30 Day Productivity Challenge

Philip J. Fry

Philip J. Fry

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Nov 5, 2014
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Hello BuSo.

I've realized that I've wasted a lot of time! No, I wasn't sitting there twiddling my thumbs. I was poorly organized.

So, I just finished the Productivity Blueprint Udemy course and am now ready to get my life handled.

Today is day1.

I wake up at 6:30am, go for a run, and begin work at 8. By 11:30, I'm at lunch. At 12:30, I'm back to work and, at 5pm, I'm done with work! I like to cook so I have 2 hours to try something new for dinner. Follow that by some reading, overflow work, or skating. Then, at 10:30, I'm in bed.

One thing I learned from the course is only do 3 things a day. Make sure their the super important high lifetime value or high dollar value ones!

Today I:
1.) Captured all tasks for the week, chunked them into items, stated my purpose for the items, commited blocks of time for each item, and assigned a time for each item in my calendar for the whole week. This was what I learned from the course. It was for work as well as personal items.
2.) Finished building my legal site.
3.) Sent out an a/b test email to my list.
4.) Sent a high value email to my developer.

Yeah, can't wait for day2!
 
Fucking god. Its 6:34am on Day2 and I'm exhausted. Right after I posted last night, 3 huge things came up. I had to deal with them all the way until I bed and, when I got to bed, I kept on thinking about them. I woke up at 3am to reply to some related emails and went skating to clear my mind but, nope, still couldn't sleep.

Fucking god. Way to start a 30 day challenge.

Day2, here we go!
 
Day2

Man, this morning was a rough start. I was tossing and turning all night. I thought I had to go kill a guy because he scammed me out of $2,300. In addition to that, SuperSecret site failed and I'm out $2,100 there. Oh well.

I got up at 6:30, wrote the above, went for a 2 mile run, and got to work. Sent a "i'm gonna kill you" email to the dude and he replied back within a few minutes. We ended up agreeing on him re-doing a lot of his work for free so that he can live. Good guy.

After that, I was to work on making two yearly business plans as well as monthly budgets and cashflows. I was so exhausted, I couldn't even read. It took me about 30 minutes to read an article becuase I couldn't focus. I had to take a nap around 10am because sitting was too hard.

It ended up taking me until 4pm to finish the business plans, budgets, and financial plan. 4 hours over time and I had to push my link building later into the week but its all good. I now know:

* I have enough money to live for the rest of the year
* how much I need to take in to keep on getting by
* how much I made in the last 2 years
* specific, achievable, and measurable goals for each business, what to aim for

I should have done that in late December!

Now that I have a destination and course, life feels a lot easier!

In the afternoon, I read the documentation to BuzzStream. Gonna test out link building with that. WaFo style shit but, hey, I'm open to sending emails out the next 3 days.

After that, I spend 2 hours researching a target audience, seeing how they are, what they respond to, what they like to +like, how notable members in their community got notable, and a few other things. I'm using this to create a content marketing plan for that audience so I'll be a notable authority within a few months.

I used to be super technical, worrying about numbers and metrics but, now, I realize its a lot safer to have a following of people. That's what marketing is before the Internet came out.

We'll see how it goes. Its 9pm and I have to go to sleep in 90 minutes! haha

@MetaData, thanks for pressing like. It really motivated me to get out of bed, on the treadmill, and back to work this morning.
 
My favorite journals are when people talk about the rough times instead of just the successes. Everyone struggles, so it's helpful to put it out there. Glad my like could help, keep it up, it'll be great to see the changes from day 1 to day 30.
 
Day 3

Its getting a lot better.

I woke up at 6:30 today, without much effort, got on the treadmill, ran a mile, and got to work at 8.

I have a list of ~100 dofollow backlinks from my competitor that I imported into BuzzStream. It took me all the way until lunch and then for about an hour or two after lunch to get through 1/4th of the list.

Wow this takes a long time but, hey, these links are killer links. Ones even a .mil.

Whats surprising is how responsive and happy these webmasters are. It totally made me want to send more emails out. This is a lot better than copy and pasting articles into weebly sites all day and then blasting it with spam. I like BuzzStream all right.

