SNM146: Using Your Time Effectively

speaker 0: 0:00 using your time effectively on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Convert Kit To find out how Conferred Kid can help you grow your business, save money and increase your relationship with your email list. Head over to serve no master dot com Backslash Convert kit Right now, Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

The last couple of weeks things have been really hectic around here, and a series of complicated events have kind of knocked my podcasts off track a little bit. And I'm kind of rebuilding that and putting things back in order, and I want to take you through. These things have been going on for me and have been adapting to them, and it all comes down to organizing between high and low priority projects.

So before I went to America about the week before I went, America started having problems with my eyes, and they got so bad that for a little while I was afraid that I was going blind. My eyes were hurting all the time. I was struggling to get my work done. All of these things were adding up, and I was getting more and more scared. Over the last few weeks, I've discovered that I can only work so many hours per day before my I started.

I have to stop. So even when I want to work longer, I can't. A couple of things have happened, and I've taken a lot of actions to improve my eyes. I have really special computers. Glasses have special computer monitors that knock away 70% of the blue light. I've got special lights behind the moderates that generate bias lighting whenever working I do. All of these different things have my computer set to a thing called movie mode.

Using a special lighting filter, the turns, the screens almost fully yellow. It makes it really hard for me to add it images anymore because I have no idea what color they're actually going to be. For anyone else who sees everything I see, it's pretty much pure. See, Pia. It feels like I'm looking 18 hundreds photos, but it allows me to work a little bit longer. On most days, I could work about eight hours and then I start to go bad. I have to stop.

What's good about it is it's actually forcing me to live a healthier lifestyle. Whenever my eyes start to act up, I go exercise on the ocean or go for a walk with my wife and kids. I do something. And so it's helped me to control my tendency to overwork my tenants. You were called. Sometimes I just wanna grind, grind, grind, grind, grind and I'll end up working instead of the shift. I plan on working, which is usually 7 a.m. to three PM with one hour lunch.

Sometimes I'll end up working starting at 5 a.m. And I work all the way till 78 or 9 p.m. Not because they have to love what I do. I always thought that I would be someone who has very casual approach to work in life. But it turns out at following my father's footsteps, I worked too much. I live on the beach and I noticed that some days I wouldn't even leave the house.

I won't even go outside for two or three days, but now I leave the house 34 times a day because of my eye. So as much as it's like this limiting burden, it's also kind of made my life a little better. So interesting. Dynamic writes a cloud, but it's over like can't work that much. I start hurting, but it forced me to do things that are better my life. Anyways, I can't use a lot of leisure time to play video games at most.

If I want to relax and play the game, I can play front 30 minutes and then I gotta rest. My eyes get dry. I've gotten a lot of advice from people about ways to improve my eyes, and I've done everything that I can find so far from setting up the lighting, too. Hi distance myself from the monitors, all of these different things. I'm trying to dio and recently someone talking about something that I can take that specifically helps. Your eyes would have eyestrain.

I might check that out next time. All I'm looking for every way to do that. But all of these problems with my eyes lead up to okay, I can work last, which means I need to be even more efficient on top of that. Over the last few weeks, we've had a couple of medical scares with the kids. Put the kayak with my wife inside it. Recently, me and her flipped it, which meant I had to swim all the way back from the waves to home.

It's a great workout. I wasn't really worried because I know how to really take care of her. I'm really good in my kite, but I know she was worried for a little while and she was pretty scared. Some guy that everything was okay. We do all of these things together. And then the day after that, you, after all these things, right, she decides that she thinks she's pregnant, which I think is crazy because she's been on antibiotics for a week.

We went to the doctor before she started taking the medicine. The doctor goes like you're definitely not pregnant. You could take the antibiotic. It's no problem. She finishes taking the antibiotic this week in like a day or two later, she goes. I just took a princess. It's looks positive now where we live. The pregnancy tests are really cheap. We can't get access to the fancy ones you have in America. The ones we have caught here costs less than a dollar.

Discuss, Listen, a condom around here should the pregnancy test, which is like a little fancier, cost more than a condom. But it costs last where we live and I looked at it and it's I can't really tell one color want. There's like the two lines. One line is really dark, and then the lines, like halfway in the middle.

So she goes to her doctor, Doctor, how could I be pregnant when you just told me last week I was, The doctor comes home and tells you what the doctor said. The doctor says, Hey, you're pregnant. Units are taking your prenatal vitamins. It's time to get ready. You're gonna have a baby. You've been pregnant for four weeks, and I said to my wife, Are you sure that sounds? Is that why weren't you Why didn't you know that a week? You if you're pregnant for a month?

