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True story... Back in the early 1990's when cell phones and car phones slowly started to become more and more common, my mom gave a long rant about "those silly car phones". "Car phones!" she would exclaim, "As if anyone is that important. Like you can't wait five...
There's a cool time management technique I use...but before I get to it I need to be clear about something. Obviously you don't want to over-schedule. Early in my business life years ago I would do that all the time. I thought I could hit five or six long appointments...
True story... When I was a young lad of about 19 years old and was working in my first corporate job, I saw one of those shifty but convincing late-night get-rich infomercials. This particular one was on investing in heating oil options. For half an hour, the host of...
One of my ongoing standards is to be 100% work-functional wherever I am. I define work-functional as the ability to get any work done that I could normally get done while sitting down at my office. A lot of people out there think they're functionally mobile when...
Why don't people stick with new habits they know they need to be happy? That's a complicated question and there are many answers. Occam's Razor suggests the answer is because new habits are uncomfortable, so we stop doing them. This brings me to something I call the...
I am always reading one fiction book and one nonfiction book on success, business, finance, or similar. I've done this my whole life. It was and is instrumental in my success as a person and a businessman. If you're not reading regularly, you should be.Back in my...
I was first introduced to this concept by Dan Kennedy. It's one of those global principles that's very hard to find an exception to. It's basically this: The worst number in your business or career is the number one. Any time you see the number one in your business...
True story... A few years back there was a guy I'll call "Joe". Joe was a car salesman, but he was no ordinary car salesman. He sold for Lincoln Mercury, and his cars were directly competing against Cadillac. Not an easy job. Every time someone bought a Cadillac,...
In part one of this post series, I talked about how I've digitized just about everything in my life, from DVDs to paperwork to binders to...cassettes. I now have a much less cluttered house and a more efficient way of accessing my entertainment and information....
I've already talked about avoiding crowds and thereby getting the most done with the least amount of time and hassle. Today we'll talk about traffic. Which I know is your favorite thing. (Obviously if you live and work way out in the country this post doesn't...
Some of the big business news today is GM posted record profits for 2011. That's great. Only problem is the American taxpayer, you and me, still own 27% of the company. Did YOU get a GM profit-sharing check in the mail? I didn't. GM still owes the taxpayer, or...
No, not Parkinson's disease, Parkinson's law. It's one of the most important aspects of work and time management. The law is this: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. That means that if you have a task and give yourself the "next five hours"...
Years ago I received a letter from the IRS saying that I was being audited. Now I'm not accountant, but apparently the IRS doesn't actually "audit" people like they did in the old days, where a bunch of guys would show up at your door with calculators and little hats...
Most people don't realize hotel rooms are probably the most negotiable thing in the universe. With hotels you can negotiate price, room size, number of beds, room location, room type, upgrades, and even free food in one of the hotel's restaurants. Last time I was in...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZGpWTS8guA I have never lost money in an investment in my entire life. Not one penny. I'm serious. I haven't. I have lost money in business, on business deals that went south, on marketing efforts that failed, things like that....
I put off going paperless in my home office for many years. “It’s too much trouble.” “People will need something on paper and I’ll always be printing stuff for them.” “High speed scanners are too expensive.” "Scanners are a pain. They jam and stuff." Etc. Finally I...
It’s been said, and I believe it, that Napoleon only checked his mail once a month. His attitude was that most things would not be important 30 days into the future and the truly important things would still be important. Therefore checking his mail daily was a waste...
Full credit for this goes to Tim Ferriss. It was just one little sentence in his book 4 Hour Workweek, but that one tiny sentence set off an atom bomb in my brain. Everyone should lift weights on a regular basis, including women. It will help you live longer, look...
The “Masood Method” is a combination of two techniques. One I learned many years ago from my buddy Masood, and immigrant from Pakistan who started out penniless and became a multimillionaire CEO of a world-wide steel company, all by his late 40s. The second technique...
Don’t set appointments? Huh? Let me clarify. Of course you need to set appointments in your business life. What I’m recommending is that you avoid setting specific times for your appointments. Instead of saying “I’ll be at your office at 2:30pm on Tuesday” you instead...