productivity

How to Find 10 Hours per Week to Work on Your Side Business

When I first started working on my side business, I had a full time job as a programmer, I was studying at the university, and I had a girlfriend as well. I know how HARD it can be to actually find the time and energy for your side business.

That’s why I’m SO EXCITED to have a friend and a long time client of mine, Charles Bordet from Become a Top Performer, write a post on my blog about this exact topic.

Charles has made amazing progress over the last few years – he went from being stuck in a PhD, feeling burned out and without energy, to finding tens of hours each week to work on things that were important to him – including his side business.

Charles, take it away!

***

Last year, when I started to work on building a side business, I didn’t realize is was that much work.

As something “on the side”, I thought it would be easy to find 5 to 10 hours every week to occasionally work on it.

But it wasn’t easy. I was working on a PhD, had a part-time job and was involved in several other important projects. Because of this very busy schedule, finding these 5-10 hours was a big challenge without some sort of agenda management software.

I quickly realized that the strategy “Work when I feel like it” working. My business would never be successful this way.

I needed to make a conscious effort to work on it consistently.

My first approach was to take the habit of working on it every day for 1 to 2 hours. When I was back home after work, I took a few minutes to relax, but not more, and sat down before my computer to work. Even when I didn’t feel like it.

At least, this was what it should have been, theoretically. In practice, it was often very different.

I had the time, that wasn’t the problem. Usually, I spent hours watching Netflix or browsing Facebook in the evenings. I could do less of that and get the time I needed to work on my business.

But, some days, the 15-minute break to relax I took transformed into a break that lasted the entire evening. It was hard to force myself to work when I didn’t feel like it, simply because, well, I didn’t feel like it.

My willpower supply was very low because I used it during my work. If I usually watched Netflix, there is a good reason for that. I was exhausted from my work, my body and my mind wanted to rest.

Even watching the videos of the online business course I was taking was hard. After 10 minutes, I felt distracted and started something else at the same time. It was very hard to stay focused.

After a hard day at work, which one is more compelling?

When I was doing research around my business idea, I caught myself endlessly browsing the internet without finding anything relevant. I always ended up visiting websites that were clearly not related to my business.

From there, I felt discouraged, it was already late, so I surrendered and opened Netflix. Hopefully, I would do better the next day.

I tried hard. Some days I was very productive, that was encouraging, but most days were simply a waste of time.

I could have kept going the same thing over and over, hoping that it would get better, or change the way I was working.

Fortunately for me, I chose the second option.

When are you feeling fresh and motivated to work on your side business?

The main problem that prevented me to work in the evening was that my energy and willpower supplies were empty. This made it very hard to stay focused, motivated and to be creative.

So, when do I have a lot of energy? In the morning, of course! After a good night of sleep, and before spending all my resources during my job or academic research.

But I didn’t have time in the morning. If I wanted to have 1 or 2 hours to work on my business, I would have to get up between 5 and 6 am.

That was SO early to me!

When I tried to do it the first time, I didn’t understand what was happening. I just turned off the alarm clock and went back to sleep.

I know that some people are getting up that early every day, because they start work very early, or they have a long commute, but they have no choice. Here, I had to willingly get up at 5 am.

Nobody was forcing me. It was much easier to go back to sleep.

At night, before sleeping, I thought about all the reasons that I had to get up early. They all made sense, it was a rationally good decision.

But in the morning, when I tried to explain that to my half-awaken brain, it didn’t make that much sense. The will of going back to sleep was too strong.

Another problem I had is that if I need to get up at 5 am AND get 8 hours of sleep, then I also need to go to bed at 9 pm. That is very early. Most of us wouldn’t even consider it.

I remember of a time when going to bed before midnight wasn’t even an option. Much have changed since, fortunately.

Do you feel ready to sleep at 9 pm? Well, me neither. I’m the kind of guy who can feel asleep in less than 5 minutes, but it took me a long time when I tried to sleep that early. That wasn’t a good experience at all!

Usually, at this time, I was watching series, playing video games, or chatting with friends on the internet. I was supposed to stop my activity, tell my friends I had to go to sleep, even if I didn’t want to.

Again, it was hard to force myself to do that. Series are too addictive. Most of the time I just forgot to go to sleep.

The problem wasn’t even that I didn’t want to sleep, it was that I forgot it. I didn’t feel tired enough and I was absorbed in the activity I was doing.