At about 2, I was losing my will and focusing was hard so I decided to take a 1hr walk to get dinner. By 6, I had dinner, talked to my girlfriend, and rested. Back to work.

I had personal reading that I marked in the calendar as well as skating but I had to catch up on some messages and emails. Here's the awesome part:
  • I secured a writer for $ .75/100 words. His writing's good, not great, but good. I offered him ~$125 of work every week for 12 weeks if he goes down from $1/100 words to $ .75. Awesome. I got the $125/week price from the budget I made yesterday. Yeah!
  • I went through all my subscriptions and services and unsubscribed from all of them that I don't use daily or don't help me get to my goal. I went from ~700/month in expenses to ~160. Awesome.
  • I posted a Craig's List ad last night looking for a writer. Wow, this evening, I checked my inbox and got an email from a guy with a bachelors in English who writes science fiction as a hobby. This is the *perfect* guy. I secured him for $15/hour. Sickness.
  • I made myself a goal: If I sell $4,000 worth of products in May, I'll buy myself a Mac Book Air. My budget says I need $2,000 to get by and my financial forecast estimates that I'll sell $2,000 in May but, fuck it, I'm gonna work for $4,000, take the first extra $1,000 and put it back into the business and take the second $1,000 and buy a new laptop! I sold $460 so far.
  • Hmm I can't think of anything else that happened today.
11pm! Uh Oh! its 30m past my bedtime!

@algospider how about this, if it works, I'll write about it. haha.
 
Spoke too soon.

Got to bed last night and my mind kept on going, and going, and going. I think I feel asleep at 12. Then I woke up at 3 and it took me like 20 minutes to sleep again. My mind was still going too. Then, this morning, I woke up at 8:30! WTF! I slept right past my 6:30 alarm!

Its 9:15 now. I just meditated and I'll be meditating every morning and night now, to calm my mind down.

Ok, back to work.
 
Day 4

Ok. I missed my alarm this morning and woke up at 8:30. Point taken, meditate before and after bed.

No time for gym. I ate dinner's leftovers as breakfast... =[

A little before 9, I was back at the table.

From the past 3 days, I realized that, from when I wake up until lunch, I am super on point, focused, motivated, filled with will, and get tons of work done. Around lunch time, my momentum slows down and, at 2, 3, 4, I have no will left. Then, after dinner, my PM energy comes in and I'm churning out work.

So, because of that, my most important to-do item is always placed in the AM section of the day. Tasks that can be done with an IQ of 70 is placed between lunch and dinner. And tasks that are vital but less important, such as replying to emails, are placed at the stretch after dinner.

I've also made lunch 90 minutes and dinner 90 minutes. 1 hour lunch is too short to nap. 1 hour dinner is too short too when you're cooking. 90 is just enough time to eat, digest, lay down, and recharge.

So, this morning, I got through the rest of my buzzstream list (~75 entries). I got a lot more efficient and was sending them out way faster than yesterday. Yeah!

I inventoried all the fuckups that dude whom I threatened to kill did and sent him an email of all the things he needs to fix. He has until the 9th to do it.

I fired all my VAs and hired 1 VA part time. What I realized, from inspecting their work, was that the super low dollar VAs got less meaningful work done than intelligent ones. Like, this one chick spend more time making XLSes that were color coded than the work itself -_-.

VA1 is awesome. She is from central Europe, speaks great English, and is very, very polite and nice. She does her work regularly, on time, and communicates very good.

I was paying her $5.5/hour. After talking to her, she told me she was actually subsidizing my work because she had another contract at $9/hour (which was ending today). I want her to do my work first thing so I offered her $6.5/hour with max 20hrs/week and min 10hrs/week. So, she's guaranteed to take home $65 every week no matter what. I'm also giving her $130 in severance pay if she doesn't like working for me. I also told her that it'll be raised to $7/hour once the sites rank.

She loves it and, from her emails, I can tell she is super motivated.

This is great for me. She does better work than the Yes Sir's who agree to everything you say or ask from them yet always fail. She also now is invested in making sure these links get built!

What's more, I now am obliged to have things for her to do! This forces me to work as well! We're in this together!

