February 7th, 2012 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens and this comes at a time when the famous nineteenth century novelist seems more and more contemporary.

Why am I writing about him when I’m in no way a Dickens expert? Well, like me, he spent most of his life in London and the English county of Kent and, having found out about his charitable nature, he’s turning into a major hero of mine.

Background

Charles Dickens, the son of a Navy pay-office clerk who was to spend time in prison for insolvency, is considered one of the best writers of the 19th century. Whilst his father was in jail, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days pasting labels on bottles.

The experience at an early age, both of his father’s incarceration and the necessity to leave education for menial work, shaped his later life and work.

Dicken’s was entertaining, generous, and liked a drink. His life and work concerned the affairs of the impoverished and disadvantaged. He supported and educated the orphaned children of acquaintances and was involved in a number of philanthropic works.

Generosity

The mid-eighteen hundreds was a period of great turmoil in Europe, characterized by huge technological advances but by an ever increasing gap between rich and poor. In Britain, the people were cold and hungry whilst the country was at the peak of its political and technological power.

Whilst money must have been of primary importance to the young Charles Dickens, he certainly didn’t hoard it once he’d started earning.

In one of his most famous and cinematized works, A Christmas Carol, Dickens warns us against penny pinching and meanness.

Early on in the novel a couple of gentlemen visit Scrooge in his shop asking for “some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time”. Scrooge declines:

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

Scrooge dismisses the gentlemen by saying: “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”

Later that night, as we all know, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts. One of them reveals to Scrooge two shockingly emaciated children by the names of Ignorance and Want. Scrooge asks if the grotesque children have “no refuge, no resource,” and the spirit repeats Scrooge’s unkind words from earlier that day, “Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?”

Scrooge is a lesson to us all. Although he is a good businessman, he is a poor man in terms of spirit, appreciation and kindliness.

People are more important than money.

Perseverance

Writing did not come naturally to Dickens. Unlike other writers, Trollope for instance, he couldn’t rattle off 6,000 words before breakfast. He had to exert himself to master his craft. After a long day’s writing, he would fetch a bucket of cold water, emerse his head in it, dry himself off and start working again.

Successful people work hard.

Changing and adapting

Dickens was eager to give the readers what they wanted. The episodic publication of his books meant that his plots could change in response to lower than normal sales of earlier chapters.

Test your products and tweak them according to what your customers want.

Travelling

As a journalist, Dickens travelled the entire country, which would have been rare at his time. And, as soon as his income from book sales allowed, he travelled to America twice and extensively throughout Europe.

His experiences of different parts of his country and of different cultures in the world broadened his mind and improved his writing.

Travel broadens the mind.

Taking exercise/walking

Scarcely a day would pass without Dickens leaving his desk and walking the streets of London. He could routinely walk 20 miles a day, and once left at 2am to walk from his house in London to his country residence in Kent, 30 miles away.

Walking not only served to inspire Dickens’s great descriptions of nineteenth century London but, more importantly, it gave him respite from his desk and helped to clear his mind so that he could return to his work refreshed. Whilst out and about, he could often be heard muttering or shouting to himself as he grappled with his characters’ dialogues.

Exercise increases productivity.

Modern Technology

To Dickens, the electric telegraph – the world’s first instantaneous means of long-distance communication – was ‘the most wonderful’ of ‘all our modern wonders’. There was obviously something about instantaneous mass communication that interested Dickens and interests us all greatly now.

What would Dickens be doing if he were alive today? He would, of course, have a blog.

Always keep your eyes open to the next advancement in communication technology.

Making money from small purchases

Dickens’s wealth didn’t come from the sale of expensive items; it was instead, as a contemporary put it, the result of “thousands and thousands of individuals, putting down their shillings month after month in exchange for another 32 pages of tightly packed letterpress”.

Selling multiple items of negligible cost is a sound business model.

Money

The effects of his father having to go to debtor’s prison left an indelible mark on the young Charles. He put these words into the mouth of David Copperfield‘s Mr Micawber: “if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched”.

Dickens’s estate on his death was £93,000, comfortably making him a millionaire by today’s standards. And this despite being known for his generosity.

Always spend less than you earn.

