Goals for August 2017

[The Engineer]

Time is not on our side. July has come and gone. Did you stay on target?

Were you able to affect enormous growth in your business?

Yesterday, someone actually said to me that they want to start a business and that their goal is to "just break even." I said, "you mean your goal is to fail?"​

What do you think the response was?

Do you think I had a chance to say "When you break even, all you do is waste time and make money for other people. You should be aiming infinitely higher than that so you even have a chance to break even. Who in their right mind wants their first product to be a loss leader? What you're saying is you intend to waste a ton of time in hopes to not make any money in order to shuffle the patio furniture around on the Titanic."

I didn't have a chance to say anything because the person doesn't intend to start a business. It's been the same song and dance for 5 years. It's gotten so inane that they've been trying to convince me and themselves and those around them that their day job they drive out to is actually a business and that they don't work for their boss.

No, I didn't get to say anything more because the answer was "Fuck you!" as they walked away. I don't think you'll be surprised that this person lives in poverty and is 'content' with it. "Money is an ego game." Is hunger?
​

We can't sugar coat reality or we stand no chance at survival, let alone thriving and prospering.

The game is to be as real as possible with ourselves. Did you dominate July or did you screw yourself over milling about pretending to be running at 110% capacity? Are you even playing in the same ballpark that you laid out for yourself for the year, or did you end up in some alternate universe where the idiot version of you chased some shiny new 'opportunity?'

What's it going to be lads? Time is not on our sides. Every day you waste... you can't get that back. What's it going to be?

 

[Concept]

Recently got a new contract offer (yesterday). The good news is it is bringing in some serious $$$$$, the bad new's is it will suck up a lot of my time.

As a result, August is a bit up in the air for me until I've settled into the new role by the end of the month. I then plan to use the extra $ to outsource writing and time-consuming tasks (like email scraping etc).

I will also be losing a week traveling around (family commitments) where I will have little to no internet connection.

Goals For August

• 3 new pieces of content live
• Start the process to get on a writer.
• Create systems and processes for the writer.
• Blog and forum commenting.

Non-Work Related

• Continue with healthy lifestyle changes.

It's a slow month this month, however, with the burst of income coming in from the contract, I'm looking forward to ramping things up in September and onwards.

 

[infotech]

MFA Site Goals

• 15 New posts
• Bring about ~100 daily sessions
• Earn 3 digit income
• Double Social account followers

Freelance Goals

• Make up for last month earnings too.

 

[Ryuzaki]

JV Project - Going to let the links shake out from last month to get a clear indication of what's going on and what more to invest. It's looking good so far.

Main Project

• Wrapping up a web design job and then a developer job.
• Going to spend some of that cash on outreach and link development.
• Going to spend some of it on more expert content.
• After that, I'll be formatting and scheduling the good 15+ posts I ordered last month.
• Then I'm going to map out my current categories, the gaps in them, and at what point they can be considered done for round one. I'll loop back through all of them infinitely later, but I have to call them done at some point so I can grow horizontally (Already doing that, but I want to close the loop on everything else too).

The hopes here is I can get some more money content up and ranking ASAP before the holidays come around. If all goes well, I'll try to boost existing rankings too so it'll be a nice windfall of cash to reinvest.

 

[eliquid]

I'm trying to nail down my sleep pattern this month.

It's been horrible.

Last night, I went to bed at 2am and then got up at 11am. I don't want to sleep away the day, but more importantly I want to get 9 hours nailed down to 7. Two hours doesn't seem like a lot, but it is honestly. Sometimes that 9 hours is 10 or 11. Getting nailed down to 7 is the goal.

Of note, I don't care what the "time" itself is. I'm not a 9-5 type person that feels I should be in bed by 10 and up by 5:30. To me I can work any 18 hours in any 24 hour period "shift" as my day when I want. As long as I get 7 hours in of sleep in somewhere.

Part of the issue is diet. I drink caffeine regularly during the day, even up until midnight almost daily. I need to cut this back to caffeine getting cut off around noon. That's hard because in this situation that's an hour after I wake up. I'm sure the sugar intake I have is also hurting ( normal and refined ).

I'm also not very productive when I first wake up. It takes a few hours for me to get energized from waking up, thus why I want those 2 hours back.