What's even more awesome is that, because I fired all the inefficient ones, my weekly VA cost went down from ~300/week to max 130/week. WINNING.

I sent her a list of all my competitor's dofollow forum links for commenting a few minutes ago. Sickness. My competitor has only 200 dofollow links. 100 was done by me through BuzzStream. The other 100 will be taken care of by her. I have an infographic for the site coming in 1-2 weeks. We're gonna promote that to take over our competitor. Match and exceed baby.

The competitor's site was sold on Flippa 2 years ago and the flippa GA stated it got 25,000 UV/month. The current CPC is $5. The new owner placed the ad block in bad locations and the site's very poorly designed. My site's gonna get higher ad click than his. $$$$.

Usually, my girlfriend comes over for the weekends and I spend all weekend with her, no work, but she has a work function to be at on Saturday morning so she might (or night not) come over Saturday evening. If no, she won't be coming over at all so I'm free to work all weekend.

This week, my goals were:
* Make business plan, budget, and forecast. DONE.
* Complete productivity course. DONE.
* Send e-mail blast out. DONE.
* Promote $5CPC site. Halfway done.

Of course, there were non-work goals like read, go skating, and cook new dishes but those are luxuries right now. I would like to read in the evening though, gotta figure that in.

Hmm... what else happened today. The lunch time nap was killer. Allowed me to be productive during that lunch to dinner stretch. My post-dinner stretch was just chilling today, skated, watched some YT videos, and chilled. What I'm doing first thing tomorrow is planning Friday, Saturday, and Sunday's agenda to make sure I have stuff to do. I got done with today and tomorrow's activities (buzzstream) faster than I thought.

Thanks for the support BuSo!
 
Great to see you're fine tuning your time. Huge rewards will be reaped if you stick to eating the frog each morning and forcing yourself to get the important stuff done. As far as the IQ 70 part of your day.. this happens to me, too, especially if I don't take breaks every so often. When you work from, say, 9 to lunch, are you taking even 5 minutes per hour to step outside and stop thinking about work for a minute? You'd be surprised how an hourly 5 minute break will increase your production later in the day.
 
Day 5

Whoo! Friday!

My girlfriend is coming over tomorrow. haha, if she can't get out of this "mandatory fun" at work, she's just gonna make something up.

So this is what happened today:
  • I sat down and started planning the year's milestones based upon the forecast... then I realized I had no idea what I was doing.
  • I then went and did a project management course. It was designed for construction but, hey, it is 100% applicable to building sites.
  • Had Lunch (No after lunch slag today! Yeah!)
  • Went and implemented what I learned to my first site, it took awhile to work out who does what, who'll be waiting on who, what's required to get everyone prepared and read to work, and the timing but it was well worth it! I have post it notes, one color for each person, for tasks that need to be done. Awesome
  • I receive an email from $2,300 contractor. He says redoing those work is too boring and that my work is stupid. He then asks how much I'm gonna pay him to have him redo the work. Yup, he's dead. I went and called oDesk. Its been about a month since I sent payment and they've closed the review window. They need the email transacript to re-open review. It was a 1 hr phone call and at the end of the call my laptop crashed. FUCK. I was so frustrated. I sat down and made a list of all the annoyances with running Ubuntu Linux and this laptop. Stuff were: browsers crash for no reason, lose all tabs; no sound since Wine conflicts with OS's sound settings; only 2 USB ports since one broke off; overheating issue was fixed with a new fan 2 months ago ($200) but it gets hot as a stove during video playback; not all web apps work with Linux; oh man, by the time I finished the list, it was about 15 things and I realized that my reason for using Linux as a desktop came from when I was 15 -- I just wanted to hack around with a computer since my parents wouldn't let me have the Internet. Terrible idea now as it gets in the way of business. Like, why should I spend time debugging programs that take up 99% CPU resources when I need to do a spreadsheet? WHY!?
  • So, I sat down and reworked my budget. Yup, I can spend $1,500 for a MacBook Pro 13' and be totally OK for the year. So I just ordered one. Funny thing, google docs made my laptop hang when I was figuring out the budget -_- Another funny thing X11 restarted a little after that. Yeah, It was a fun 11 years Linux but I'm switching to Mac. You can be my Server OS though. haha. The MBP will be here Wednesday.
  • I finished up the 2nd site's planning, 1/2 way done. When all the requirements are mapped out,It'l be placed into a timeline so I can maximize resources. The way I figure it, if I have 10 competitors in 10 different niches and they all rank higher than me, I'll still win in the end if I manage to compete in all 10 niches with good management while they can only compete in 3.
9pm! 90 minutes until bed.Gonna finish up this last site, journal, meditate, shower, and hit the sack.