Avoiding bubbles

In 1825, in a climate of feverish speculation, a nervous Bank of England refused to lend money cheaply to British banks and companies. 80 banks failed, and almost 500 companies went bankrupt almost overnight.

This Victorian economic crisis is depicted in Nicholas Nickleby, when Mr and Mrs Nickleby speculate with their joint assets of £2,000 and a farm. “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst … four hundred nobodies were ruined”. Mr Nickleby dies soon afterwards.

Avoid speculation and the “something for nothing” economy.

What can Charles Dickens teach you in 2012?

Charles Dickens certainly learned from the mistakes of others, dragged himself and his extended family from poverty and still found extra time and cash to do good deeds and help others.

Whereas with every financial crisis, politicians and bankers seem to have to learn the same lessons over and over again.

But, hopefully, we only have to make mistakes once to learn from them.

What mistakes have you learned from and what principles will you be applying to your life and work in 2012?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I swapped the office cubicle for the spare room two years ago and I’ve never looked back. However, working from home isn’t as simple or as easy as it sounds. It certainly helped that I’d spent two years “easing myself in” – working at home temporarily whilst freelancing at other offices part time.

Exercise

Dog-owners walk their dogs everyday and yet you never hear of people who take themselves out for a walk. If it’s good enough for our pets, it’s good enough for us!

I used to take public transport to work which involved a fair amount of walking – not great physical exercise but physical exercise none the less. After exclusively working from home for a few months I was literally piling on the pounds. Not good!

So, my first advice to home workers is to … get out of your home! Spend 30-60 minutes of the day exercising. You should at least enjoy the benefits of this amazing lifestyle revolution as there will be days where the benefits won’t be so apparent.

Sir Richard Branson (the British entrepreneur, best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 companies) always says that the single most important trick to increasing productivity is exercise.

Getting work

Maybe the most important thing about working from home is to make money. Of course, we can all dream of earning a passive income (like The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss) but this takes time to set up and in the meantime you need to pay the bills.

I would always advocate having a certain amount of income already planned before you give up your 9-5. This is why I found it so useful to do a bit of freelancing for other companies part time while I made the switch to home working. You can always take your personal work to your job with you and work on it during downtime!

The best work comes from personal relationships. The closer these relationships are the better the work. Let me explain. If a top executive at a top company knows you and recommends you to work for a colleague it will be 100 times better and more profitable work than if you get a job from a 3rd party site such as Elance or PeoplePerHour.

So focus on your business relationships. Good clients will get you more good clients. Avoid bad clients like the plague.

How do you get good clients like the top executive at a top company? It’s much better to write about what you do in your blog and get good clients to contact you rather than to look for them.

Outsourcing

“Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest”. Why spend hours on a fiddly bit of JavaScript, PHP or CSS, when someone can do it for you for $5 or $10. I have had incredibly good experiences offshoring some technical work to Asia. Use Elance, oDesk and crowdSPRING. Easy to set up an account and set maximums to ensure you never pay more than a few dollars.

Self-discipline

This is a difficult one because everybody’s different.

Personally, I don’t have an alarm clock – I can usually rely on myself to wake up and start working before 9.30am but I know that is too lax for some people. I know one person who needs to wake up at a certain time and dress into their suit in order to “go” to work at home.

That may be important for them but for me it is more important to avoid distractions at certain periods of the day to concentrate on the most taxing jobs. These are key client tasks (designing, coding or preparing a document for a client) or other work that takes a similar amount of brain power (writing blog posts and newsletters). Similarly, there are times in the day when I’m less able to concentrate, at these times I do less demanding work such as social media, invoicing, accounting and certain email tasks.

So if I had a normal day – which I never do but if I did – it would go something like this:

So, you can see, even though I’m a naturally disorganised and spontaneous person, I have identified and isolated times in the day where I’m at my most productive.

However, I do stray from my self-imposed rules. Another thing I do is to flit between two client jobs. No book on productivity would ever recommend that but it works for me!

Family life

I hardly need to say that the family is the most important thing and the reason why you are doing all this. For this reason it is always necessary to have slack and time in your routine for family time both planned and emergency!