Finally, sometimes I get out with my friends and come back late. I told myself I had to be serious and wake up at 5 am the next day.

Sure. Of course you know what happened. I slept in, I felt guilty, and no work was done on my business this day.

Sometimes I succeeded though. I crawled out of my bed, reached my desk, turned my computer on and tried to do what I had to do.

But, what was I supposed to do by the way? My ideas weren’t very clear. I needed time to get this cloud out of my head. I had trouble to get clarity of what needed to get done.

I thought that working in the morning was better because I would be fresher and more energized. Was I wrong?

I wasn’t. But I was doing it all wrong.

It was a real struggle. I thought I wasn’t a night owl because I wasn’t able to work at night. And I thought I wasn’t an early riser either, considering all the difficulties I had.

Fortunately, I figured out how to make it work. It took me time. Not days, not weeks, but months. I tested different approaches, realized some experiences, and created systems to make every morning a success.

What if You Could Work Every Morning For 2 Hours on Your Side Business?

Today, getting up at 5 am every morning and working on my business has become a habit. My neighbor below even came to ask me to walk more softly in the morning. That’s when I knew it was a consistent habit.

I want to share with you how I transformed these past failures into a successful system so that YOU can do it as well. You will have absolutely NO excuse for not working on your side business consistently for at least 5 hours a week, even if you have a family and a full-time job.

My system is very personal and adapted to my own habits and schedule. It won’t necessarily work for you, but I will show you how you can gradually build your own system adapted specifically for you.

Also, my system is not something fixed. It was different last month. It will be different next month. Actually, I am experimenting right now with something a little bit different with what I’ll describe.

Life is constantly changing, so you simply adapt your habits and improve them with time. What’s important is that these changes are small. The hardest part is to have the basic system established. Then, you can tweak it from time to time to improve it.

At first, I took baby steps to get up just a little bit earlier. It was easy, and it worked. On the opposite, when I tried to wake up 2 hours earlier at once, it was hard, and it didn’t work.

If I had tried to directly implement the system that I am going to show you, I would’ve failed miserably. It is too complex and with too many new habits to take. Change happens slowly.

The key is to start really small, very easy, and to improve with time.

For example, don’t try to get up 2 hours earlier like I did at first. Try to get up 15 minutes earlier. It’s easy. 15 minutes aren’t a lot to work on your side business, but that’s a start, and you’re moving in the right direction. Next week, you’ll try 30 minutes, and so on.

Hopefully, my system will inspire you to create your own. Don’t feel that you should do exactly the same things as me and expect the same results. We’re different, and I’ll show you how to create your own system.

How to Guarantee You Will Get 8 Hours of Sleep Every Night

As I told you earlier, I struggled a lot to force myself to consistently go to sleep early.

This changed when I started to have an evening routine. The goal of this routine was to insure that I go to sleep at the right time, without me not wanting to or forgetting about it.

My phone is set up to ring at 6 pm to trigger the evening routine. When this happens, I stop working and I forbid myself to work more. I know that if I keep working, I will certainly mess up my sleep schedule.

This rule is very important to me. It also prevent me from getting burned out when I work too late for too many days in a row. At first I’m excited to work a lot, and after a few days I feel exhausted and need days to recover.

This is the first item of the evening routine. Stop working. I actually reboot my computer, so that I have a fresh new session, without all the tabs or files related to work still open.

The second step is to get up, put my shoes on, and go out for a walk. I’m usually still working at home at this time (I’m not always working by the way, but it is often the case), and since I’m at home, I don’t have a commute.

A lot of people hate their commute. But when you don’t have one, there is nothing that separates work and home. I need this separation, so I created it, by just going for a 20-minute walk.

A relaxed walk in a nice neighborhood

I enjoy walking, this is really good for me. It is relaxing. I let my mind wander. In a way, as I have rebooted my computer, I’m also rebooting my mind.

Once I7m back home, I put my orange glasses on. Ok, this is definitely not for everyone. Only for the weirdos like me, and preferably if you’re living alone.

These glasses are made specifically to block the blue light. The problem with blue light (from computer screens etc.) is that it interferes with your melatonin production, which is the hormone that regulate sleep and wake cycles. I won’t go into very deep details, but basically, it’s good for my sleep. A less weird option is the use of f.lux, but this is much less effective.

