I’ve been self employed for a long time now and one of the roles I play is as a consultant for major corporations. If you happen to work for one of these giants I can be certain of one thing, you have plenty of time available, you have just been trained to mis-manage it. Oh! I’m sorry, did I just insult you? Well, get used to it. Major corporations, from top to bottom, have become extremely adept at wasting time, money and every other resource they can get their hands on. If you have spent much time inside this environment, you have to learn to be brutally honest with yourself with regard to how you use resources. If you are going to accomplish something on your own, you have to treat your resources with special care.

Time is your most important resource.

While some people will argue with me that money is the most important resource, especially when starting a business, I argue right back that the two are interchangable. Effort (time) provides you with money, money can provide you with effort from others, thus freeing up your time. For those of you who yearn to be rich, you probably do so in an effort to have more time. Money spent may come back to you, time never will.

If you will agree with me that time is your most valuable resource, then you have to agree with me that it should not be wasted. Take a few moments to reflect on the previous day. The previous week. The previous month. How much did you really get done? How much time did you spend on low value activities? How much time did you spend entertaining yourself? How much of the time you spent working really went to getting work done? Be honest. If you want to tell me that you spent 80 hours locked inside the walls of XYZ corp and there was nothing you could do that would have trimmed that down to 70, then so be it. You’re done. You have accepted your fate. Stop reading.

If however you can look back on your past week and identify areas that were total time wasters, time spent watching televisions shows that you weren’t even interested in, or periods of time when you were completely and utterly bored, then welcome. You have found the time resources you need to get yourself started.

Your Job is working against you.

Time management goes hand in hand with task management. The average employee knows that they have to go to work every day for 8 hours and “work”. Some are paid hourly and thus incented to work at something less that peak efficiency to ensure that more work will still be left for tomorrow, or that overtime is available. Most of these jobs are either service type jobs where you are in front of customers the entire time (bad) or jobs where you are expected to complete repetetive tasks all day (good). Your goal with this type of job is to ensure that you work like crazy when work is presented and utilize any downtime you can get by doing this to your advantage. Above all, get out of there on time! You are too valuable to use that time working for someone else rather than for yourself.

Other people are paid a set wage for their typical 40-hour work week and are thus encouraged to “look good” by working late and completing all of the tasks set before them on a schedule. The problem with this type of work is psychology. If I ask 2 different people to complete the same task, one scheduled for January 5th and the other for January 12th, both people will complete their task at exactly the same time. The day that it is due. If, however I challenge myself to complete the task in the absolute shortest period of time, say 3 days instead of 8, chances are just as good that I will get it done. This leaves me with 5 whole days to myself.

Sure, you say, if I get it done in just 3 days the boss will just give me more work. Besides, I doubt that it would be possible to complete an 8 day task that fast. You may be right. However, from what I have seen of the American workplace, so much non-work goes on there that an 8 day task can probably be done in one! (ok, I am being funny) The truth is that you want to train yourself to be much more efficient than you are today. Above all, get out of there on time! If you are working the 80 hour week, you are inefficient and foolish. (Sorry to insult you again)

Time Management isn’t hard, but it can be painful.

Changing your habits is one of the most painful things that a person can do, but if you wish to become successful you need to challenge yourself to question your current habits and see if they are the ones you really want to portray to the world. Are you really being efficient? Are you really being effective? Do you tell people NO enough? When you are asked to take on a task do you evaluate whether the task should be completed in the first place? Dig deep and get to know yourself. Only then can you change your habits for the better.

We all have strengths, we all have weaknesses, but if you are going to build yourself a better daily routine, you need to quickly turn those weaknesses to strengths or at least minimize their negative effects. The world if full of do’s and don’ts, Here’s my list.