Good night Buso!

@emp Czech Republic

Oh, I forgot to mention. I'm just gonna suck it up, learn my lesson from working with this contractor and move on. He's too immature to work with and only wants money. Why didn't I see this coming earlier? I have a credit card dispute against oDesk so we'll see how it turns out. If it goes against me, I'm just gonna call it a lost. I'll have to spend a about 10-20 hours re-doing his work. If it goes for me, hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha his work's basically 40% off!
 
Day 6 and 7

After I posted that, I decided to sit down, take a drink, and watch a movie.

Saturday, I woke up at 8:30 and tried to do what I planned and, after about an hour, I realized I have no motivation. Fuck that, its the weekend. I'm NOT working on the weekend.

I decided to watch some training videos on Wrike as well as watch some MegaStructures documentaries.

That was actually really helpful. How they build incredible skyscrapers is a great model for how to build and manage several sites.

Some of the things I learned were:
  • Start with deadlines and resource limitations: price and deadline.
  • Plan as you go: figure out the big milestones you need to reach for hte project, then fill in the details.
Before, I thought you'd sit down, plan everything, and then go build your 1,000 stories sky scraper. No, I watched the one wehre they built the circular skyscraper in Abu Dhabi and they planed the foundation, then the supports, then the outside. They were finalizing the plans as they go. Same with the SMART tunnel in Kuala Lumpur. They had a team surveying the ground before the digger, as they go.

So, now, I'm gonna do my big deadlines first, then write out the purchase orders or job orders the week of.

Also, this is something amazing I found: you write down all the steps you need to get done along with whose doing it, you estimate how long its gonna take, then you total up how many hrs each person is assigned. THe person who's assigned with the most hours is the critical person. The critical person's total hours is also how long the project's gonna take. By doing this, you can see the clog and then rework things to reduce the task's total time: thus saving you time and money.

Never thought I'll learn so much from construction.

Anyways, its 10:11, time for bed. I'm recharge, ready, and motivated to take this week on! I just finished my week's planning.

From last week, I got a lot of goals done and figured out how to maximize my energy level and productivity. Winning! I also realized I was scheduling way too many tasks per day. That was unrealistic. Lots of goals were placed aside to just get the important goals done. (like, I didn't even do any personal reading :( )This week's a lot less scheduled, We'll see how it goes.

I also want to see how much work my VA can do. She's the critical person right now and I want to up her hours to 40hrs/week but I also don't want to fuck myself over by being committed to paying her 40hrs/week when I don't have 40hrs of work!

Tomorrow and Tuesday are planning days so I'm gonna plan the work for all projects to see if I'll have 40hrs/week of work for her.

I'm also training the writer Tuesday morning as well. My goal is to have the trainer do biz1, the VA handle link building, and me doing the executive work: planning the company, doing high value outreach such as calling companies, or creating/doing things that are impossible/not cost effective to outsource, such as make videos.

Ok, thats it for today!
 
Day 8

Man, today was a bad start. I thought I had my alarm set at 6:30 this morning but... nope. I forgot to set my alarm. Woke up at 8:30.

By 9, I was at the desk working. Total, I'm at $660 in order. I'm still shooting for 4k this month.

The writer who I was supposed to interview tomorrow morning backed up. He probably found out that he won't be able to use this work to advance his career heh heh.

So, I contacted another writer. This one's a college student and does a lot of writing projects at school for free. Looks like he has a passion for writing. And, at my pay rate, he wont find a better deal!