Not only is it good for my sleep, but the action of putting these glasses and seeing everything in orange also give more strength to the separation between “work” and “home”, because I literally see things differently.

The last action of my evening routine is to clean up my apartment for 15 minutes. Having a clean place is very important to me because when my apartment is messed up, I feel less good, my mind is cluttered by the mess and I lose my focus when I’m trying to work.

By including cleaning in my evening routine, I make sure this is done every day.

After that, I’m free to enjoy my evening by doing anything I want. Because of the routine, I never forget to go to sleep. This is very powerful.

Again, this is something very personal and that’s constantly changing. Eric Conley has a very different evening routine, and he does it right before sleeping (while I’m doing it at the end of my workday), but the principle and the objective are the same.

Here is a summary of my evening routine:

Reboot my computer.
Go for a walk.
Put orange glasses on.
Clean for 15 minutes.
Do whatever I want until I go to sleep.

How to Virtually Guarantee Every Morning Will Be the Most Productive Time of Your Day, Even If You’re Not a Morning Person

The radio automatically turns on at 5 am and wakes me up. What do I do?

I haven’t really found a way to be very energized every morning. Sometimes I am eager to work, and other times I just want to sleep more.

A few years ago, I couldn’t even consider going to sleep before midnight and always got up late. I clearly didn’t consider myself as a morning person.

Today, it’s very rare that I go to sleep after midnight and I now consider myself as a morning person. But I had no predisposition for that, I struggled to become a morning person.

This is not something that is fixed for life. If you don’t consider yourself like a morning person, it doesn’t mean you will never be. But it takes efforts to change.

The way I found to be consistently productive every morning, whatever my mood is, is to have an exciting morning routine that’s awaiting me.

Every morning, I repeat the same things, in the same order, so that I can expect to get the same results, which is a successful and productive morning.

Actually, pretty much everyone already has a morning routine. We naturally do the same things over and over in the morning. The difference here is that instead of stumbling upon a routine, I created mine. And I made sure it is exciting and leads me to success.

At first, after getting up, I turn the lights on (very important) and go to the toilet to pee. Then I weigh, every morning, because I like to have data. Later in the morning, I will enter the data point into a spreadsheet.

Now comes the first very important item of the routine: breakfast.

Every morning I do the same thing. I brew my coffee in a French press and prepare an omelette with bacon, tomato, cheese, and basil, plus a couple of toasts. I love it!

Who can resist, seriously?

This is a big breakfast high in protein that sustains me for hours! I need this because I get up very early and donÌt want to feel hungry at 9 am.

It takes me 20 to 25 minutes to prepare it though. That’s why, for a few months, I tried to do ham, egg & cheese muffins. I could prepare them days in advance and simply warm them up in 1 minute.

Very simple and can be prepared days in advance!

But after a while, I missed my omelette, so I went back to it.

Then, I check my emails while eating my breakfast. This is the only time of the day I check emails. I’m using BatchedInbox, which is a pretty cool tool that delivers my emails every day at 5 am only. It means that if you send me an email at 6 am, I will receive it the next day at 5 am. I’m not bothered by emails during the day.

After that, bathroom time, where I read for 10 minutes, take a shower, brush my teeth and dress up.

I’m also ready for work, but I now need exciting and powerful activities to put myself in the right mindset. These activities build the momentum that makes every morning a productive morning.

The first activity is to go for a walk. Did I say I love walking? It’s even better in the morning than in the evening. The streets are very calm, the sun is rising, the birds are singing! It’s really cool. This is a very beautiful way to start the day.

Yep, even in Winter, that’s a lot of fun!

When I’m back, I write in a journal about anything that I have in my mind. It can be about my struggles, my genius ideas, my successes, anything that I’d like to write about.

This gives me the opportunity to practice my writing every day, even if it’s only 100 to 200 words. It also tells a lot about what I’m focusing on at that moment.

I can later go back and read what I was writing 3 months earlier, what I was thinking about at that time, what were my preoccupations, etc.

It allows me to take a step back and see the improvements I’ve done. Or, on the opposite, it can also help to see that I haven’t made as much progress as I’d have liked to, even if I felt busy. Realizing this is essential and particularly hard to do when we’re busy all day long.

Finally, last but not least, I write my goals. It helps me to increase my focus and gives me the inspiration to kickstart the day.