And she was Well, she said to me, Oh, you know, I checked everything on your pregnant 50 50 and I said, Wait a minute. In the first version of the story, you didn't mention this 50 50 part shows he had. The doctor said 50% shows. What does that mean? I said, It means maybe it means you're just as likely pregnant is not pregnant. I can point to any woman on earth and go 50 50. She's pregnant like it's just a guess.

The odds are pretty good that anyone who doesn't look pregnant, it's 50 50 pregnant, right? So now we're dealing with that surprise. What do you do when your doctor, after a full exam, checking everything a 50% chance of pregnant? Do we start taking prenatal vitamins? Do we start doing these other things were definitely not using the same doctor that we used for my son.

We definitely wanna have our child in a better hospital, which means we either have to fly to the city where the hospital is. And if we fly and me and my wife go. Me and my wife and my son can travel quite easily because my son is young enough that he flies for free. But we leave our daughter behind. She'll feel left behind. We'll start to bring her. The cost goes up so much, it's actually cheaper for us to take a boat.

We can take a boat where you get a cabin for all four of us for the same price is the three of us ago. So the upgrade we have to decide about that isn't so bad. It's like an eight hour boat ride and you're in a cabin. It's at night. What's weird is we go to the other island. We get on at 7 a.m. 12 hours later at 7 p.m. Is when the boat leaves and it arrives 3 a.m. In the other city.

So it's like the worst times for booking hotels and figuring things out. So it's a little bit of a complex decision of traveling back and forth and figure out what we're gonna do. The good thing is that if we take the boat and we want to buy something, you know, we could bring stuff back with us. It's not a hassle. You could bring lots of stuff on the boat. My friend does it all the time. That's why he prefers the boat.

So all of these things are going in my life. I'm showing you things with you to kind of explain why things have been disjointed. And while this has been happening because my eyes haven't been doing too many podcast episodes as I should because on top of everything else, my son and started waking up at 5 a.m. He used to wake up at six. I would get about five record to podcast ever since before he wakes up. Now he wakes up.

When I d'oh this morning, I woke up at 505 AM I wake up right or five? I don't use an alarm. I don't know why, but I always wake up right around five. Fortunately, the kids something happen in the night, I guess, and my wife and the kids want slept in the other room with the air conditioner works a little better. Our commissioners also been acting weird, so it's a little bit hot.

All these things were going on and watching these things with you to show all my life is so dramatic, More explaining how a bunch of things in my life have a put a new pressure on them out of time I have available. And so I've been load balancing, which is where I'm determined.

What is the most valuable things to Dio at the way I work in the lab taught you to work in a lot of the different projects is, ah, balance between short and long term projects. So short term project, for example, is a project that I'm working out right now. I got hired for Cool Research Project. I've been working and doing copyrighting for some guys in the medical field, and I wrote them a sales letter before.

It took me about two months to do it, and they pay me a lot of money was awesome, baby half up front, half on delivery This time the pay me less money and all I do is the research. I find all the medical research and proof for each part of a sales letter. It's about 10% the work, and I'll be done, probably by Monday.

I'll be in the next couple of days, so it's like a week's worth of work at the post eight weeks worth of work. It's a really great project, you know. It's cool. Is that so short? I get that first payment at the second payment almost the same week. I really like that. That's a short term project and it pays very, very welcome. I'm very, very good at this type of research. That's why they approached me to do it.

It doesn't take a huge amount of band with. I'm not working on eight hours a day either. But I do really, really good jobs and very efficient at this type of work. I know exactly what they need. That's a short term project. You get paid fast, short term projects paid less money than long term project. Long term project will be where did the exact same amount of work, but said Gay paid a flat fee. I go, Hey, just give me a percentage of the profits now.

The danger about that type of work is that sometimes people accept that and make that agreement, then they don't pay you. That's just life. Have several of those things out there right now, and sometimes they pay me. And sometimes they don't have someone who was supposed to pay me a percentage of growth, double their website profit, and I'm still waiting for them to start paying me now. They went through a couple of medical emergencies of their own and in the field.

Let's meet in person what's having me. I think I have a meeting later this week with them to kind of find a life stuff and start the money again. But these things happen. That's the risk. The long term payouts, the slow pays. Those things can take a long time to pay, and sometimes they don't pay off that well. But sometimes they really do.

