example of a website. It’s pretty common that a business will have a website with no specific goal – just some vague notion or hope that customers will come their way because they have put up an online version of their brochure.

By contrast, every smart entrepreneur I know uses technology with very specific goals in mind that are measurable. For example, a website can be used for selling a product or getting prospects to opt-in to a marketing database.

These things are measurable and can have KPI’s attached to them. We know instantly if they’re working or not and we fire the ones that aren’t working and we continue improving the ones that are.

Now may be a good time to rethink the various ways you use technology in your business. Are they reducing friction? Are they doing what they were hired to do?

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on How To Build A Marketing Infrastructure & Scale Rapidly. It's your guide to building a high-growth business.

If you want to be successful in business then you need to create a minimum viable product. As an angel investor, I get to see many pitches, product, and prototypes. One of the most difficult things I see is startups who've spent tons of money on product development, only to find out:

• There's no demand for their product.
• Their product misses the mark and major redevelopment is needed.

In medicine “minimum effective dose” is the lowest amount of a drug that produces a therapeutic response in those taking it. It’s used to ensure patients get the treatment they need without being overexposed to unnecessary side effects.

As an entrepreneur, it’s natural to want to create an outstanding product. Often we feel like artists working on a masterpiece. There can be a lot of emotions attached to what we’re producing.

We want to present our best to the world. While being passionate is most definitely part of the success equation, it can also be a major roadblock in the process.

Read on and I’ll share with you two things I’ve learned from expensive experience.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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Minimum Viable Product Explained

To Create a Minimum Viable Product You'll Likely Fail Cheap, Fail Often

Nobody wants to be told their baby is ugly. But what's more painful is learning your product's a no go when you’ve sunk huge amounts of time, money and effort into developing it.

When it comes to product development – the probability of creating a smash hit on the first go is astronomically low. I’ve come to expect that I’ll need to course correct or even start over multiple times before I get my winner.

Surveys and marketing research can help you identify a winner quicker. But there’s nothing like actually trying to get someone to part with their money to determine if what you have is of value to the market or not.

This is why I’ve now learned to make small “bets.” This lets you fail cheap and fail often, as opposed to a “bet the farm” strategy. By making small investments, you can cut the losers early and ride the winners.

Real Artists Ship

Steve Jobs famously said, “real artists ship.” I’ve taken that statement to mean two things.

1. It’s easy to have a theoretically “perfect” product sitting endlessly on your drawing board. However, you can only start judging it properly when it’s in the hands of your end customer.
2. Real artists or entrepreneurs are prolific. They create multiple iterations of their product with continual improvement based on customer feedback.

It’s this valuable feedback loop we want to tap into early in the product development process. By creating a “minimum viable product" you build a product that has the core functionality of what you want to offer. And you create it as quickly and cheaply as possible.

So, instead of packing all the features you think your customers want into a product. And this is an expensive and protracted product development cycle.

You'll release a bare bones product and tap into the feedback your customers are giving you. What do they like, what do they dislike? You let them define the features and future of the product. It’s never been easier and cheaper to do product development this way.

What Makes Developing A Minimum viable Produce (MVP) Possible?

Exponential advances in technology and the constant drop in price of these technologies, makes creating MVP possible.

Social media, mobile devices, and web technology can give you almost real-time, continual feedback directly from your customers.

Of course, certain industries lend themselves better to this type of product development than others. If you operate in a highly regulated industry like car manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, this will not be possible.

But this is the exception rather than the rule. Most small businesses can create minimum viable products and experiment with features, price, terms, etc.

I'm talking about ordinary local businesses like cafes and restaurants to services businesses like legal firms, accountants, and many others.

Start Tapping Into Your Ideal Customer

Shipping quickly. Tapping into a customer feedback loop. Constantly improving your products is the best and most reliable way I know of consistently producing winners.

Don't invest all your time into building something you think your customers want. Let them guide you in terms of what they want and make it happen.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on Building Business Systems. It will help you to skyrocket your sales, and attract investors.

There’s no end of articles, books and blogs on goal setting. It’s certainly a worthy topic and any entrepreneur worth their salt has spent a lot of time and energy on setting both personal and business goals.

However, rarely do I see much written about “goal management” i.e., what to do after you have set your goals and how to keep managing and measuring these to ensure you achieve your desired outcome.

The biggest mistake I see in terms of goal setting is the failure to understand that a goal has to change something that you do on a daily basis.

Otherwise it’s not a goal at all but a daydream or something equally useless like a “New Years resolution” which in reality is just a vague hope that you will magically change something in your life without any plan on how to do it. By mid-January it’s long forgotten until the following year when you’re a year older and repeat the hoping process.

If I’ve set a goal to lose a certain amount of weight within a given timeframe then I need to change my daily routine to include exercise and changes to my diet. How much I exercise and what type of diet all depends on how much weight I need to lose and by when. However, the critical point is that the goal has to have a corresponding change in what I do on a daily basis.