Do:

• Limit your telephone time. Push phone calls to voicemail and respond to them via email whenever possible. Pick up for friends, relationships are important.
• Limit your email. Check it as little as possible. Start by tracking how many times a day you check it now. Cut it in half immediately. When you are down to 2-3 times a day, you are almost there.
• Limit your television time. Most of it stinks anyhow. Get TIVO! The extra cost is tiny compared to the hours you can save skipping commercials and the boring parts. I usually get a 1 hour show down to less than 30 minutes and I don’t miss a thing.
• Carry work with you at all times. I always have a book, articles, minor tasks, lists of potential clients, etc with me. Any free time I get I can then use to build my future.
• Get some exercise every day. As little as 30 minutes a day can change your life.
• Organize your work. Spend time at the beginning and end of your day organizing your work. Most people spend a ton of time just figuring out what to do next.

Don’t:

• Try to change everything at once. Pick one thing that you have identified as a weakness and work on it. When you have it under control, add another.
• Get too far ahead of yourself. I know people who have confused becoming more efficient at work with not giving a damn. If you hope to transition from your day job to your newly created venture, ensure that you are the most valuable employee that they have ever lost when you go.

That’s it in a nutshell. Building a better day takes a brutal examination of your present day and ripping up those bad habits so that new ones have some room to grow.

Next week we’ll talk about what could be the single most important issue when starting a new venture. Getting exposure.

November 1st marks the beginning of the Holiday Season for me, from this point out the year is focused on celebration. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, holiday sales, football games, parties and other events seem to get endlessly strung together from now thru the end of the year. While the constant taunting of “buy me, buy me” coming from the stores comes earlier each year, I will make a point this year of turning my criticism of this into celebration of it. No, I won’t shop any earlier or buy any more than I usually do, but I may have friends over for dinner this November, or have a pre-holiday party.

I know that there are a lot of of people out there who are having a harder time this year than they did last year. The Governments stated inflation rate of 4% or so is nothing but a fantasy in the real world and the increased costs of food, gasoline and utilities over the past few years is still causing a lot of nausea at the end of the month. I have two children in college and no idea where next semesters tuition is coming from yet, but we can’t let lifes difficulties get us down. We need to celebrate. Call up some neighbors and invite them over for dinner, chances are they will offer to bring dessert and you will all have a better meal and a great time.

Celebrations don’t have to be fancy, or expensive. Some of the best times I have had in the past few years have been ad-hoc parties on the back patio where neighbors walking by have joined us for a quick meal. I find that food can turn any event into a party, that seems to be the American way. Three or four dollars buys an extra package of hot dogs and buns, so there is nothing really standing in your way. As for the ever present “time issues”, stop overextending yourselves, especially when it comes to work. Yes, your employer deserves a solid weeks value for the pay, but you are no good to anyone once you’ve been ground into dust.

So take a break and celebrate life. Call up a friend you haven’t seen in a while, invite the neighbors over for dinner, or a movie. My wife and I are available most nights this week  Do it today, you won’t regret it.

Even though gasoline was cheap, it didn’t get wasted on quick trips without reason. Just like everything else, it was used sparingly when needed. Half of Mrs. Gravocks visits ended with the trip to the store cancelled in favor of a cup of coffee and long conversation. If no one else needed anything from the store, her needs could wait until tomorrow. Perhaps then someone would be out of coffee, milk or whatever and decide to ride along. A trip to the store, albeit only a few miles down the road, was more a social experience than it was an expedition.

I was reminded of this 1970’s mindset yesterday when I stopped at the store to pick up some milk and eggs on the way home from dropping my kids off at school. I saw one neighbor in the frozen foods department, another in the deli lne and yet a third at the check-out counter. All three live within a few hundred feet of me and all three had come separately, making special trips to the store to pick up ten or twenty dollars worth of goods. “Wow” I thought, what a colossal waste!

Why don’t we carpool?

On the trip home I couldn’t help ask myself that very question, Why don’t we carpool? My answers will probably ring true to most of my fellow readers… One of the neighbors I don’t really know all that well, One I know pretty well but hadn’t talked to in a week or so and the third I haven’t talked to in a month or more. It’s not that I don’t like my neighbors, or don’t get along with them, it’s that I am just not close with my neighbors the way we used to be. There is no daily interaction, only occasional or social contact.