Increased quality time with your loved ones will, like exercise, increase your productivity.

Equipment

Your chosen profession will obviously dictate the sort of equipment you will need to buy in for your home office. So all I will say here is don’t buy anything until there comes a day when you actually need it.

You wouldn’t believe how many home workers say to themselves: “Right, I’m running a business from home, I simply must go out and buy a fax machine!” It may well turn out, once you start working, that you don’t need a fax machine. Wait before making purchases!

Charging

I’m not a fan of charging clients per hour. But in order to get an hourly rate, calculate what you need to make if you were only working for 4 hours a day. In order words, make sure that you charge at least two times more than would like to earn if you’d had a traditional job.

Conclusion

I believe that working from home and pursuing a “DIY Career” provides an incredible opportunity to improve your health, carbon footprint, quality of life and can have a positive effect on the world! After a period of travelling to work and being told what to do I have found staying at home and pursuing my own dreams incredibly empowering.

Here are a couple of books that may help you on your way:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• Getting Things Done by David Allen

Do you work from home either part time or all the time? What problems and solutions do you have? I am really interested in this subject and I would be incredibly grateful for any tips you could give me.

As always, if you enjoyed this article, you could register you thanks by Tweeting, Liking or voting for it using any of the links below.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

“If you are successful at school; you will be successful in life”

I wasn’t a great success at school. Even though I was sent to good schools, in order to get me to work hard, I was told “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life”.

As hard as I tried my exam results were below average and in the other arena for school success – the sports field – my performance was even worse! The mantra I’d been hearing  “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” caused me to come to an uncomfortable conclusion. I consoled myself by thinking that I would be a successful rock star and prove them all wrong.

I soldiered on into the lower end of higher education establishments and eventually found employment working on picture desks of newspapers and magazines.

My dreams of becoming a rock star eventually faded away as my group split and I was left to ponder my future as a London-based wage slave commuting to work on the train with everybody else. Hardly rock and roll!

Eventually, after a few stints teaching English abroad, I became a freelance artworker and occasional graphic designer as I had a basic understanding of Photoshop and QuarkXpress.

Not only did my professional life seem to be going nowhere but also, as most of my friends were getting married and settling down, I was increasingly at a loose end at evenings and weekends with too much time on my hands to think about my lack of success.

I had been an under-achiever at school and it was looking the prediction “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” was coming true in a negative way!

Everything changes

So, I was heading towards a dead end. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I’d carried on in this direction. I don’t think about this too much because, I’m afraid, it wasn’t going to be very pretty.

I can’t say exactly what happened to turn things around but something did. It started with a passing interest in Neuro-Linguistic Programming but then I began reading books about psychology, meditation, Buddhism and other eastern philosophies.

I stopped seeing myself as an individual who was tossed and turned by the events of life and began feeling at one with the universe and more responsible for my thoughts. Somehow the thought processes within my brain that would turn towards negative thoughts suddenly turned to positive ones.

A number of other changes happened to me around this time – I woke up one morning and gave up smoking “cold turkey” without any side effects. I started to exercise more. I further indulged my creative hobbies of photography and music.

The love of my life

After years of being without a stable partner, I finally did the best thing I ever did – I met and married Marina, my wife. And, let me tell you, living with a life long partner is ten times better than being on your own!

With the stability that marriage afforded me I was able to concentrate more on my work. At this point I could earn about $60,000 a year from freelance artworking and designing in London (these were still economically stable times!)

But I was frustrated by working in the design agency environment – the client’s wishes were filtered down by the chinese whispers in the line of command and there was a lack of creativity.

I had always wondered what it would be like to run my own design company.

Company director

But did I have the courage and ability to do it? There were a number of questions weighing heavily on my mind:

• Could I leave the relative security of the in-house freelance design work I was doing? The storm clouds of the current financial crisis were gathering.
• Did I have the self-discipline to be able to work from home on my own? Would I spend all day watching Oprah?
• Did I have the ability do run my own business? The phrase “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” was chipping away at my confidence.
• Did I have the talent to design? I had never been to design school and I was totally self-taught.
• Could I handle clients? I didn’t have much experience of this.

