Friday June 8th, 2007: Issue #809
Wednesday’s Kickstart was sent out perfectly normally at about 10 AM in the morning. The control panel in my autoresponder says that it was sent, but oddly, also reports that there were no bounces.
That is probably because it appears to have been lost in the ether somewhere. There are about five and a half thousand Kickstarts floating around in cyberspace as lost electrons.
Spooky! I wonder where lost emails go to? Do they whizz around forever or is there a huge virtual garbage pail in another dimension that just sucks them all in?
Hopefully today’s issue will get to you, but if not don’t forget to check out the archive at http://kickstartarchive.com
Of course, if you don’t get Kickstart, you won’t read what I just wrote and an inter-dimensional paradox loop will have just sprung into being. Mind you don’t fall in!
#~#~#
It’s the little things that floor you every time.
I have a few profitable AdWords campaigns running at the moment and like to check my stats on a regular basis. Although Google can be a bit slow at updating the figures at times, it is generally useful to be able to monitor the number of impressions your ads get against the number of clicks that they achieve and how many of those clicks turn into sales.
For most of this week I’ve been pulling my hair out in frustration because Google have only been updating my AdWords stats once a day. I know that they can be slow at times, but that was ridiculous!
I was still seeing sales happen, but had no immediate way of relating those sales to specific ads or keywords until the daily update.
Finally, yesterday, I found out why Google were seemingly so darned slow - I had inadvertently changed the display setting in my AdWords campaign management page to ‘yesterday’. So OF COURSE it was only updating every 24 hours! How stupid does that make me?
I don’t know how that setting got changed, but now the penny has finally dropped in my rusty brain I can assure you I won’t be making that mistake again!
It is so easy to blame big, faceless corporations for all of our problems, when quite often it is our own tiny errors that cause us the most difficulties.
#~#~#
A couple of years ago I built a cross between a carport and a garage on the side of my house. The job ended up 90% complete apart from the small task of cladding the front and side to make it look nice.
I got stuck because the only company I could find who would sell me the small amount of the type of cladding I needed wanted to charge me as much for the delivery as for the materials! It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a principle, so the job has been put off and put off.
On Wednesday my next-door neighbor had a builder start work on her driveway and I got chatting with him. We joked about my unfinished job and I explained why I hadn’t got on with it.
He told me about a small company, barely two miles from my house, who sell exactly the stuff I need. They don’t have a website, or even a yellow pages listing under ‘cladding’ so I’d have never found them. But the builder had an old receipt with their phone number on it.
I called and they delivered yesterday morning (free). The job was finished by yesterday evening.
How simple! And how silly that something so simple has take two years to be ‘got around to’.
This may be an oxymoron, but it truly was procrastination in action!
Procrastination often has a perfectly logical reason providing its foundation. Unfortunately the reason is all too often just an excuse.
I’m beginning to think that success is not so much about getting lists of jobs done, but more about removing the excuses that we willingly cling on to that stop us dead.
#~#~#
I’m reading a good book at the moment. It is called ‘Instant Income’ by Janet Switzer. Look out for it in your bookstore.
______________________________________________________
An Inspirational Thought
_______________________________________________________
A Zen poem by William Carlos Williams goes:
The Red Wheelbarrow.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Zen poetry is notoriously hard to pin down with a clear meaning, but I take this to be saying that the inconspicuous, everyday things in our lives are often the most important and should be looked after and cherished.
What is your reading of the same words? I bet your interpretation is different to mine.
###############################################
Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
###############################################
_______________________________________________________
The Quote of the Day
_______________________________________________________
Sir Isaac Newton said:
“I have stood on the shores of time picking up a beautiful seashell here and there, while all before me lies the great sea of life, undiscovered.”
_______________________________________________________
Today’s Power Thought
_______________________________________________________
When we think about time management, I would guess that most of us start from the thought: “how can I get all this done?”
We live in busy times. Most people are effectively ding more than one job - whether it is running a job and a family, or simply that our jobs are now far more demanding than they used to be.
Everyone is looking for ways to offload some of their work, and having limited success in finding a place to offload it too!
Today’s action point is a time management idea that, at first glance, appears to be the diametric opposite of what is required. But stick with it and think about it.
When your life is brimming over with things to do and you are struggling to keep up with your own schedules, ask yourself this deceptively simple question:
“How can I do more?”
I told you it was counter-intuitive!
But think about this … by honestly asking yourself HOW you can do more, or HOW you can do your current task better, you are forced into a mindset of prioritization. In order to answer it sensibly, you must look at the whole picture of what is on your plate and decide that if the current job is going to take up more of your time, which of your other jobs are going to have to be deferred or delayed.
You see, the problem with the way most of us try to manage time is that we simply pile more and more stuff onto our workloads without taking the time to think about what has to be moved in irder to allow the other things to happen.
Over time, we are all capable of doing far more than we currently do, no matter how busy we are. The secret is in sensible prioritization. Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, every task before us has a priority. It may seem at times as it everything is need to be done simultaneously, but that is rarely the real case.
But by allow ourselves to *think* and *believe* that everything is urgent and that we have no time to do everything, we create a reality for ourselves that is full of stress and panic.
That simple little question, which should be said as ‘HOW can I do more?” is the key to putting our lives into an order of achievement so that every task can have its right place and its right weight in our minds.
When every job on our growing list has an equal emotional drag on us, they all start to line up side-by-side in our minds and create a barrier that takes superhuman strength of character to break through. Asking how you can do more, and in so doing putting the jobs into a sensible and logical order puts them into a single-file line which is much much easier to navigate.
So, how can you do more?
_______________________________________________________
Fascinating Facts
_______________________________________________________
Someone read the wrong book!
Hawaii had a rat problem so they imported mongooses to kill the rats. The problem was that rats are nocturnal, but mongooses hunt during the day.