Are you BUSY or PRODUCTIVE?

I hope you are all sharing in this gorgeous fall day and that it is filled with sunshine and smiles! I'd like to take some time today to thank everyone for all of their wonderful feedback and support of my new blog! I've had some truly great convos, emails, and comments and I am very appreciative!

I would love to take all the credit, but I definitely could not have created such a uniquely me space without the patiently talented Kristen at wildmagic.etsy.com. Please take a second to check out her shoppe and wonderful graphics and designs!

I had the images and the vision of what I was hoping it would look like, but without Kristen's help it would have taken me weeks of playing with HTML code and let's face it - I'm a writer and an artist - I do not need to be a master of all trades! (I'm still convincing myself of this...)

I am a financial wellness and wealth coach by day and I constantly find myself at my client's kitchen tables coaching them not to engage in tasks that will not net them their hourly rate of desired pay!

In business, you need to spend 90% of your time in productive activities that will create either more productivity or increase your income. It is my nature to obsess over "details". If I had committed myself to creating my new blog or recreating my mySpace page to the exact specifications that I wanted myself, I would have obsessed about it for weeks not days - and even when I would have achieved the desired look, I know that I would have continued to play having had reset my work schedule to include HTML coding!

Don't get me wrong - I did start playing with it on my own for about two hours that day, but I was able to snap out of it once I realized that half my work morning had flown by and I had accomplished nothing. One of my favorite business quotes, "Are you busy or productive?"

At the end of the day feeling drained by hours of tasking only to find that I really hadn't accomplished anything I set out to do, I decided to stop the insanity!

So I quickly logged out of mySpace and blogspot and contacted Kristen and sent her the images I was interested in using, the overall feel I was hoping for, got a quote, and set to work on the projects with someone who knew what she was doing! It was economical, productive and the net effect was a week of marketing and creating that I wouldn't have had had I done it on my own!

What it cost me to hire someone to do it was a mere fraction of MY cost per hour of my own production time! In simpler terms, I was able to produce and create in that time MORE than what it cost me for someone else to do the task...

As I write this I remember that I learned this years ago! When I started college, I was a full-time student and worked full-time in a restaurant but still lived at home. I would get home at 2am from work sometimes completely exhausted to my mother's fussing at me for forgetting to do the dishes or not cleaning the bathroom or leaving laundry in the washer...

After about a week of the ridiculousness - regardless how much I wanted to yell, "Are you kidding me?! I'm never home," I picked up the classifieds and hired a wonderful woman named Terry for $50.00/week to dust, sweep, mop, clean the bathrooms, scrub the kitchen... It was worth it to me to spend half a night's income to pacify my mother at home and give me peace the little time I was home...

Just because you're in business for yourself doesn't mean that you have to do every part of the business.

• Figure out what you're good at, the activities that bring you the best results and then STICK TO THAT PLAN for at least 4-6 weeks! You're not going to be able to measure the results of an activity if you change it every time you hear something new! Pick a few projects to start off with and go from there.

• Set a SCHEDULE and stick to it!

• Hire out your weakness and/or get help with administrative tasks
  

Working for yourself is the most rewarding job you can have, but you'll never work harder! I have learned a lot about entrepreneurship... anyone that works hard at anything for ten years will be successful in it - just make sure you're doing something you love - because it will still be work ten years from now if it isn't.

Don't put off for tomorrow...

...What you could get done today. When I was in high school I used to wake up before dawn to get my hair done like the "other girls;" with naturally wild curly hair and incredible volume, I of course wanted my hair straight! I remember sitting in front of the mirror with my arms extended painfully out to my farthest wing span blow drying and then ironically using the curling iron to ummmm... curl it again! Then I would sit with a notebook and pen in hand to start scribbling my daily list of "things to do." I was 14 when these lists began - my "day of details". I remember the frustration even then as I scribbled my almost minute by minute schedule of the projected events of the day. Even then I was an obsessive neurotic overachiever!

My mother found my stack of lists one day, each item painstakingly numbered by order of importance and then perfectly struck through in a thin black ink line - only black - never blue - all of my completed daily achievements. (Now I use yellow highlighter to recognize my completed tasks 'cause I'm also a recognition whore.) She snatched them from me and yelled to remind me in case I had forgotten, "You're just a child! You don't have lists of things to do, or places you have to be, or cures for cancer you have to discover! Can't you just learn to just BE!"

I thought about this morning ritual I had half a lifetime ago as I awoke this morning to begin scribbling into my "List of things to do NOTEBOOK"... Not a lot has changed, well except for the yellow highlighter and the fact that you probably could not pay me to wake up early in the morning to do my hair, except that the list keeps getting longer no matter how many things I manage to highlight done.

Launching this business has become another infinite list of "daily details." Where should I post my designs? Should I learn that software program, create that other account? What do I do this morning that will net me the best results tomorrow?

Time management... The ultimate daily affirmation for the self-employed:

I use my time wisely and only do the most productive thing every minute of the day!

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today... but what if there is never a tomorrow? Would I have chosen to do the same things today?

I Must Assimilate!

After much internal conflict, I have succumbed to the pressures of creating a blogspot account and blogging! ☺

But when you're a type-A obsessive compulsive, control freak this opens up a brand new can of worms of decisions. Hair pulling debates on will this just be a business blog - and isn't my business a PEOPLE business - I mean isn't one of the main reasons I am successful in business is because it's personal to me and therefor how can I draw the line between a personal blog and a business blog?

Will I be using this as a "dear vagina, why so blue?" journal or will I be using it like many of my very productive friends and teammates and fellow shoppe owners who feature one another, maybe a favorite recipe, a really cool product they came across...

And now with the ultimate assimilation to the world of blogging comes a whole NEW set of issues to battle in my already over cycling brain - will I now go back to mySpace and regurgitate my daily escapades for the enjoyment of post pubescent boys everywhere? And what for this Facebook? Will I now also rewind my years of climbing up the corporate ladder and join my executive almost-husband and schmooze with the likes of those closet "I hate my jobbers" in Linked In?

I "twit" but don't know what the hell to do with it after days of communicating with the twitting helpdesk, had quite the digs in mySpace until interstate authorities had to issue restraining orders to stalkers, was quite the IM master until honeycyberbots started taking over the airways...

But with the ever cheerful, positive, "I can do and succeed at everything I pursue" attitude, I will move forward with this new blogging venture ever eager to see what lies ahead and which path it will lead to... oh and by the way, that pic up there - my favorite design featured in my shoppe at dorana.etsy.com - that's just in case tomorrow I wake up and decide this is a business blog!

siempre - dorana