I’d also had a very stupid prejudice, thinking that in order to run my own business I’d have to be selfish and mean. I know now that it is perfectly possible to be a successful business owner whilst keeping my principals of honestly and kindness.

But, as you can see, despite a history of negative vibes about my abilities, I have started and run a successful design and marketing business in these trying times!

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re stupid!

Don’t let anyone make you believe you can’t do something! If my experience has taught me anything at all it would be this: don’t believe everything you’re told by the “experts”. By “experts” I mean teachers, careers advisors or traditional authority figures.

Business requires a certain creativity of thinking which can actually be a disadvantage in the classroom but a positive bonus in later life.

The future is bright

Now I am looking to expand my business by modeling my processes, outsourcing and increasing my passive income. I still have to fight negativity from people criticizing my business model for being too simplistic. But I will continue to learn from my experience and pass on as much as I can to others who wish to embark on a similar journey.

So what do you think?

I really interested in hearing from others who have started a business. Did your journey have any similarities or differences to mine? Or, if you are thinking of starting a business, has this helped in any way?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the bestselling self-help books ever published. Written by Dale Carnegie in 1937, it has sold 15 million copies.

“[Dale Carnegie] changed my life”
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest people and most generous philanthropist of all time.

The book isn’t about how to be popular like a prom king/queen, how to cajole people to do things against their will or about how to play the office game of trampling on certain people to get to the top.

It is more about looking at life from the perspective of other people. But what can a book like this, written over 70 years ago, tell us about internet marketing? The answer is a great deal.

The book has 30 core principles. Here are a few of them and their possible application in the world of web…

Don’t criticize or condemn

If you see someone has made a mistake in a blog or a forum, don’t wade in and lambast the person with annoying words like “fail” and “idiot”. If you really feel they would benefit from the correct information, why not PM them or email them. They don’t want to appear stupid in front of their peers and it won’t benefit you if they do either.

Don’t complain

Don’t complain to clients, don’t complain to co-workers – don’t even complain to yourself under your breath or even in your thoughts! Complaining is negative energy which breeds negativity.

Give honest and sincere appreciation

Isn’t that what I’m always saying about social media and blog commenting? If a blog post you have read is helpful don’t just say “Nice post”. If you sincerely congratulate the blogger for their hard work and explain how it helped you honestly, your appreciation will be gratefully accepted.

Arouse in the other person an eager want

Carnegie talks a lot about seeing things from the other person’s point of view. And allied to this is internet marketing’s holy grail: make people see value in what you have. How do you do that? Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. What could arouse desire to make you click that link?

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

I love to talk about myself. It’s the only subject I’m expert on. This is a great advice for people wanting to get responses from the leaders/heroes/rock stars in their niche. Do you want to get an internet celebrity to write for you? Send them an email with 5 questions about them. It’ll take them 5 minutes to write, they won’t have to do any research and I bet 9 times out of 10 you’ll get a favorable response.

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it

Dale Carnegie used to love an argument. In fact, he had wanted to write a book about how to argue successfully until one day he realized that you can’t.

He realized that he had changed his mind. So have I. I can remember holding convictions in the past that I now believe not to be true. So what makes us change our minds? We do. No one in the history of the world has ever changed their mind as a result of an argument. Period. And, if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll argue with them!

Seriously, arguing is a waste of time. If you lose, you lose. If you win, you lose. The other person will still believe they’re right and will resent you forever.

Read pages and pages of flame wars on a forum. Do they teach you anything? Sure a healthy disagreement within a discussion is natural. But an argument online descends into people accusing each other of saying things they didn’t really say and reaching for dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entries to justify themselves.

Arguing wastes time, saps energy and diverts you from your goals.

Show respect for other people’s opinions, never say, “you’re wrong”

Remember, if two partners agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. Of course, there are going to be differences of opinion and it’s good that there are. But be diplomatic with other people’s opinions. Show them you understand why they hold that differing opinion and then move on.

If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically

We all make mistakes. But sometimes our biggest mistakes are not being brave enough to admit them in time. Someone who admits their mistakes garners respect.