Things I am trying:

• Eating fat before I go to sleep. Such as getting some chicken or taking some Krill oil.
• Drinking water before bed so my body stays hydrated while sleeping.
• Ear plugs in. I have kids and a dog. Any noise they make is bound to wake me up in the night.
• No caffeine after noon-1pm ( or at least 10 hours before I go to bed )
• Setting multiple alarms far away from my bed so I have to get up to turn them off
• Cooling the temp of the room down when I go to bed
• No desktop/cell phone/tablet blue screen light 2 hours before bed
• OTC sleeping aids

Things I'm battling:

• When I lay down, I might lay down awake for 0.5-3 hours. 10pm becomes 1am and I'm still awake even though I've never gotten up or done anything but lay still with eyes shut. My eyes end up stinging and I still can't get to sleep.
• When it's time to wake up, I can't get up really. I kinda lay there and drift back off to sleep even though I badly want to get up and do work. Alarms are going off all around me
• My mind races before bed. INTJ's have this issue a lot. All of the days info is processing, all my ideas are coming out, etc. This isn't a bedtime issue.. this is 24 hours a day for me but it keeps me up too.

Some of it might be discipline. But I think a lot of it borders on my body and mind are not tired because it got up at 11am and is trying to get in bed at 11pm. My mind races constantly which is also a factor.

Even when I do force myself up at 4am or 6am and go to bed at 10pm-11pm, I seem to not wake up the next day until 9-10-11am and I feel I lost hours to sleep and trying to "wake" up.

Anyone else have this experience?

 

[Prentzz]

Anyone else have this experience?

I have quite a bit of experience with sleep problems and it runs in my family. I could have copy+pasted what you wrote and it would 90% apply to me at different periods in my life.

The first 2-hours when you wakeup will always be sloppy, this is basically just how our bodies work. That's why I use those first couple hours for non-work related tasks that aren't mentally tough i.e. go to the gym, cook some food for the day, iron my clothes etc.

I'm a caffeine fiend and rely on it far too heavily but would recommend 8-hours before bed you cut it out hard and increase water intake at this time to balance out.

Try melatonin if you haven't, it's the only sleep aid that gave me minimal side effects and allowed me to sleep through.

Go to the gym or workout. If your brain is tired but your body isn't I find that I just cannot sleep. If both your body and brain have had a workout that day you'll sleep far better in my experience.

Losing weight has helped me sleep better too. Even cutting from around 16-18% body fat to 10-12% has made me sleep better, it's also helped with my sleep apnea so I feel more rested from the same hours.

Install Flux to remove the blue light from your screen if you haven't already.

If you can't sleep after 45-minutes, get up and do something small like unload the dishwasher, put your clothes in the washer. Something that won't raise your heartrate but will allow your brain to slow down by focussing on a task.

 

[Cash Builder]

Just realized I missed July's goals as I was busy all month setting up my link building service.
It's up and running now, so time for some goals.

Affiliate Site
I will not be spending a lot of time on this in August, I have built a lot of links in the last 2 - 3 months so I want to let them kick in and then decide if I need more or go back to posting more content.

• Post 4 articles
• Earn $100 in commissions
• Work on a system to get content created and posted faster and more efficiently

Link Building Service
I started a link building service at the start of August and this is where I will be focusing the majority of my time this month. It's a lot different to marketing an affiliate site where one of the main goals is to get ranked in Google. Not sure I'll get very far with that approach here, so it's time to think of some other marketing methods.

• Continue to add sites to my list that meet my quality guidelines
• Market the service on different platforms

 

[Cash Builder]

Affiliate Site

• Post 4 articles - done
• Earn $100 in commissions - done
• Work on a system to get content created and posted faster and more efficiently - not done

Link Building Service

• Continue to add sites to my list that meet my quality guidelines - done
• Market the service on different platforms - done

 

[infotech]

MFA Site Goals

• 15 New posts - failed (9 posts)
  
• Bring about ~100 daily sessions failed [~50]
  
• Earn 3 digit income failed [still 2 digit ]
  
• Double Social account followers failed [15-20% gains]

Freelance Goals

• Make up for last month earnings too. failed [just made up for current month]

 

[Ryuzaki]

• Wrapping up a web design job and then a developer job.

Done. The web design job was a doozy but very fun, due to the complexity of it. The developer job may be on hold or may go forward, it's undetermined at the minute.​

• Going to spend some of that cash on outreach and link development.

Didn't do this yet but it'll happen soon. The reason is is that I didn't get the content edited and posted yet. I managed most of it but there's a couple straggling pieces I'll wrap up.
​

• Going to spend some of it on more expert content.

Done, and will be on-going.​

• After that, I'll be formatting and scheduling the good 15+ posts I ordered last month.

Done and sitting as drafts ready to be published whenever I need to fill a gap. A lot of this was high quality, non-targeted blog posts on interesting topics. They can stay in the chest and serve as gap-fillers whenever I need to be doing something else.
​

• Then I'm going to map out my current categories, the gaps in them, and at what point they can be considered done for round one. I'll loop back through all of them infinitely later, but I have to call them done at some point so I can grow horizontally (Already doing that, but I want to close the loop on everything else too).

I didn't get to this yet, but I do need and want to take another bird's eye look at things and create a mind map to keep me focused, with big picture pieces I can strike-out as they get completed.​