I've also worked on a project where I wrote a book for someone that one of the first project I worked on and they said I will give you 10% Whatever this is, a percentage will do it yada yada. I didn't make $1 from that project for more than a year then. Since then, I've made a lot of money still make $3200 a week from that every single week to pay off.

It's just a little bit, But if you add it up, it's way more than I would have charged just to write the book flat fee at the time. I probably have done it for $1000 since then. I've made almost 100 times that. So we have to look at these different things. And again, we have projects that were excited about the most. I tend to get really excited about long term projects and less exciting short term projects. We need to look for that ballots.

What you don't want to do is only work on one of only work on the other. If only working on short term products to pay your bills, you're constantly chasing that. You'll never get ahead. So let's say you can generate every month $5000 in short term projects. But that's what you need to keep your business running that you need to keep your family spat in your house.

Taken care of, then you'll never be able to actually get ahead because you won't have money coming in from somewhere else. But let's say you add in just one long term project. You finish a long term project and makes you $100 a month. So now every month you're making $5100 but you'll need 5000 to do it. So you're getting $100 a head every month. But adding your second project $200 a month.

That gives enough breathing room to do a bigger project that brings another $500 a month. So six months you're generating $6000 a month. Even they only need five to keep your family going. And this is where you start to actually notice you have a little breathing room. So then that month you actually work even less. You only make $5000 because you do less short term work. You take on another long term project, and then that is generating $2000 a month from long term work.

This is how we want to start load balancing to get to the point where we're living totally on long term money or passive income, an example of a long term project for me. Another example is the book 20 K Day. I just recently sent out at it earlier view copies to a bunch of people. That book is now in the final movement that's gonna go to the editor in a week or two, and then I'll release. I'm excited about that.

I'm excited to get it out into the world, but that's a long term project. I actually started working on it and October, so more than six months released the book because a couple of things happen. I addicted in the entire book, which led to a bunch of editing problems. Now I have to figure out some changes in my business because dictating a book, what's really good about that is that it doesn't hurt my eyes. So I'm gonna have to do more, more more dictating.

Actually, I'm learning to overcome this particular challenge because it's a medical problem for me. So as we have these limitations, we have to constantly look for. I have these unique medical problems, but I have to learn to adapt and overcome and the way to do that. Looking at this is that the next book I write, the next thing I d'oh, I'll have toe work with the transcriptions.

I may have to hire full time person, too transcribe stuff I work on, which is fine, But that means an additional long term cost, so have to generate enough revenue to cover the cost of that person, whatever that full time salaries. But it's something I'll have to do if my eyes don't get better so I can keep writing books as fast as I do. So all of these different things mean I have to constantly load balance and it's deciding.

Hey, do I upload podcast episode today for me, recording a podcast episodes quite easy. The rest of it takes a little bit of time once they get back, processed myself to write and create the podcast episode around, and it takes about 30 minutes 30 to 45 minutes per episode to make all the graphics make everything cool, make it really nice. And when my eyes are acting up, I simply can't do it. I don't have enough time.

Instead of working on stuff to fill up the war chest to make sure that my staff get paid, make sure my family is OK. Make sure we have the money to cover it. When my daughter has to go the hospital. We have to pay for medical insurance when my wife is 50 50 pregnant So as you're building a business, even as he moves forward, more and more you're gonna have to make these decisions. This is the second phase online business success.

So the first level of success the first aerial you'll deal with is working versus not working. You'll sit down your home and you go. I could work for two hours of my project where I could watch a movie or I could spend some time with my wife, spent some time with my husband. Sometimes kids go out to the bar and have some fun. And so it first, the challenge is working versus not working in the second phase.

What we talked about today is working on good and bad projects. We're working efficiently, choosing the right things. It's easy to get excited about a project, but I always want to do.

And the way to do this is to look at how much money will I make over how much time and constantly look at your ins and outs of your business and say, Well, this generate enough revenue that it shouldn't write priority right now only when I've generate enough revenue to cover my business for the whole next month. Do I? Then look at what I'm gonna do for long term projects. So I make sure all the bills this month paid.

I make sure that all the staff is paid. I don't want to dip into savings ever. I always want to be paying people out of the monthly income. Once all of the month's bills are covered in between What Amazon is paying me in between what I'm making from short term project. Then I can look at okay, what I want to build next. What can I do that's gonna join a long term revenue? That's how we start to assess.

You know, I have some friends that I begin working with a really experts and time management. And of course, I can ever find the time to go through their courses or to master their software. I wish that I could, but we always have this balancing. I'm this interesting dichotomy because I'm not very well organized in the sense that I don't know what I'm gonna do today. I don't have a written out.