I sent him an email and scheduled him for 8am Thursday. Lets hope he take it.

After that, I got an AWESOME email from oDesk. The contractor who cheated me out of several hundred dollars, $450 + time + 2 months delay + other annoyances got banned from oDesk! hahahaha Yeah!

I still have my credit card dispute against oDesk for his scam so, if it goes my way, I'll make it out of this just fine. I'll just have to use look elsewhere for employees. (No more VAs for me. Fuck that, they suck).

By then, it was an hour to lunch. I spent an hour moving a PHP script from one server to another server... ended up not even running correctly. Fuck that, I'm just gonna avoid using that script now -_- lol

After lunch, its time to work on this $660 worth of orders... it ended up taking until now (9pm) to finish round 1. About 3 more hours of work and I'll be done w/ it.

Tomorrow is project planning day. That's the most important thing. It can go all the way until Wednesday. Round2 can wait until Thursday morning.
 
Day 9

Woke up at 6:30 today, without the alarm clock!

for the morning work session, I planned out the work on my 6 sites with paper and pencil. My plan was to plan it on paper and pencil then move it to Wrike.

WOW!

After planning, I realized I have 86 weeks of work! Thats with my employee, JM, doing 40hrs/week too!

So, I emailed her, and asked her when she can begin working 40 hours a week. I'm still waiting on her reply.

The afternoon session was bust. I was so tired, I had to take a nap. No will power.

At 5, I had dinner and, then, I finished up a little more planning. Still waiting on JM's reply.

My plan this week is to finish up the planning tomorrow, celebrate my girlfriend's birthday thursday, recover from that friday morning, and write task descriptions for JM.

Gonna go watch some family guy and chill.

C ya buso.
 
Day 10

Its 7:38 and I feel stupid :(

The midday lethargy is pretty terrible too.

I sat down to work on the project planning and I realized I fucked up the planning big time. Really. It makes no sense and seems totally unrealistic. My goal was to finish link building for this site in 2 weeks. My VA reports back that she's 1/3rd of the way through matching the forum backlinks -_- Uh Oh. I planned 2 days of work for that. It might be a little slower than I thought.

I also realized that I was only targeting the #1 site in the niche. There are non-profit sites that are ranking well so I'm gonna go after their backlinks too.

Doing so raises the total time on this project, which raises cost. I want to get *a* site up to 500/month within 3 months just to get momentum going but I think this site's sandboxed. Its not even in the top 100 for the keyword.

Man, I'm just gonna sleep on this and figure it first thing tomorrow. I'm also gonna delay planning any other site until I fully finish planning this first site. I'm gonna practice project planning with the 4 small sites before I move on to the 2 big ones. Gotta practice, you know.

Great news, I found an awesome writer. I'm interviewing him tomorrow at 10. He went to the same school I did. Well, not quite, I went to prep school there while he went to the university there. If I had graduated from there, he would have been a year ahead of me so he probably know some people I know. Small world, especially since the school has a student body of 5,000 people.
 
day 11 & 12
30apr15 & 1mar15

Yesterday, I sat down and did some thinking. Here's what I figured out: Instead of planning all 6 sites at once, its better to plan one site, execute the plan, than review the plan. That way, you can improve your planning ability when you move on to your second site. It was foolish of me to think I could plan 6 sites at once.

Financially, I'm in uncertain times right now. My product's sales are going NOWHERE so I won't reach the 4k mark... I'm a little under 1k for this month, which is below my 1.5k I figured in my budget. I'll reach the 1.5k mark since I have 30 more days of sales but it won't be no record breaking month like I was hoping for.

I re-did my financial forecast to see what my finances will look like if $0 came in. I'll be left with $2,000 at the end of the year. That's if no sales come in, no sites rank, no amazon earnings, no adsense earnings, my employee continues to work, I continue to work, and I continue to withdraw $3,000/month to live.

I have 8 months worth of cash to reach $9,000/month. That's my goal. With $9,000/month, I'll be able to live, keep the company running, and expand. It'll mean I'm successful. $3,000/month would be the bare minimum I'll take. That'll be enough to keep the company running while I strap by. Anything less than that means I'll have to get a job to support myself while I work on the biz at night. Dude, how shitty would that be. Going back to a job after working for yourself.