This lack of daily contact with our neighbors has been replaced with daily contact by those people who we work with. With most families now valuing the employment of both spouses outside the home, nobody is around on a daily basis to nurture these relationships. The social structure of the neighborhood has been usurped by the org chart.

You’ve lost that loving feeling.

The downside to this new structuring of our social networks is that we are drawn to work not only as a source of income, but as a source of social nurturing. Corporations reap the benefits of this and try to encourage it to whatever extent that they can. Happy employees are better employees. People with little or no neighborhood social contact have a tendency to work longer hours (generally for FREE!) as they feel a misplaced sense of being toward their company.

Neighborhoods on the other hand have largely been the losers in this shift in social admiration. People return home from their jobs only to lock themselves inside their homes until the next opportunity to return to their true social nest, the drab gray cubicle that they really consider home. Venturing outside is limited to performing outside chores like yardwork and home repairs.

Fight the good fight.

If you want to strengthen your neighborhood and build a more open and caring community you need to understand that getting to know your neighbors means more than just making friends with those around you, it means shifting those social bonds away from your neighbors jobs and back into their community. Getting to know all of your nearby neighbors is a good start, but be prepared for the fact that you may have to drag them kicking and screaming back into their own neighborhood.

Social events such as the Sunday afternoon football game or the weekend picnic are great beginnings, but how about weekday dinners? Give your neighbor something to look forward to on a Wednesday evening and you will truly begin to help them make this shift. How often have you turned down a mid-week invitation because it was a work day, or do the same for the kids because it was a school night? In doing so we are saying that school and work are more important than our neighborhood connections. I challenge that.

Building a better community can be difficults, but it is a good fight. Fight it.

I welcome your comments.

A conversation with one of these people today has led me to sit down and see if I can formulate the basic strategy I use when working with someone to make them more successful. This article, and what I hope to become a series of articles, will represent that attempt.

Before I get into the meat of it, let me provide you with just a bit of background on myself, what I am and what I am not. First and foremost, I am not a multi-millionaire. I have however founded a company that has generated several million dollars in revenue over the past decade. While we didn’t “hit the big time” and sell the company or go to an IPO, we manage to run it profitably. That means we didn’t generate a million dollars in income and spend two.

I am not a Harvard MBA. I am a hard working guy who has learned how to start, grow and manage a business using my own money. Yes, on occasion my businesses have borrowed, both start-up capital and operational capital for sound purposes, but I do not follow the mantra of “build fast, build big, sell out and wait for the collapse”. I prefer to build things that are profitable from day one, grow well without being over capitalized and have staying power. I still work part time at a business I founded more than 10 years ago. I also have a couple of other small and growing businesses that I enjoy very much. All together they combine to form a very nice stream of income, and I enjoy the variety I get.

While I certainly don’t consider myself average, I believe that anyone who is committed can be at least as successful as I have been. I’ll admit to having my ups and downs and I claim responsibility for all of them! So, with that all behind us, lets get onto the important subject here…You!

Everyone has a dream, most people just don’t realize it.

Several years ago I was visiting another company who was reselling some of our products. One of the technical support people, a fantastic guy in his late twenties named Ace, wasn’t in the office. I asked if he was going to be in today as he was one of their best I wanted to make sure I brought him up to speed on our latest offerings. Everyone just smiled. It was kind of an uncomfortable smile, so I asked if everything was alright with him and his family. “Everything’s fine with Ace, in fact, he retired” was the answer. “Oh” I replied and then we continued on with business.

Over lunch the conversation turned back to Ace, who hadn’t really retired, he just made the choice to live his life a bit differently. It seems that he had been running his own business on the side and it was really paying off. It was providing him with enough income that the full time day job no longer looked very attractive. The business itself didn’t take all that much time either as he had to build it on the side, in his spare time with the help of hired help. He was committing his time to is because he could, not because he had to.

The lunchtime comments were full of things like “I wish I could do that” or “wow, wasn’t he lucky” or “I wish I had though of that idea”. That is when the epiphany hit me. Other people aren’t like me. I spent a good portion of the lunch asking people there what their hobbies were, what were their interests outside of work. One person liked boats and sailing, another was into hiking and camping and one young girl wanted to be a makeup artist “someday”. They all had fantastic businesses sitting in the palm of their hands and none of them could actualize them.