Setting goals without setting a corresponding change in your daily routine is a waste of time and is destined to lead to disappointment. If you cannot (or will not) make the required change in your daily routine, then the goal is not important enough to you right now and probably should not be on your current list of goals.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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The Perfect Day – The Big Secret To Achieving Big Goals

I strongly believe that one day is by far the best unit of time to concentrate on in order to achieve your big, audacious goals.

Too much happens in a week and a month for us to easily measure. But one day is an easily digestible unit of time.

One of the best ways of managing and measuring goals that I know of is through the concept of a “perfect day.”

For example, let’s say my top three goals for the year are:

• Lose 10 kilos
• Write a book
• Learn to play the piano

In order to achieve these in the space of one year, I may have determined that each day (or on most days) I need to:

• Go for a 20-minute run
• Work on planning, researching or writing my book for 1 hour
• Practice the piano for 30 minutes

Any day that I can tick off all of the above is classed as a “perfect day.”

Bunch together a few “perfect days” and you have a perfect week. Have a few perfect weeks and suddenly you have a perfect month and you’ve now developed a routine and a discipline.

With your new daily routine and a string of mostly perfect weeks and months, you’ll soon realize that you have accomplished all of your most important goals.

The goal might have been achieved in the space of a year or longer but the unit of time which you managed and measured was one day.

Now perhaps not every one of your days can be a “perfect day,” but could the majority be? Once you get hooked on having perfect days it will be difficult to go back to having ordinary ones.

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. So some things you have to do every day. Eating seven apples on Sunday night instead of one a day just isn’t going to get the job done.

I’ll leave you with a few words on the topic from the late great Jim Rohn:

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

Our last article began a two-part series on how to get things done. In this article, we conclude our “best of” list for high performance and productivity. Combined, this two-part series of articles can be thought of as a blueprint for how high-performance people think and work.

I’ve always believed and personally experienced that success is learnable and predictable – meaning that if I consistently do the things that other successful people do, I’ll usually get the same successful results they do.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my Lean Strategy Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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‍‍Batching – A Key To Boosting Your Productivity

Do you find yourself trying to cram everything into your busy day? Every time you reply to an email three new ones arrive. One of the most sensible productivity techniques tips I’ve ever received is batching. Batching can save you hundreds or thousands of hours that would otherwise be wasted.

We’ve previously looked at taming technology – especially email. There we’ve introduced the idea of only checking email once or twice a day at most. The reason for this is that batching similar tasks greatly reduces the overall time needed to complete them. This is especially the case for smaller and more regular tasks such as responding to email, voicemail and running errands. For example, to respond to email as it arrives, the process might go something like this:

• Email “ting” notifies me of a new email (interruption)
• I go into my email inbox (set up time)
• I reply to the email and then delete or file the original one (doing the actual task)
• I go back to what I was doing prior to being interrupted (re-focus)

The above business process sequence might take me just three minutes. However, repeated fifty times throughout my workday would take up two and a half hours in total.

Had I scheduled a time in my day to respond to the fifty emails as a single batched task, it’s very likely I could have done this in half or even a third of the time.

Efficiency is gained because I have eliminated 50 repetitions of the interruption, set up and re-focus cycles.

On top of that, the productivity gains of not being interrupted every time an email arrived would be huge.

Email isn’t the only task that can be batched. Anything that happens multiple times a day or multiple times a week are perfect candidates for batching. Some common examples include: returning phone calls, replying to or sending email, meetings, running errands, handling snail mail, sales calls, etc.

Doing multiples of a similar task in one session keeps your frame of mind focused, reduces set up time, and boosts overall productivity.

The Art Of Thoughtful Neglect

Productivity is often focused on getting as much as possible crammed into your day. Using tools like Outlook, Gmail, various list systems or the excellent Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, one has a myriad of options for becoming highly efficient.

The only problem with being efficient in this sense is that it rarely ever results in making progress on our most important goals. Busyness and efficiency can deceive us into thinking that we are actually accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is spinning the wheels but going nowhere.

What would happen if you concentrated fully for a set block of time, say 3 days or a week on that one big goal – you know that big one which has been gnawing away at the back of your mind?

Blow everything off. Don’t reply to the emails, don’t return the phone calls (or at least do the bare minimum you can get away with). Would you get it accomplished? Would you at least make a big dent in it?

Ask forgiveness not permission. “Sorry I’ve been away on some important project work for a few days,” can precede any belated return emails or phone calls.

Let’s take this a step further, what if you only made two goals for the entire year – one personal and one professional? Choose the two biggies. Rather than ten goals that only get partially completed due to lack of focus, what if you absolutely smashed through and achieved your two biggest? Would that make your year?

Do What You Love

This one is huge. When work doesn’t feel like work, getting things done is not burdensome – or at least it’s much easier.

I frequently tell people I’ve never worked a day in my life. That’s because I’ve always followed my interests and created businesses around these interests. Even though I was building fast-growing businesses it felt like a hobby – like I was a kid playing when I should be doing my homework instead.

That’s not to say I enjoyed every facet of what I did. Of course there were tasks which in themselves were no fun, but overall the “mission” was something that I felt passionate about and enjoyed doing.