Photo by ShelleyS

Little known fact

Author Dale Carnegie changed the spelling of his last name from “Carnagey” to Carnegie in 1922, at a time when Andrew Carnegie (the hugely wealthy industrialist and philanthropist) was a widely revered and recognized name. Dale Carnegie was able to fill out New York’s iconic Carnegie Hall for lectures. So he lectured in the hall that bears his own name – marketing genius!

What about you?

Have you ever read this hugely influential book? What other advice have you gathered from self-help literature that has helped you in business?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

In a previous post about Tim Ferriss‘s best-seller the 4 Hour WorkWeek, I ranted on about Tim’s fantastic opinions on the 80/20 rule, Parkinson’s law and elimination of unnecessary actions.

I have now finished the book and continued with my entrepreneur self help guide binge with The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. The book has a tag line of: Why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it.

So what have I learnt from these micro-celebrities from the small business self help genre? Is there anything here that can improve my design and marketing business in these trying times?

Both books concentrate quite heavily on removing yourself from your business. The logic behind this is that if you can get others to do your work you are free to do something else or take on more work and therefore expand the business. I have tried to get other people to do what I do with mixed results.

Automation and the 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss promotes the use of virtual assistants from the third world to do administrative or clerical tasks. And even marketing, website development, technical services or buying your wife an anniversary gift. To be honest the prospect of this strikes fear into my heart. And I don’t think my wife would be too happy either!

I have heard horror stories of the language barrier causing tasks to take 2, 3, 4, 5 times longer than they would normally with Indian web development companies. I’ve made connections with many of these companies but I’ve yet to take the plunge.

And is it really as easy for a designer or a marketer to instruct a virtual assistant on how to deal with their clients as a lot of the work is based on relationships and built on inspiration?

Practice makes perfect. So I shall try to outsource more and more this year.

The E-Myth and small business development

Michael E Gerber, on the other hand, paints a great picture of why this automation is so necessary. He describes the personality of a small business owner as being split three ways – into the Entrepreneur, the Technician and the Manager. This was so familiar to me it was kind of scary.

• The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. He thinks up the idea that got us here in the first place and his imagination needs to be nurtured in order to come up with more fantastic opportunities to move us along.
• The Manager is, of course, the pragmatist who is there to plan, to order and to predict.
• And last but not least there’s the Technician. The Technician is how we all started out. The Doer. The “if-you-want-something-doing-properly-you-have-to-do-it-yourself” guy. He’s the one with his head down doing the work. At least that’s what he thinks.

All businesses need a mixture of these three personalities. But in reality we are more like Technicians trying to get on with it whilst being bugged by another “great new idea” from the Entrepreneur and compartmentalized by the Manager who’s trying to establish order.

With these three inside my head all the time it’s a wonder I get any sleep!

But this is the reason, according to Michael E. Gerber, most business fail – because the Technician’s in charge. So automation and outsourcing is vitally important to your business as it frees up the dreamer in you to work on your business rather than in it.

So where do we go from here?

Well, my business has changed beyond all recognition from a few years ago when I started out. Back then I promoted myself as a freelance print designer whereas demand from this site pushed me to offer complete design and web marketing packages.

If I cut down on the time spent on the individual jobs by outsourcing and automation I can view my business more as a product and start tweaking it to make it better and better.

Maybe these books are teaching me to spend less time reading tweets and blog posts about the minutiae of the design business (as rewarding as they are) and more time on the larger picture and the future.

I shall be returning to these points later.

So what about you?

Have you read either of these small business Bibles? Have they or any of the issues discussed here caused you to act differently in your business? Let me know in the comments section of this post. And don’t forget to tweet or link to this post if you enjoyed it.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The book I am reading at the moment is The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I had heard about it from Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress the popular blogging software that powers this site.

I’m only halfway through the book but already I’ve been introduced to some interesting principles and have acted upon them.

Pakinson’s Law

C. Northcote Parkinson was a writer who arrived with this perceptive dictum from his experience in the British Civil Service.

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

This is something that I used to observe while working for design consultancies and advertising agencies in London. People, when given a day to do something, will spend the day doing it even though the task could be completed adequately in a few minutes.

I have often wondered why billions of people trudge into an office every day arriving at 9am and leaving at 5.30pm. Is 7.5 hours the time they need to do their jobs? Not an hour more or less any particular day?