Fuck that.

$9,000/month is where I will be in December. 8 months.

So, my VA spent about 40 hours posting on forums. In total, we got 150 visitors last week. Also, a DA49 site linked to my site, buzz stream works! haha.

The site's monetized by Adsense and the stats aren't so pretty =/. Keyword tool reports $5 CPC. Adsense reports $.11 CPC -_- Even with the 25,000 UV/month like my competitor has, it'll be a $12/month site =/

I'm slashing the link building for the first site now because of those stats. ROI would be super low, plus I think I'm gonna outrank the other guys fast.

Next week, our infographic will be out so I'm gonna blast it out to companies on buzz stream and that's how I'm gonna exceed them!

I also realized that, last week, I was a fool for taking the weekend off. The point of a 30 day challenge is to build your momentum. Work every day towards your goal. Even 4 hours a day or 30 minutes is something.

Time to get back to work. cya.
 
I think you'll find that as you move up the rankings to page one and eventually top 3 and #1, your CTR will increase drastically on the ads, and you'll start receiving better CPC's too. I don't know if the CPC's increase because advertisers choose to target your site or if Adsense has some algorithm that feeds the best ads to the place where they have the best chance of being clicked. But it's held true for me every time. I know the CTR increases because the higher you get in rankings, the more qualified, targeted, and ancy traffic you're getting ahold of. Those with "right now" intent don't go to page 2, or really out of the top 3.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I think you'll find that as you move up the rankings to page one and eventually top 3 and #1, your CTR will increase drastically on the ads, and you'll start receiving better CPC's too.
Click to expand...
I think this has to do with the intent of users searching for broad keywords vs long tail. Users who search broadly don't specifically know what they want yet and are more likely to click on ads to see if that is a good solution for them.
 
Day 13
2May2015

I'm getting the hang of planning sites now. Each SERP is different so you can't use the same template for every site (or silo or LP).

It took me a few hours of Scrapebox work to get ~100 nofollow high DA forums and ~40 extremely relevant blogs to post to but, hey, my VA has 40 hours of work this coming week. Awesome.

Some of these SERPS are really hard to get legit links on. That is the challenge I guess. haha.

Man, its 12:30. I need to get this one last writing order, then I'm off to bed!
 
WTF Where did day 14 go? Its the 4th already. God time flies.

So, on the 3rd, I...
  • Sent out writing orders to my writer
  • Wrote an article
  • Mmm... can't remember much else.
Today, day 15, I made the wireframes for 2 infographics. These are pretty sick. They're designed to speak an emotional reaction so people will share them. haha. Only way to get links in this niche!

I also sent in a few writing orders as well.

Currently, I've planned the next 4 weeks of work for me and my employee. Wow, never have been this organized before. #CEOStyle #LookingGood

I can't believe its 1/2 through the 30 day challenge already -_- my girlfriend's been around here for the past few days, which has thrown me off my beat since its hard to wake up at 6:30 and stuff when she's around. I told her I'm waking up at 7 now since she's here. She's OK with that... 6:30 was too much for her lol.

C ya Buso, its 10:07, time for bed.
 
Day 16
5May2015

Yesterday I compiled some lists for my VA to comment on as well as talked to my credit card about the oDesk chargeback. Its gonna be a long legalese paper but, hey, $1,800 is worth it.

I realize I have a dilemma right now. My business needs my full commitment and, at the same time, my girlfriend wants to spend quality time with me.

I remember a passage from Letters from a Self Made Merchant vol 2 where he said that a chick is worth her weight if she'll support the family's finances. I'm gonna have to talk to my girlfriend about my goals, work, and ask her to support me.

Work wise, the first site's now in the top 100 for its main keyword. Yeah!

I'm at $1,200 in sales so far. I'll hit my $1,500 quota from the budget (yeah!) but I won't make my $4,000 goal (boo!).

I sat down yesterday and did some market research, looks like I'm gonna have to offer a new product to better serve this demographic.

It feels dumb that the new product is actually a downgrade compared to the old ones but, hey, I'm a professional and its not my opinion that counts.
 