I’m now ready to work and have roughly two hours for my side business before I need to go to work.

This routine ensures that I’m fully energized and inspired to work on my side business every morning, whether I was initially feeling tired or already excited. Quick summary:

Get up.
Toilet + Weigh.
Prepare breakfast.
Eat breakfast + Manage emails.
Toilet + Reading. Shower. Brush teeth.
Walk outside.
Journal.
Write goals.
Ready to work

It might sounds a lot. And that’s actually a lot. It takes me almost 1h30 to do all of this. It wasn’t like that the first time I tried to implement a morning routine. And If I had tried, I would’ve failed, simply because this is a too big change.

Instead, I recommend starting very easy. Consider what you’re already doing as a starting point, and from there make small adjustments from time to time.

For instance, if you want to try meditation, add a 5-minute meditation in the morning. That’s really easy to do.

Then, you may realize you don’t enjoy meditation that much (I tried meditation for 2 months before stopping for this exact reason, and replacing it with walking), then stop doing it. It’s as simple as that.

After a while, you will have a much better morning routine that you love doing every day.

Step-by-Step Guide to Get Started

Do you feel overwhelmed? That’s normal. I just described the system that I built in months. I don’t expect (nor recommend) you to do the same things tomorrow. First because it will very probably lead you to failure, and also because this is not adapted to you.

Instead, I prepared a step-by-step guide so that you have NO excuse to get started.

Step 1: Where are you right now?

Assess your current situation by answering to these questions:

When are you usually going to sleep?
When are you usually getting up in the morning?
How much time do you need to be ready in the morning?
How many hours do you need to sleep?

Example: I’m usually going to sleep around 11 pm, getting up at 7 am and takes 30 minutes to get prepared. I think I need 8 hours of sleep.

Step 2: Where do you want to be?

Describe what would be the ideal morning so that you have time to work on your side business:

When do you need to go to sleep?
When do you need to get up in the morning?
How much time do you want to work on your side business?

Example: I want to go to sleep at 10 pm, so that I get up at 6 am and have 1 hour to work on my side business.

Step 3: Create a very basic system.

The morning routine is that as important as the evening routine. I noticed that usually, people struggle to consistently go to sleep earlier. That’s why I recommend you keep doing the same thing as usual in the morning.

Instead, create a basic evening routine that contains the following items:

The time when your alarm will ring to trigger the evening routine.
A relaxing activity that you enjoy doing.

Example: Since I want to go to sleep at 10 pm, I will set up my alarm at 9 pm. My relaxing activity is taking a warm bath with a very good book.

Tip: If your computer is a distraction that prevents you to go to sleep, schedule it to automatically shutdown at a certain hour.

Step 4: Improve your system gradually.

Stick to the basic system for a while to get used to it. Naturally, you will want to improve it by trying different activities, different timings, and so on.

If you’re happy with it the way it is, don’t force anything. It means it’s working, so keep doing it and don’t break it.

But if you’re like me, you will want to make a lot of changes very often, because you like experimenting and testing. Be careful with that because it’s easy to break the system when you do too many changes at once. Restrain yourself to one change at a time.

What if I can’t get up in the morning?

When I first tried to get up very early in the morning, it didn’t work at all. That’s why I want to add this extra section with a few tips that will help you to NOT fall back asleep after waking up.

Have a gradual approach

Try to get up 15 minutes earlier the first week. It will be much easier.

Then, the week after, do 30 minutes earlier, and so on.

That’s how I did it the first time I wanted to get up very early. Yes, it took me a month to get up one hour earlier. So what? I succeed. Long term changes aren’t made in one day.

Make it harder to fall back asleep

Put your alarm clock far from your bed, so that you have to get up to turn it off.

Some alarm clock propose you to solve a small problem, walk a few steps, or do an addition, before it turns off. Give it a try if you struggle a lot.

What If You Want More Than 10 Hours Per Week?

Getting 2 hours to work on your side business every morning is really good. It means 10 hours per week if you’re doing it consistently every weekday.

But what if you want more? More time for your side business. More free time every day.

Because even during the day I had a lot of work to do, between with PhD, my part-time job and my other academic projects, I developed systems that helped me save more than 4 hours every day!

I used these hours to get progress faster on my projects, but also to have more free time and spend it hanging out with my friends.