I don't have a pre written schedule, but I get lots of stuff done and I always get enough done to cover all the bills to take care of my family, to let us live in paradise and continue to grow. So we have things, need a fix. We have surprise bills. We always have enough money for that. And this is really just real life, isn't it? This is just what it's like to run a family. This is just what it's like to be the breadwinner.

We responsible for things and toe move your family in a new direction. Where to go from working at a job you hate toe building a job you love. All of these things are about making the right decisions. Most of the people I talked too much of the coaching client they work with. The problem is not free time. Their problems. Not that they're hard workers or problems intelligence.

It's usually choosing the right thing to invest their time on choosing the right way to invest your time be challenging. And what I recommend doing is start objectively looking stuff and go okay. Need to do this. And I need to do this and I need to do this before you start working for the day, every day I sit down in a one on one or today. What's the priority now for me? One of the challenges is that I check my email first thing in the morning.

So sometimes my chemo takes five minutes. Earlier this week, one day I woke up. There was no email on my serve. No master account for the first time in almost a year. Hadn't gotten Neiman on the night yesterday. I had almost 20 emails, which means it took me over an hour to reply to everyone. Normally, I wake up between there's only three in 10 every day. So someone day there weren't any. The next day they were double.

I don't always know how long it's gonna take in. Sometimes people send me stuff that I have to check right away. Yesterday there was a tech support complaint. Someone said, I can't access my purchase and I went in. I logged in this her used her lock in and I went to my members. I logged and I went clicked on all the links and access the product that she had purchased. So everything worked fine for me. What that means.

I center of the pictures and logged in as you. I used your news in your past. What? I went through everything. Everything worked perfectly for me. I can't replicate your mistake that I sent a couple of things, you know, like refresh your browser. Try using a different browse on your computer. Try using a different device. May be the problem. Had he connects us on your laptop. I sent us some of that advice, which I hate, sending it to people because it seems kind of trite.

It's like I didn't fix your problem, but maybe I did. So I may have a second tech report email from her. I have to deal with that. So whenever someone sends in something like that, that becomes my number one priority. I always want to fix and tech support. I want every single person e mails me. If you email me today, I'll answer you tomorrow morning. My time always do that. That's my first priority.

And sometimes I can knock my focus off track and have all these short and long term project side projects I'm working on and balancing those with what I want to finish. I just finished the second rewrite of 20 K Day and sent out there early reviews to people. I'm kind of not looking at that until they come back. I'm not gonna look at anything until these 10 or 20 people will read it and give me back their feedback and kind of tweaked it.

Then I'll send it to the editor of the Final Editor and then I'll release it. That's my plan. That took a long time and that will generate some revenue. But then, at the same time, I've just finished recording the videos for the main course of bonuses for course called Kendall Sniper, which is something that I've built to be what people could purchase right behind breaking orbit.

So I kind of built a little two step funnel there around a specific product, and I'm gonna launch it on a different payment processor. It's really gonna be separated from serve no, master, but just finished those videos, and that course is gonna sell for added up to 37 $57 something in that range. So it's gonna sell for far more than 20 k day. That's a long term project. I've been working on that for again.

Almost as long as 20 k day, actually outlining and when I have free time recording it. I recorded the 1st 10 videos, like two months ago, that this week I said, You know what? I'm just gonna quickly record the rest of these recording videos actually easier on my eyes. So I like for these guys, they're slides already done. I like that so I can get done when my eyes are hurting a little bit. So these are the projects. I'm working on it.

I want to give you a feel for what it's like when you're fully working for yourself, that you need to be strategic about how you spend your time. You'll be tempted to work on step. It's fun, or that's exciting. And sometimes you look at something go. Wow, this is who you really fun. But it might not make any money for a long time, but sometimes you just want to get it done, and you kind of have to say, OK, I'll give this an hour day.

They give us two hours a day, and if you're having problems, sometimes you have to push down. Like for me. I love doing the podcast, but because of all the things in my family. Unfortunately, that's the thing that got put to the side first I actually have, even though there's been a gap. If you notice has been a gap, I haven't adjusted podcast episode for about two weeks. I have a bunch of done.

It's not that I have a record of its I can't upload them so kind of dealing with that problem adapting. And because of if I don't fix my eyes, I may have to switch to doing a podcast. Words week. Even though I could easily record enough episodes, it's the writing in the up loading and the preparation part. So there are challenges that I have to face and overcome, and I'm learning how to do that. You're gonna run into your own different sense of challenges.

