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December 12, 2013 By Andy Traub

When Setting Goals Never Make This First or Last

Goals are scary, powerful and necessary but before you set them remember what happens when you make money your first or last goal. The results are eerily similar.
Money Calendar
[gss-content-box]If this post was helpful you can get them all via email by clicking here.[/gss-content-box]
[one-half first]

When Making Money is Your First Goal

Bad Clients
We work with anyone even if that person is annoying, impatient, unprofessional, dishonest or lazy.

Bad Service
We under deliver on our service because the profit is the goal, not the product.

Unequal Treatment
We treat our projects and customers differently based on how much profit we are making.

Poor Work
Our work ethic will be inconsistent.

Never enough
We will feel like we never have enough money even if we really do.

Poor Partnerships
We are less likely to partner with capable people because capable people don’t work for cheap.

Money Complicates Things
We will talk about money too early in the relationship which is more likely to hurt the chances of landing the deal.

Poor Work Boundaries
We will have poor work boundaries because we are always pursuing more profit.
[end-column]
[one-half]

When Making Money is Your Last Goal

Bad Clients
We work with anyone even if that person is annoying, impatient, unprofessional, dishonest or lazy.

Bad Service
We under deliver on our service because the profits aren’t motivating us to work diligently.

Unequal Treatment
We treat our customers and projects poorly because they aren’t giving us a sense of worth.

Poor Work
Our work ethic will be inconsistent.

Never enough
We will literally never have enough money.

Poor Partnerships
We are less likely to partner with capable people because capable people don’t work for cheap.

Money Complicates Things
We won’t talk about money until we’ve made too many promises then under-deliver because we’re not making enough money.

Poor Work Boundaries
We will have poor work boundaries because we’re always pursuing more profit.
[end-column]

Have you made a financial goal for next year? Did you make the mistake of making money the first or last goal for your business?

[gss-content-box]If this post was helpful you can get them all via email by clicking here.[/gss-content-box]

Filed Under: employment, organizing, Small business, Solopreneur, Uncategorized

May 25, 2011 By Andy Traub

How to start your work day

Crowded desktop

Doomed from the start

You turn it on or wake it up every day. It has replaced your real desk top with a desktop full of icons representing folders, files and shortcuts to programs. I’m like you. I move my mouse and it wakes from its energy saving slumber. It greets me with a picture of my children, a dock leading me to programs I use most and items that I have deemed important enough to remind me of their presence every time I visit my desktop.

Sensory overload

You should not wake yourself to CNN, Fox News or any other sensory heavy blast of information. Why then do we wake ourselves to [Read more…]

Filed Under: advice, organizing, Productivity, Uncategorized Tagged With: 37 signals, andy traub, basecamp, GTD, ommwriter, simplicity, work flow, work productivity

April 12, 2011 By Andy Traub

Creating income because that's how it works

Filed Under: employment, organizing, Productivity, Small business, Social Media, Solopreneur, Uncategorized

January 24, 2011 By Andy Traub

How to make good passwords for true security

What’s your password? You know, the ONE password you use for everything. If you have an answer to that question then you need to keep reading. A recent study by an internet security company (ZoneAlarm) listed the top three user passwords:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789

It gets worse. The fourth most popular password was…password. They go on to offer tips on creating a great password and I think their formula is great.  Here’s the formula I use to come up with my passwords. Please keep in mind that I sign up for a massive amount of on-line services to test them out for my podcasting audience and clients so I needed a system that would allow me to sign up quickly and not store that password.

Name of service or site (4-8 letters) + upper case letter(1) + symbol(1) + lower case letter(1) + number(1) = 8-12 character password

Real life examples
Here’s where it gets simple instead of confusing. Just repeat the last four characters for your other passwords.

Hootsuite = hootT*y9
Gmail = emailT*y9
Mailchimp = mailT*y9

Keep it fresh
Changing your passwords every 3-6 months is a great idea so my suggestion is to keep a list of the services you use this system for but never write your password down anywhere. Do let at least one person know your pass code in case its needed in an emergency situation.

Here is a link to the original info graphic by ZoneAlarm

Filed Under: advice, How I work, organizing, Productivity, Uncategorized

October 20, 2010 By Andy Traub

Consuming content with Instapaper (How I Work Series)

Does anyone else see the irony that reading sites that are supposed to make you productive can have the opposite effect?  For fans of GTD (Getting Things Done) and sites like LifeHacker.com, productivity can be a wonderful pursuit but are usually a phenomenal waste of time. Ironically LifeHacker.com, which is supposed to help me “hack” my life to be more productive, used to distract me endlessely.  Instead of  just spending time on web sites and telling you to follow a Franklin Covey planner (I don’t own one) I’m sharing on how I get things done in my business.  Here’s why I’m sharing my work tips;

Reason #1 – Systems are critical to productivity. Even if you write poetry or paint canvases for a living you still need systems. If artists needs sytems, habits and structure to be productive then the rest of us do too. What’s your system for checking email, corresponding on Twitter, processing new customers or forecasting your cash flow? Yeah, we need systems.

Reason #2 – The more I share about how I work the more accountability I have to keep those systems going. I like to practice what I preach because I like to preach/teach a lot.

How I read articles when I don’t have time to read articles.

– Go to Instapaper.com
– Click on the “Register” button on the top right and get an account
– On the right side of the page under the “Folders” section click on “Add Folder”
– Name your folders by topics that you have interest in. Keep the names short.

Here are my folders;

BetterBiz – Tips on improving productivity, marketing
BlogThisAT.com – Articles that are great sources of blog posts
For client – Articles my consulting clients would benefit from hearing about
Personal – uh, personal stuff
Post it – Articles that I want my Virtual Assistant to Tweet about. I also add comments to these articles once they’re in my Instapaper list. He uses that text and then creates a link to the article using Hootsuite and schedules the tweets to go out throughout the day. More on Hootsuite in future posts.
SMStrategy – More specific articles about my social media strategy
BTWshow – Articles for my Business Tech Weekly podcast

– Click one of your folders
– On the right side of your page you’ll see “Folder tools”. Drag the folder name in that section to your bookmarks toolbar and put it in a folder. Repeat this with all of your folder bookmarklets. When you click on the bookmarklet the page/article will be automatically added to that folder.
– To read your articles:

Four ways to visit your Instapaper.com account.

Email them to your Kindle (see “Extras” button on Instapaper.com for instructions).
Read them on your iPad with the Instapaper App
Download them to your Kindle automatically with Ephemera (mac only)
Download them to your Kindle automatically with Calibre (mac or pc) using this process

Happy reading. Let me know if this helps.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to take action on what you learn. The world needs you to ship.

HERE’S A SIMILAR POST I DID ON INSTAPAPER

Filed Under: advice, Attitude, How I work, ipad, organizing, Permission, Productivity, software, Tech tools, tutorial, Tutorials, Uncategorized

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