I share these systems in my ebook Get An Extra Hour Every Day. It will help you to save at least one hour a day, but probably more, like it had for me. With just one extra hour, you can:

Go out with your partner, forget about business, and don’t worry about ANYTHING.
Send extra pitches to the websites you want to contribute on but never find the time to.
Make progress quicker on your business and increase your income.

If you liked this article, you’ll love my ebook Get An Extra Hour Every Day!

How to double the value of your time

By Primoz Bozic 5 Comments

A couple of months ago, I was on a call with one of my mentors, Naveen Dittakavi. Naveen is one of the most productive people I’ve ever met – he has a successful software development business, he manages a community of over 1700 people, and constantly works on developing new skills and new projects. All of that while still finding time for his family and friends!

I first met Naveen in Munich last year. Here he is with his fiancée on the right.
As I was very impressed with how much he manages to constantly improve despite all of that work, I asked him to share his strategy with me.

Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: “So Naveen, you’re working on so many things that it must be insanely draining… How do you manage to find the willpower and energy to keep improving your business and learn new skills like copywriting?”.

Naveen: “It’s actually not that complicated. Of course I have a ton of client work, but I don’t want to spend my most productive hours on that when I can spend them on doing things that will make the biggest difference for me in the long run.”

Me: “What do you mean by your most productive hours?”

Naveen: “Well, through testing I have found out that I am the most productive and focused between 7 and 9 am. It’s probably related to the fact that I wake up well rested, which means that I have a lot of energy and willpower at that time.

This means that if I want to get something, it’s way more likely that I will actually get it done than if I planned to do it in the evening when I’m drained. In that case, I would probably just keep procrastinating it on and on. I also make a point of making these hours non-negotiable.

From 7am to 9am each morning, I’m only working on my projects and growing my business, and never on client work. This ensures that I constantly grow both myself and my business.”

Me: “That’s very interesting. But how do you know what’s worth doing at that time? How do you determine what’s important enough?”

Naveen: “What I like to do is focus on outcomes. Think of it as compound interest – I invest time into activities that will grow exponentially and not lineary in the long run. For example, if I spend 10 hours building a system or a product that allows me to earn $100/month in recurring revenue per client, and I don’t need to put much extra effort in it after the initial 20 hours, this can earn me $1,200 a year per client.

But it’s more than that. I can then offer this to every new client that I work with without any additional work on my side, so in the long run, as my business grows, my hourly rate for those 10 hours of work will be insanely high.

If I would spend those hours simply doing consulting, I could perhaps earn a couple of hundred $ per hour, but that’s where it ends. I would make more money in the short run, but in the long run it’s not even close. I feel like that’s an issue that a lot of entrepreneurs have – they focus on getting results fast instead of building systems that will keep getting them results as the time goes by.”

To sum this conversation up in one sentence, Naveen uses his most productive hours on developing systems that will keep bringing in the benefits for years to come.

As Naveen explained this to me, it struck me – I’ve been using my most productive hours the wrong way, which is why I didn’t see as much progress as I wanted to.

Let me explain. Every day, I used to wake up between 10am and 11am. I would then shower, eat breakfast, read a book and go over the list of the 3 things I wanted to get done the day. I would play a couple of games on Lumosity while listening to calming music. Once I was done, I was in the zone and ready to do the work.

So I started doing the work. More specifically, I would usually have 2-3 hours of coaching between 12pm-4pm with my clients, with some breaks to do in-between. At 4pm, I would go to lunch, and after that I would work on the 3 important things that I wanted to get done for the day.

This was actually going ok for a while, and I felt like I was progressing well. However, with time I saw a pattern occurring. More often than not, I would procrastinate tasks that required a lot of focus. Answering e-mails, working on my blog, talking to people and reading books went fine. However, creating systems didn’t go so well. After 6 hours of work, I just didn’t have the creative power and focus that I needed any more and I would often procrastinate these creative tasks and keep moving them to the next day.

After talking to Naveen, I redesigned my days. I made sure that I had two hours free every morning before my first client session. Since then, I use these two hours mostly for learning new skills like storytelling, writing, as well as revising and building new productivity and business systems. Needless to say, my top 3 things for the day are now getting done way more often, and since I have a ton of energy, willpower and focus while working on them, they get done way faster.

This doesn’t work just for me and Naveen though. Last year, when I attended a conference from Ramit Sethi in NYC, I asked him to tell me about what his usual day looks like. He explained that it varies a lot, but that every morning he goes to the coffee shop for a couple of hours to just write his blog posts and e-mails.