The world has enough boundaries in it, get rid of the extra ones in your head.

We all know these people, or at least ones like them. They would love to run their own business, but they “don’t have the time”, “don’t have the money”, “there is too much competition”, “blah blah blah!”. So they end up chained to their jobs for fifty years, or more like 20 different jobs, until their too tired to work anymore and too tired to enjoy whatever retirement they can manage. Life becomes a grind. I’ve been there myself, its not much fun. What these people don’t realize is that most of the hurdles that they see for having their own business have been placed in front of them by themselves.

The biggest part of running your own business is solving problems. The people I just mentioned failed to even get started because they all failed to solve the very first set of problems presented to them and their potential businesses. If you feel you don’t have enough time to start the business, thats a problem. If you really want your own business, solve it! You don’t have enough  money to start the business? Solve it! Too much competition? Solve it! All of these problems have solutions, however most people get to the point that they see the problem and give up. Most people are lazy.

The first test.

The first time I meet with someone to discuss their business and see if I can give them advise I will usually have a long conversation with them getting them to tell me as much as they can about what it is that they would like to do. The conversation will cover the gambit, from gathering ideas, discussing the market, competitors, you name it. Essentially I want to know two things: A. Does this person have a solid basis of knowledge for what they are about to get into. and B. Is this person passionate about it.

At the end of our conversation I will make 3-4 recommendations, each one requiring an hour or two to complete. We will discuss them and agree that they are things that the person should do before we get together again, usually in one week, maybe two. Failure to complete them before our next meeting doesn’t represent complete failure, but if it continues into the next week then I know that I’m wasting my time.

Take the challenge.

You don’t need me for this one, you can manage it by yourself. You have no one to let down but yourself. Here is what you do. Select 3-4 tasks RIGHT NOW that you know absolutely need to be done to get you started. They don’t have to be huge, in fact they should be 1-2 hours each. Take your time assessing them and WRITE THEM DOWN.

Next you need to mark your calendar, set an alarm, whatever you do to notify yourself that something is due today. Don’t have anything like that? Hmm, there’s a problem Set yourself an alarm that says “MY BUSINESS task list due today”, set it for one week from today. If you are an organizer, do whatever you need to prod yourself along during the next week to get things done. How well will you do? Let’s find out next week.

During this brief 2 day whirlwind tour we were approached no less than 2 dozen times for people looking for change. On the way to the metro, “Excuse me, do you have any change?”. Walking by the ballpark, “Got any change?”. People playing instruments hoping for change, people selling flowers hoping for change, people peddling local papers, hoping for change. More than anything else though, people doing nothing at all, just asking for change.

Presidents Clinton and Bush, with the help of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have managed to get the printing presses of this country operating at full speed. It will be the job of the next president to get the Mints up to maximum capacity however, because if Washington D.C. is at all representative of this country, we are definitely in need of some change.

Her answer left me a bit mad, but not at all surprised. “No no honey, they have people to do that”

People have truly become more than lazy, they expect to be waited on hand and foot, even at a Wal-Mart. Maybe it the attitude that retrieving a cart is beneath them or perhaps their motives are less self-centered and they are looking out for the employment of the teenage cart pusher. In either case I think they are being lazy and they are just plain wrong.

I have had this conversation before with a friend who defended the need for the cart pushers, sorry, “grocery transportation equipment retrieval engineers”, to maintain their jobs. His attitude was that if the need for cart pushers fell off, the stores would simply fire them leaving them unemployed and increase their profits.

My argument was that these people are generally young teens and there is a high attrition rate, so the stores wouldn’t need to fire them, they would simply not hire one as one left. He countered that this still only increased store profits.

I agreed, but unly to a certain point. By returning our carts ourselves we may eventually reduce their staffing need and increase their profits, however when food prices rise dramatically stores usually absorb that increased cost when possible to eliminate temporary spikes in the market. We would eventually get the savings back in our own pockets as customers. And a store that has lower costs for things like retrieving carts, could operate more efficiently and provide more competitive pricing.