So, yes, people spend countless hours and days indulged in essentially useless activity. I knew that. So tell me something I don’t know, Tim!

The Pareto principle – also known as the 80-20 rule

This principle is something I’d heard of before but maybe hadn’t realised it’s significance, here it is:

For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

Here are a few examples:

• In 1992 United Nations Development Program Report showed that the richest 20% of the world’s population controlled 82.7% of the world’s income.
• Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.
• In business, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.

Is this true for me, I wonder? Certainly, 20% of my clients account for over 50% of my income, but I’m not sure it’s as much as 80%. However, thinking about it, I would say that about 20% of my working day is spent generating 80% of my income as I spend a lot of time doing other things, some of them I would consider important (writing blog posts), some of them not so important (reading the news, Wikipedia, Twittering). This brings me on to another of Timothy Ferriss’s bugbears.

Interrupt interruptions

So, it follows that one should cut down as much of this 80% unproductive time as much as possible to free yourself up to do other things you may find more enjoyable. There are a number of ways to do this.

Ferriss suggests turning off the audible alert for when you receive email (or “brain farts” as he likes to call them, I love that!). I have done this and this has definitely worked for me. I’ve hardly ever received an email that was so urgent that I had to stop everything and concentrate on it. The author actually recommends cutting down emailing to two times daily: the first mid-morning (not first thing, after you’ve completed your important first task of the day); and the second at 4pm before your close of business. I haven’t quite done this but I have grouped my emailing together more.

The author suggests further methods to cut down interruption: don’t answer your mobile if you don’t recognise the number; don’t watch or listen to the news; don’t surf the web; don’t do meetings. I agree with him that meetings are usually a useless activity but then I hardly ever have them myself and as for the other things – I’m trying to cut down my non-productive web surfing but I still always answer my mobile as it could be a great new client!

Looking to the future

Now that you have stopped interruptions and are working more productively you can find time for what Tim Ferriss calls a “muse project” which could be reselling a product on the internet or creating one yourself and selling that.

I have created many e-commerce sites for clients and have been involved in the marketing of products for many years so this is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I haven’t thought of a product yet but I’ve got a few ideas!

What is your experience?

Have you ever read this book and what is your opinion of it? What do you think of interrupting interruptions and working more productively? Will this book make a lot of people rich and happy as a result of it’s advice and procedures? Or will the only person making money as a result of this book be the author?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Before I start of this post I would like to ask you to think of an answer to this question: What one thing could you do that you aren’t doing now that if you did on a regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference to your personal or professional life?

One book I enjoyed reading very much was Stephen Covey‘s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the concepts in this book is about time management and the four quadrants of time.

Quadrant I: Urgent and important matters. Crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects. We all have these things; we’ve all got to do them.

Quadrant II: Non-urgent but important matters. Relationship building, planning, recognising new opportunities, improvements to your workplace, exercise, recreation. Things we know we should do but don’t because they’re not urgent.

Quadrant III: Urgent but not important things like phone calls, email, interruptions, popular matters, some meetings. This is visible stuff on-hand at the moment that isn’t really important. It’s easy to get caught up in this quadrant!

Quadrant IV: The worst of the lot – non-urgent and non-important matters. This includes trivia, spam, time wasters, distractions, non-productive activities.

OK. I bet your answer to the above question was a Quadrant II activity!

For Covey, time management, is all about minimising the Quadrant III and IV activities so that you can concentrate on Quadrant II (Quadrant I just has to be done!). It’s so easy to get caught up with your head down gardening that you don’t look up to realise you’re in the wrong garden!

Think about what it is you really want to achieve. A successful design business? How are you going to achieve that? How can you expand your business without neglecting what you’ve already worked hard to achieve?

I’m also a big believer in meditation to clear your head and realise your goals. I’ve talked about the method on my quitting smoking website. It’ll work for non-smokers as well.

This was written in response to a productivity meme. I was invited by webee‘s productivity post. Who was invited by Paul Enderson. Who was invited by Instigator Blog. Other excellent posts in this meme are Aaron’s 5 tips, Chris’s flow state and Tara’s productivity secrets

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

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