Ramit wasn’t very thrilled that I was wearing a similar outfit to his…
The awesome thing about this strategy is that you can use it in various ways – to save time, to earn more money or to acquire a new skill faster.

If you want to save time, you can use your most productive hours to build productivity systems for yourself (more on those in the future posts). If you invest 10 hours into building a system that saves you just 30 minutes each working day like the one that Derek Halpern built to answer 3x as many e-mails in half the time, this can save you 130 hours in a year.

If you want too earn more money, you can use the time to develop products or recurring services like Naveen did, or you can spend the time on improving your business model and strategy.

If you want to acquire a new skill faster, you can use these hours to learn and improve through reading and thinking about what you’ve read. Your reading speed and comprehension are largely dependent on how focused you are, so if you want to learn something rapidly, it makes sense to actually do it when you are the most focused and not when you are tired and almost sleeping, like this:

Feeling Tired

If this is what you look like while learning, you’re probably not learning a whole lot.
With this strategy, it’s very easy to double the value of your most productive time. In fact, usually you can even 3x it, 5x or even 10x it by building systems that will earn you more money or save you time in the future.

Now imagine what it would be like if you actually did this. If you actually spent your most productive time on the high leverage activities, you might very well be making more progress in your business and life than you are right now, even if you didn’t do anything else for the whole day.

Imagine finishing up the two hours of work and creating a nice system that will save you hours of stress and frustration when dealing with e-mails. Imagine finishing a product that will bring you extra $500/month, even while you’re on a vacation. Imagine learning a new skill every 2 weeks. How would that make you feel?

In order to start using this strategy in your own life and reach your own goals faster, you can use the 3 step framework below:

Step #1 – Find out the high leverage activities that will give you the best outcomes

You can do this by asking yourself a couple of questions:

Where do I want to be in a year?
What do I need to do in order to get there?
Which of the things that I need to do will have exponential outcomes, like compound interest?

Here, you really want to be focusing on the activities that you do once and get the benefits from them for months or years. Make a list of at least 3 such activities and use it to determine what you want to be working on during your most productive time.

Step #2 – Identify your most productive time of the day

One of the easiest ways to do this is to track your time (write down everything you do in a day together with times/duration). Here’s an example of my time tracking:

You don’t need to make it as colorful and specific, you can simply do this in a word document or even on a piece of paper. If you want to be really sure when you are the most focused, you can also add a grade for focus/energy level on a scale of 1 to 5.

As a rule of thumb, you will most likely have the most energy after you wake up in the morning and go through your morning routine, before you do any work. If you are an evening person, try to identify at which time you usually start being productive in the evening and if there is something going on before that (maybe you come back from the gym or something similar). This will allow you to plan your productive time accordingly.

Step #3 – Make your most productive hours a non-negotiable

This is the key step. Your most productive time should be reserved for the activities that you identified in step #1, without exceptions. I like to make sure that I actually stick to this by putting my non-negotiable activities on my calendar – this way I can’t schedule a client meeting at that time. Below is an example from my calendar:

You might notice that I have time off for lunch and recovery scheduled on my calendar. Yes, that’s a non-negotiable for me as well.

If you often struggle with actually getting stuff done, you can also check out my FREE 5-Day Success Bootcamp where I will show you specific systems that you can use to take massive action, including a system that my friend Blaz used to go from being an unemployed student to earning more than $10,000/month as a freelance designer in less than 5 months.

That’s it! Now you have all that you need in order to skyrocket your progress in both life and business. You can get started right away by doing the action steps above, or you can navigate to another blog post, consume more information and never take action – the choice is yours.

If you liked this article and you have a friend who might benefit from it, why don’t you send it over to them? Your friend will thank you for solving their problem and I’ll thank you as well for spreading the love.

And don’t forget to join the Bootcamp.
-Primoz

How to crush your goals in 2014

By Primoz Bozic 3 Comments

The year is coming to an end. You’re browsing through your computer and find a document called “yearly goals”. You open it and think to yourself… “Damn, I totally forgot about my goals again. Why does this happen to me all the time?”. And then, feeling a bit frustrated, you draft the goals up for the next year. This time will be different. But as the year goes on, the document gets lost on your computer and you slowly forget about your goals.