So, I leave it up to you. To bring your own cart, or to leave it to the cart pushers, that is the question. As for me, I will push my own cart and sneer at you for being lazy.

As I was reading the news earlier this week I came across an article in The Detroit News entitled “Michigan dips below U.S. Median for 1st time”. The article went on to describe that for the first time in history, the median houshold income for the people of Michigan had fallen below the median houshold income for the nation. Twenty-five years ago the median household income in Michogan was ranked 8th in the nation. Today it is 22nd. Nearly everyone in the country can tell you that it is due to the decline of the auto industry. Nearly everyone in the country can probably say “Yeah, I saw this coming a few years ago for Michigan”.

In fact, it is pretty easy as a retrospective to say “Gee, this decline has been coming since the mid seventies”. It was in the mid seventies that we experienced peak oil within the United States. Our reaction was immediate (for a country that is) and Detroit went to action with the Pinto, the AMC Gremlin and a host of small, economical cars. Heck, even the Muscular Mustang was remade as the 4 cylinder pony car of 1974. Americans adapted, begrudgingly as it was, to the changes coming from Detroit. Americans adapted to Jimmy Carter asking us to “Turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater”.  Then, something interesting happened.

Saudi Arabia and the United States struck a strange sort of deal. A sort of protection for oil deal where the military might built up during the Vietnam War would be partially redeployed to the Gulf to protect the Saudi Houses interests. For this protection, the U.S. would be guaranteed all the oil we could drink and, more importantly, all OPEC block oil would be traded exclusively in dollars. I will talk more on that another day, but suffice it to say that he who borrows too much money to support a war, in this case Vietnam, needs a miracle such as this to get out of such a bind. It was, in fact, a sweet deal all the way around.

Unfortunately, it was a sweet deal that focused on the short term. The short term in this case being 25-30 years. Cars grew again back into the roaring behemouths that Americans love to drive. Gas sucking, toxin spewing, profit making gigantic SUVs. Life was good. We’d have three decades to worry about running out of oil so it was full steam ahead. At this point I am reminded of the 40 page research paper assigned at the beginning of the semester. Suffice it to say that for the American Auto Industry it is 4 pm on the last Friday of the semester and the paper, yet to be started, is due on Monday. Worse yet, the Teamsters refuse to work the weekend, the suppliers only make repair part anymore and the Management hasn’t picked a topic for the paper anyway.

The point of the matter is this. Yes, some of the topics we discuss at RebuildingEden.com and on our TalkCast (Saturday Night, 11:00PM EST at TalkShoe.com) are designed to sound the alarm for potential future events. Yes, there is a chance that as a country we will be able to avoid some of the negative effects of these issues. Finally, Yes, it make take some time before we see the worst of these effect. But the reality is also this: When you combine the stressors being placed upon our country as a whole and weight them against the reaction of the country as a whole, it looks a lot like Detroit in the mid-1980’s. And we all know how that one is turning out.

There would be no buildings erected in my name, no statues of me adorning the city center, no lasting “gifts” made to the study of science, mathematics, or any other education institute. I have simply been a drop in this large body of water we call life.

This is the impact of the average man, the impact that 999,999 of us will make for every million people in the world. If the world was full of “movers and shakers” then the average would simple move to a new standard. Take a look around you at the people that you know. From the simplest to the most intelligent, from the poorest to the richest, if you live amongst average people their impact will likely be the same as mine when measured as I did above. Even the most intelligent, wealthy person from the zone of average will leave very little behind. Sure, some may leave their families struggling when they pass, others will ease their families financial burden, but few will have a long lasting societal impact when they go.