You're gonna start working on something, and then when your kids needs attention, your kids are older. Maybe one of them is going through some marital troubles. Needs to stay with you for three days. You can't spend the time working right. You gotta be there for all of these challenges are gonna come in and out of your life. It's just the way the world works and that's okay. Great thing about this business.

The great thing about working for yourself, The great thing about a business that's so low overhead like this is that you can do shifts and push down how much things cost. You can control your overhead and say, Okay, you know what? I got taking my kids and when you got next week, off you go work on your side projects. Is most people who work outside projects to in fact, probably all of them D'oh, right? Who work independently just like me.

We will work for me, are all working outside stuff. It's the nature of the beast. It continues, and the people they hire people work for them and then they'll work on the side projects to everyone has their own side stuff to work on. Sometimes that's what you do. Sometimes you pause a couple of your accounts that you're spending money.

Hey, take some time away from this, gonna work on other stuff, so I want you to before you start each day before you started, we'll just organize your plan a little bit. Part of reasons is on my mind. Have a lot of structural and calendar strategies for becoming a fast rider. That's a 20 k day, about all about riding fast and again. If you have a little bit of strategy is the beginning of the week, you could do some great things.

Now here's a simple system that I use to plan what I'm gonna work on each day I look at every one of my projects and I say short term or long term money. So that's two categories short term, long term, Then I rank them based on priority. There's a couple ways that you could do it. Mostly I rank them based on how much money I'll make and how long will take me to finish the project.

So if I would probably pay $1000 in probably $10,000 and I could finish the $1000 project this week or the $10,000 project for the next eight weeks, $2000 project first, because it's short term fast money. Then I'll begin to work more and more in the long term project. So each day I say, Okay, I'm gonna give this many hours to short term this in the hours to long term, and that's how I begin to divide up my day.

It's a more basic strategy, kind of similar to, if you've ever seen when those moves up. Card counting. I think the movie's called 21 or whatever they say Winner, winner, Chicken dinner Not a black guy. I don't know. It's all I know about it, but basic card counting is you basically assigned a value of 10 negative one to group of cards and you're counting up in town or something. And this is the same idea.

You use a more basic system for me, trying to get really complicated with deciding what to work on, starts taking up too much time, and I can spend three hours organizing what I should work on. And I know that's a rabbit hole some people fall into. They spend more time organizing than they do working. And so organizing and prioritising stuff all the time is how you can start to build your rhythm.

You could start to get good at it in the way that I don't seem organized, because how can I explain? Oh, I look at everything and give it a plus one plus two value, you know, and I divide stuff into two categories short term and long term money. And then I just kind of worked my way through it. It sounds like I don't have a strategy because it's so simple. I have a bunch of friends who are masters of time management. They have these amazing courses.

You have this amazing looks to have this amazing software, and it's all wonderful. But for me to invest the time to learn it, even though they say all you get your time back, I just Right now I can't do it because my limitations right now are not from wasting time. They're from family and medical things. So I'm learning to live inside this new gate, and I wanted to share with you a little bit of what's going on in my life.

So you understand what's been happening but also help you to understand how I prioritize it, organized my day. Even today, I kind of have been organizing what I'm gonna work on. And I've just decided to change the short term project to work on because one of the short term project, the person sort of message me over and over and it's done. It's done. This is done and I rise. You know what? I can finish it today and then I can see the person yet done.

It's ready to go and that'll be perfect. So sometimes it's about messaging the person back, or even the person that satisfaction they need to go to the next step. These are the things that we do to begin structuring our days appropriately. These the ways that we can get ahead. There's the ways that we can organize it quickly instead of taking me five hours. It just takes me up five minutes. Once a check on the messages, I go. Okay, that's what I gotta work on.

This one I want to work on. That's really a better way of described my day, isn't it Gotta wanna. I gotta work on the short term stuff to make sure that I keep those clients happy. Keep the money rolling in my family a step ahead.

And I want to work on the long term projects because eventually that means that I can go full passive income again, which means I can just live without doing any work at all. and I want to get to that point it someday. But the truth is I love what I d'oh. I love working. That's why I've been overworking. Not because I have to, but because I love it. I think about how you're gonna plan your days, organize your projects. You don't spend too much time on.

You gotta work on or to a times and what you want to do. But you find the right balance that ensures you hit your numbers quickly and you stay the course so that you can very quickly escape the 9 to 5. And just like me, sir. No, Master, thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe. So you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race.

Hit over to serve. No master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. You've just listened to another amazing episode of the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe, and we're back tomorrow with another amazing episode.