I know how you feel, it has happened to me many times before. I would set a ton of goals, whether they are yearly, monthly, weekly… Only to give up on them when things got a bit tougher, or to simply forget about them.

A year ago I was sitting down and planning my goals for 2013. 2012 was a great year from me, and it was hard for me to expect to repeat the results in 2013. But I did it. And I crushed some of the goals in ways that I didn’t dare to imagine beforehand.

But how do you do that? How do you make sure that the goals that you set for 2014 won’t be just another new year’s resolution that you forget about by Jan 7th?

Today I will share with you some strategies that I used which worked very well for me in 2013.

Setting Yearly Goals, Not New Year’s Resolutions

First of all, why the hell are we setting goals NOW and not on the 1st of January? Well, because around that time, it’s so easy to get lost within all the other BS new year’s resolutions and “trying harder”. Another reason is that if you want to be up and running in 2014, you’ll need to make some preparations first.

The key with setting yearly goals is to make them big, exciting and even unrealistic? Why? Because if the goal is big and exciting, it’s much more likely that you will reach it, even if it is slightly unrealistic. On the other hand, if the goal doesn’t excite you, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s realistic or not, as you won’t reach it anyway.

Another thing that people often forget to do is set up a system to actually review these goals frequently and evaluate your progress towards them. I mean, how many times have you set goals in the past only to forget about them after 2 days and focus on something else?

This system doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as simple as setting up a monthly calendar reminder in Google Calendar every 1st Monday of the month.

Now let’s put this into action – you can do this NOW, in 5 easy steps.

ACTION STEPS:

Write down 10 BIG things that would really excite you in 2014
Select the top 3 of those things that are the MOST EXCITING and make them your yearly goals
Set up a Google Calendar event on the first Monday of 2014, at whatever time works for you (it’s 1pm for me)
Copy the yearly goals in the event description
Set the event to repeat 12 times, on every first Monday of the month.

Thinking DIFFERENTLY And Taking Massive Action

So, how did I actually manage to crush my goals from 2013? Was it simply by using the approaches from 2012 and putting in a lot more hours? Sadly no, it’s not that simple. Just “trying harder” didn’t work.

Instead, I was always on the look-out for new strategies that I could experiment with, and whenever I learned something new I would instantly implement it. Don’t believe me? Look at one of the comments on a mastermind group that I’m in – it’s from my friend Jarrett who I met last week in San Francisco:

Everyone can consume information and take advice. But few are the people who actually implement it. It turns out that those are the people that usually excel above the mediocre masses.

And I want YOU to be the next person who snaps out of the reading mode and takes immediate action. If you haven’t done the action steps above yet, do them now. They will only take you a couple of minutes. If you don’t want to do them, or think you will “do them later”, the truth is that you most likely won’t. Later, you will find another e-mail to read and you will forget about this post. And then, you will again see no progress at all.

Once you’re done with those action steps, let’s move on to the new ones (yes, I’ll get you to do a lot of work today. But you want to improve, don’t you?)

ACTION STEPS:

Identify ONE thing that you wanted to do recently but just never got around to doing it. It can be a new exercise plan. A productivity technique. Or setting up a party for your friends.
Take 1 minute to break down this thing into smaller, actionable steps. What do you need to do to get going?
Take a small, quick step towards finishing that thing NOW. You want to host a party? Call your friend if he wants to co-host it. Want to start doing a new exercise plan? Print it out.

The cool thing about taking action is that it gives you momentum. Even taking small steps can translate into soon taking bigger and bigger steps, which eventually lead to massive changes in your life.

There is also a big mistake that many people make when it comes to taking action. Many people say to themselves that “this won’t work for them” in advance. So they don’t even try to implement something new. Or, they try but give up after a few minutes when they don’t see the results immediately.

In order to overcome this issue, you need to shift your thought process from “I’m not sure if I can do this” or “I’m not sure if this will work for me” to “I’ll try it out and to my best to MAKE it work for me”.

Something that worked for someone else might not work for you immediately, but with a few adjustments you can quite easily implement almost any system in your life.

Don’t Do Everything On Your Own

The third thing that made probably the biggest difference for me was connecting with other like-minded people. I joined some mastermind groups of people who were working on the same goals as I was. I’ve found myself new mentors and advisers. And I’ll show you how you can do this as well in a minute.