The real impact we can make in this life is not in what we can leave behind to be remembered by, but in what we can do for others while we are here. Touching the lives of others to make them wiser, safer, more comfortable, to relieve their burden by sharing in it, that is the difference that we can all make. As I take this time today to reflect on my impact on the world I ask you to do the same. Make today a “touch more people day”. Whether it is simply by smiling at them as you pass by, or a more in depth interaction, giving just a bit of yourself can raise the spirits of others. Including your own. - John

Its not a bad thing, mind you. My lists keep me focused, they free me from the mundane task of tracking how much I have to do and how what I have accomplished. They allow my mind to work the way that it is intended to, one task at a time. My lists make me a task master.

Take a look at my list for today:

• XYZ Co. - Update pre-parser - add check for 5530
• XYZ Co. - Update pre-parser - add gat-planner routine
• XYZ Co. - Update pre-parser - Add check-planner routine
• XYZ Co. - Add Create_matrix_object routine between pre-parse and create_batch
• XYZ Co. - Create A-B document size switch. Add as variable to main wo_parser
• XYZ Co. - Modify resizer to accept A and B size output. Add command line variable
• Download latest ZZZ Library set for LMNOP Co. Project
• Update ZZZ Library set for program Get_Feature_Set
• Update Get_Feature_Set for out of bound operations check
• Create project access password setup for ZZZ Library code
• Cheak all LMNOP Co. Routines for ZZZ Library access - Update with Password Access code
• Publish New Rebuildnig Eden Article - Are you a Task Master
• Create new DWG_Color_Check Routine for RRRR Co. data reader
• Assess all existing test data for RRRR Co. DWG_Text_Orient bug - Build fix list

There it is, the wonderful master work that will keep me on task all day long. No task is more than bite-sized, most of these are an hour or less. Those that are bigger than an hour will probably generate their own mini task list as I start the project. If you have never been a list maker before, give it a try. I usually have two major lists at all times, List 1 contains all of the big projects that need my attention as well as stand-alone items that need to be done. List 2 is a detailed task breakdown of small items that, once accomplished, will knock something off list 1.

The FBI claims that he acted alone in this dastardly deed. That he did in fact have the knowledge and expertise to create the Anthrax used in the attacks. If this is so then I would expect their investigation  to wrap up quickly and that documents will be published and the whole ordeal will be put to bed soon. My guess is that will not be the case.

My guess is that the case will be kept open. Investigators are not allowed to talk about current cases you see. Closed cases can be revealed with the freedom of information act. Even pertinent facts get put on the clock once the case is close. Nope, this case won’t close till its reached a ripe old age.

There are too many pending questions for me. I suspect the FBI will use some of these same questions to hold the case open even though their last remaining “person of interest” is dead. Here is the short list of my most pressing questions…

1. How was the Anthrax milled with such precision to a 1.5 micron size? The lab that Ivins worked in did have the requisite drying equipment, shown in so many FBI photo ops, but no such mill.
2. It was leaked that the Anthrax spores had an unusual coating, perhaps a glazing coat bound to them. The equipment for this procedure is very limited when dealing with a such a fine powder, perhaps limited to a handful of government bio-labs. None available to Ivins.
3. Additionally the spores bore a weak negative electric charge to assist them in remaining airborne. While this is a signature of Soviet technology, where else is it available? None is known in the United States.

There are several other questions, holes in the prosecutions story regarding Bruce Ivins. Sure he had anxiety, he had an extremely stressful job. He also wrote the Senators, Congressman and the Media quite often. He even used a pen name from time to time, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to him.

This brings me to my point. If you were one of the bad guys and wanted to avoid blame, where would you try to point that blame? Toward one of the good guys, of course. And what if you were one of the bad guys and you had spent millions of dollars developing a weaponized version of Anthrax and you knew that one of the good guys (Bruce Ivins) was close to developing a vaccine for it? What better way to ensure the value of your efforts than to scare people into believing that one of the good guys was in fact, a bad guy. Viola! You ensure the value of your weaponized Anthrax by blaming an anthrax scare on one of the few men who can stop you from your final objective.

My guess is this. The FBI was totally blown away by the quality of product found in the Anthrax envelopes and absolutely freaked out. Of course they knew it wasn’t ours, we are way behind the curve on this specific technology. To admit so however is to admit the risk to our empire and that my friends, can be suicidal.