The side benefit is that it is very easy to get really good at what you do when hours fly by and they feel like minutes because you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing.

I really can’t say it much better than Alan Watts does in the narration of this short video:

When Is The Best Time To Plant A Tree?

Answer: Yesterday.

When is the next best time to plant a tree? Today!

Have you ever thought about the things you should have done in days gone by? What should you have done a year ago, two years ago, 5 years ago, or earlier? What benefits would you be reaping now if you had done them? This is not an exercise in wallowing about the past – but we do want to use the past as a teacher.

What should you be doing today to reap the benefits in one year, two years or five years from now and beyond? Don’t let it slip this time. Plant that tree today and water diligently.

In my experience, the most successful, intelligent, and driven people have and maintain a long view of things. Today’s activities are destined to be tomorrow’s benefits.

Look at each of the important areas of your life. What are you doing today in each of these areas that will have a positive impact in a year, two years, five years, ten years?

It amazes me how some people just have a knack for getting things done – they have an amazing bias for action. While others are still compiling a pros and cons list, they’ve already finished or are well on their way to finishing the task at hand.

A wise man once said – you’ll always accomplish more through movement than through meditation.

So what’s the difference between these radically different groups of people? What’s the difference between those who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk?

In this multi-part series of articles, I’ve compiled some of the key secrets of high-performance people. Both through observation and personal experience I’ve put together what can be thought of as a “best of” list for getting things done. You’ll be surprised how differently high-performance people think.

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The Best Time Management Tool In The World

The best time management tool in the world has, in fact, nothing to do with “time management” at all. You may have been expecting me to present some kind to-do list system, time management software or another tip that can save you a few minutes or a few hours here or there. However, this time management tool will literally save you years of hard work – get better at what you do.

You’ll not only get faster and better at the things you do, but you’ll also enormously increase your value to your business and to your customers. Your increased value is most often reflected in your bank account.

What books are the top ten percent in your field reading? What courses are they taking?

By far the best time management tool in the world is to improve your skills and keep improving them with continual self-education. The good news is EVERYONE who is in the top ten percent in your field was once in the bottom ten percent. Everyone who is now a master was once a disaster.

While getting better at what you do seems like obvious advice – very few people continue self-education throughout their lives.

Often when people get “good enough” they tend to get into a routine and their expertise plateaus. As the saying goes they don’t have 15 years experience – they have one year’s experience repeated 15 times.

Discipline – The Bridge Between Goals And Accomplishment

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. The 97% crowd hate hearing or thinking about discipline.

They want the push button, magic pill, buy now pay later solution.

You’re different. You understand that we must all suffer from either the current and temporary pain of discipline or the permanent and heavy pain of regret.

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say I have difficulty with discipline, but here’s what I’ve discovered – discipline is infectious.

One discipline always leads to another. When I start keeping to my exercise routine, soon I find I’m also sticking to my daily to-do list. When I start keeping to my daily reading and self-education habit I soon also find that I’m able to stick to the good habit of healthy eating.

A discipline is the most important type of commitment – a commitment to yourself.

Conversely, the least lack of discipline starts infecting other areas of our life and begins to erode self-esteem. If you can’t trust what you commit to yourself, how can you expect others to trust you to do what you say you’ll do?

You don’t have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years.

Work All The Time You Work

We all work below our potential capacity. The question is how much below your potential capacity are you working?

To be successful, you must discipline yourself to work all the time you work.

Don’t be feeling guilty and thinking about your family when you’re at the office and vice versa, don’t be thinking about work and continually check your email when you’re relaxing with your family. Give both activities your undivided attention.

How do you explain the fact that everyone, no matter what their role from plumber to CEO, works roughly the same number of hours to get done what they need to get done? The answer is found in Parkinson’s law;

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

The majority of people working today are expanding their work day with “artificial fillers” so as to fill in the available time. Activities such as meaningless busywork, chit chat, meetings, drinking coffee, and reading the news ensure they are working at well below capacity.

If they have a dentist appointment at 2pm, they’ll get everything they need to get done by the time they need to leave, yet on a normal day it would have taken them until 5pm or later. How did they magically gain 3+ hours? The answer is obvious – they eliminated some of the “artificial fillers.”

As an employee you effectively get rewarded for inefficiency – the longer hours you work, the more time you waste on pointless meetings, the more you’re perceived as a hard worker and team player. That’s because employees work in the time and effort economy.

Entrepreneurs are different. We work in the results economy. In the results economy, you get paid for results whether they took you an hour or year to achieve. Time and effort have no bearing on your bank account – only results matter.

That’s one of the reasons why getting good at what you do is so important. The better you get, the less time you need to achieve the same results.

You must therefore resolve to work all the time you work. You must decide that from the time you start until the time you finish, you’ll work on your top priorities as close to 100% of the time as possible. That will dramatically improve your productivity and output.

Rest, recreation, and having a good time are important, but understand that they are a separate activity from work (not that you can’t enjoy your work). Mixing the two does not give justice to either. If you do, either your work will suffer or you won’t be able to fully relax, knowing that you’re only doing your work half-heartedly.