There were two main benefits from connecting with like-minded people – I would constantly get new inspirations and ideas for my projects from them, as well as a different point of view that would often solve my issues when I was stuck.

When you are reaching out to others, you should focus on reaching out to people who are at least a level above you in a certain skill, whether it’s working at a job, entrepreneurship, nutrition, exercising or productivity. I personally prefer to find people who are the best at what they do, but I know that this might be a bit hard to do at first.

One thing that you need to understand about reaching out to other people is that it’s not about you getting something from them. Of course this might eventually happen, but often you won’t get anything in return immediately. So instead of focusing what you can get from people, think about what you can give to them.

Luckily for you, one of the biggest value adds is in something that pretty much everybody is capable of doing – in implementing advice and thanking people for it. This is because so few people do this. I give out advice to many people, and the majority never implement it. Some implement it but don’t let me know about it. The people who implement it and do let me know about it are the ones that I will always happily help in case they get stuck because I know that they won’t waste my time by not implementing the new advice that I give them.

Let me give you a script that you can use right now to reach out to others. They can be busy people who are very successful, or people who are working on the same goals as you are. You need to be a bit careful with asking for help if you are talking to a super busy person like a very well known entrepreneur, but if you’re just talking to someone who has similar goals to you, you can generally ask for more, at least a short Skype call or a coffee. What the hell, I’ll make your life easier and just give you scripts for both.

SCRIPT – REACHING OUT TO A BUSY PERSON

Hi [NAME],

My name is Primoz and I’m a productivity coach for entrepreneurs. I’ve followed your last couple of blog posts closely and implemented the concepts from them. The concept that I really liked and that made the biggest difference for me was X – I was very lost in those situations before, but since I’ve implemented your advice, I managed to achieve X, Y, Z.

Thank you so much for writing those blog posts, they made my life a ton easier!

I have a couple of questions on topic X – would you mind if I sent them your way to get some feedback on them?

Thanks,

-Primoz

Notice how I didn’t ask for anything committing in return yet. You’re dealing with a busy person here and their time is very valuable. So instead of sending them 10 questions right away, ask them if they would be willing to help out. If they say yes, you can send them the questions and I can pretty much guarantee you that you’ll get a good answer back.

The next step after you get the reply is pretty simple – implement the hell out of the advice and let the person know about how it went. Do this for a while and you’ll pretty soon develop a good relationship, in fact you might even get a mentor out of it.

Let’s move on to the next script.

SCRIPT – REACHING OUT TO SOMEONE WITH SIMILAR GOALS AS YOU HAVE

Hi [NAME],

My name is Primoz and I’m a productivity coach for entrepreneurs. I’ve followed your blog for a while and I really liked the posts on X, Y, Z. I actually implemented concept A from post X and got these results, so that really worked well for me!

Since you seem to be really good at A, would it be possible for us to set up a short 15 or 30 minute Skype call where I could ask you a couple of questions on this subject?

If you’re up for it, my Skype username is: *******, and I’m free at the following times:

Tomorrow (Saturday) at 4pm-8pm CET (use their timezone if you know it)
Sunday and Monday all day
Tomorrow at 5pm would work best for me.

Are you in?

-Primoz

Notice how I used a specific time and made it super easy for the other person to accept this invitation? And honestly, if you were in their place and someone sent you an e-mail like this, would you ever decline it? I don’t think so.

One thing that you can do (if the call goes well) afterwards to build the relationship is to keep scheduling Skype calls. I usually talk with my friends on a weekly basis and after we finish a call we immediately schedule another one (I use Google Calendar for this).

To get the most out of relationships like this, make sure that you are constantly adding value to the other person by actually implementing the advice that they give you, just like you did in the coach scenario.

Now that you have the scripts, it’s time to put them to some use.

ACTION STEPS:

Brainstorm 3 people that you really admire and want to reach out to
Send them the e-mails using the scripts above

And you’re done with action steps for today! How does that make you feel? If you actually completed all of them, pat yourself on the shoulder because you deserved it.

Today we’ve covered what you need to do to make sure that you crush your goals this year. If you want to build momentum and start working on your goals as soon as possible, check out my FREE 5-Day Success Bootcamp. In the Bootcamp, I share specific systems that will help you turn your dreams into a reality, including a framework that my friend Paula used to go from an idea to taking action and creating a yoga workshop.

Join the Bootcamp!

-Primoz