Day 17
6 May 2015

I looked back at my post from Day1 and it looks like I'm at the same place, just a level or two higher. 17 days ago, I was caught up about planning and getting things done. Now, I'm still caught up about planning and getting things done, I'm just a LOT better planner!

Today, I was going through the work for a site that I have planned to work on in 3 weeks. The work seems to be a lot more than the 1 week of work I have planned. More like 4 weeks. Then the second site I worked on seemed more than 1 week of work too.

I had to take a break to think about this and then it occurred to me: I'm just gonna go through all these sites and do my best effort for the time and resource I have allocated for each one. The ones that do rank, my 20%, I'll focus more on. The ones that don't, I'll recycle or audit. No point in spending a month working on a site that might end up being nothing. No point placing all your resource into one egg.

I also realized that, when I'm at work, I'm really focused. When I'm out of work, I'm still caught up with work in my head. Its hard for me to disengage from work. Like, today, I was pretty much still caught up with work at dinner. I felt exhausted from work and, although dinner was delicious, I never recharged from it. I get it, thats gray time. Not fully working or not fully letting go.

The only fear I have with fully letting go of work is that, when I pick it up again, I won't know where to begin!

That's probably best. It'll give me motivation to finish a day's work completely.

Ok, I'm implementing that now.

Man, this journal rocks.
 
7 May 2015
Day 18

Hmm =/ For the past few days, my girlfriend and her friend were staying here. I used to live alone, which made working at home easy. Now, with two other people at the house, its... hard.

Today was the last day they'll be here before they go on a 1 week trip.

I realized that waking up at 7am is hard when there's someone sleeping on the couch a few feet away from your desk.

Yeah, its hard to be on your agenda when there are other people in the house. Like, you have to coordinate meals, when to do what, and just other stuff.

The past week has been terribly unproductive for me.

There's something about having your own space that makes you so much more efficient.

Work wise, I got an infographic from my designer today. Its like I ordered... but fucked up. Not because he fucked it up, because my instructions were bad. I'm gonna touch it up and see how it is. Not expecting a lot of shares on this one.

I spent a whole day scraping a list of sites to comment to. Then I realized I fucked it up because I didn't include intitle: or "___" or intext" so the content's really off topic.

The site we've been working on for hte past 2 weeks popped into the top 100 the other day. That's a relief since I thought it was gonna be sandboxed for ages. Then it popped out again =/. The site's an EMD and the title is the keyword. We've been doing a lot of forum posts (which have been resulting in traffic!) and some of the forums are pulling the title as the anchor so there's a really high anchor text ratio IMO. I don't know yet, WMT hasn't reported anything yet.

We'll have to see.

8 May 2015
Day 19

The girls left this morning. Its 1pm, I've cleaned up the house and am gonna grab lunch before I get to work. They won't be back for another week so I'll to get EVERYTHING done this week before their back.

After that, it'll be a few days of chilling with them. Then back to work once my gf leaves for her place and her friend flies to the EU.

I realize I have a problem right now. The project's are planned in Wrike. Which is the place for that. Wunderlist is what I like to use to organize my week and days, but its terrible for project planning. So what I've been doing is copying to-do's down on a notebook for the day and crossing them off as I go. If stuff's left over from the last day, I add them to the new page for tomorrow.

This doesn't feel like the best system.

Also, wrike only lets you schedule 8 hours of work a day. Good for employees. Not applicable for the self employed and hungry.

I'm going back to the drawing board to solve these problems.
 
Day 18 part 2

How to profit from your enemies taught me that enemies can help you more than friends can.

Its a human condition to always want to beat your enemies.

This week, I made an enemy.

I see them every day. The air's always dense when we walk by each other. They're always the same: lazy, unproductive, and short sighted.

The animosity gives me fuel.

Today, I did what I said I'll do in the last post: I planned my next 7 days. My top priority is to analyze competitors, figure out why they are ranking, plan how I can compete with them, and what I'll do, how much time and money it'll cost, how much I'm expecting to earn from it, and if I should compete there at all.

This weekend's all for doing this research and planning.
 
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