Category Archives for Productivity

How Long Does It Take to Create a Successful Business?

Question: Are you satisfied with the level of success in your business? Subscriber Osman isn’t. He asks: How old were you when you first started seeing success in your online business ventures? I turned 31 this year and the older i get the more depressed and demotivated i feel. The “time’s running out” kinda feeling. […]

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A Day In The Life Of An Online Entrepreneur

The thing that originally attracted me to marketing, email and copywriting was the dream of “passive income.” I loved the idea of creating products and setting up automated email sequences that would increase my income and give me more free time. So how close to that dream is my current daily reality? inquires marketer-turned-software developer […]

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Thinking About Quitting Your Day Job? Do This First

One of my subscribers has a side hustle running a “learn to code” website. And he’s feeling frustrated about making the jump to working for himself. He writes: I struggle a lot with managing time. I work full time as a programmer and the business (iLoveCoding) does not make enough to cover my personal expense. […]

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5 Principles For Beating Analysis Paralysis

Bewildered subscriber Aziz writes: Josh, I am asking you for the last time (for the day) How do you constantly keep on coming up with mini meaningful and actionable advice almost daily? Seriously? I have been drowning in analysis paralysis and you keep on cranking things out. HOW? Unfortunately I am no stranger to Mr. […]

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How Writing Software Helped Me Write Better Prose

Once I had a chance to interview one of the best-known bloggers in the programming niche. Toward the end of the interview, I made a rookie blunder: I asked a question with the main purpose of trying to impress the guy, who at the time I really looked up to. I don’t remember exactly what […]

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2 Rules for Writing 30,000 Words a Month

Seems like once a week I get an email from a subscriber who’s amazed that I can crank out these emails so consistently, day after day. How are you so disciplined, they say. Confession time: Writing consistently has long been a HUGE struggle for me. I’ve wanted to blog consistently since, oh, about 2009. Back […]

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Snarling Grouch’s Morning Writing Routine

Got an email the other week from a reader named Roos who wants to email his list more but finds it a struggle. Roos mused: Dan Kennedy says fatigue makes cowards of us all. I have trouble writing emails in the later time of the day. Especially the ones that should both entertain and sell. […]

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Why “Creativity” Is A Total Myth

Yesterday one of my coaching students told me: “I’m stuck. I’m trying to come up with a lead magnet to grow my list, but I can’t seem to get inside their head and come up with something interesting.” I get stuck here too. Sometimes I’ll sit down to start an email or work on a […]

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Why Every Entrepreneur Needs A Mastermind Group

A couple years back I ran a giveaway that surpassed my wildest expectations — 187,991 new email subscribers in 11 days. Insane. What I don’t talk much about is how I almost pulled the plug on the whole thing. I was totally stressed out. My server crashed. People were trying to hack into WordPress. The […]

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Table flips and karate punches

At my day job (I’m a programmer when I’m not writing sales copy), we talk to other remote team members with an instant message program called HipChat. It includes some fun “emoticons,” including this one: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Can you see it? The little dude flipping the table in rage? Lately I’ve been using that icon […]

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Why I don’t mow my own lawn

As I’m sitting here, writing this, my neighbor’s lawn mower is whining away in the background. Last spring, I probably would have been out there with him. Not this year. Early each Monday morning, usually as I’m working on my latest Sublime Text-related blog post, a pickup truck with a trailer rolls up in front […]

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When I get stuck, here’s how I break through

The little group of Jamaican children kept glancing at me. And pointing. And giggling. I was 17 at the time, and visiting Jamaica as part of a church group on a mission trip. We helped to convert an old warehouse into a church/school building, and it was the pre-teen future pupils who were getting such […]

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How to avoid overwhelm by focusing on habit development

Sometimes I think my brain is trying to kill me. All day, while I’m working, it’s running off in the background, thinking up things to work me to death. It’s especially good at finding little annoyances in life and convincing me that I should “lifehack” them, or find a way to automate or optimize them […]

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21 hours a week

It’s discouraging, having to hold down a day job when you really want to be hacking on that great idea for a web app you’re kicking around, or writing your book, or starting your own business. You look at your lack of progress on one hand, and the huge block of your day that you […]

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Focus on habits rather than projects to avoid distraction

GTD was great for breaking the cycle of disorganization that I’d allowed myself to fall into. But now that I’ve practiced it for a few years, I’m finding another approach to organizing my time is more effective: habits and routines. Putting together a comprehensive system that allowed me to keep track of all of the […]

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Drifting away from GTD

I owe a lot to GTD. Six or seven years ago, I was an ineffective and disorganized worker. I forgot things all the time, missed deadlines regularly, and struggled to keep up with the demands of my job. Reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done and doing my best to implement it turned my life around. […]

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Your focus is finite

So why am I putting in all this effort to write faster, anyway? If I want to be more productive, shouldn’t I just focus on carving out more time to write? After all, I can write just as many words per day just by increasing the amount of time I spend at the keyboard, can’t […]

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Why I’m publishing my ebook 100 words at a time

I’m writing my ebook in the least efficient way possible: Every day, I publish an update of at least 100 words. And you know what? It’s working great. Publishing 100-word chunks throws the “writing process” out the window Writing involves several discrete steps: organization and outlining, research, writing the first draft, editing the final draft, […]

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Zombie time: How habits helped me fight failure and slay the procrastination monster

Every couple of months, it occurs to me that I’d be way more productive if I could just get up earlier and get some writing done on my ebook, weekly newsletter and blog before starting work at my day job. Writing is important to me, so why not tackle it first thing?

I get fired up, set an arbitrary goal (500 words a day sounds achievable!), crank my alarm back to 6:15 and hit the pillow with head abuzz about how I’m going to crush it on my new schedule.

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Five lessons from The 4-Hour Work Week

The negative reviews for Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week scared me off three times. A con man who needs to be taken down. Modern day snake oil. This advice works if you’re already making $40,000 a month, otherwise forget it. When my curiosity finally won out, I was braced for a hyper-ventilating sermon: “Start […]

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Rocking GTD with Trello

Since discovering Getting Things Done four years ago, I’ve tried just about every task management system out there: text files, Remember the Milk, Toodledoo, Evernote, OneNote, Outlook, paper, hipster PDAs. They all have their strengths, but each was missing some key element that left me wanting more. The search is over, though. Trello is about […]

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I took Hanselman’s advice and now look at me…

About a month ago, I watched Scott Hanselman’s awesome productivity talk, It’s not what you read, it’s what you ignore, and it spurred me to take a hard look at my daily Internet usage. As a result I’ve finished several projects that were previously languishing on my to-do list, and I’ve improved my focus. One […]

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