The big difference for me at work was not allowing myself to bounce back and forth between my favorite blogs all day long, checking email, instant messenger, and all that other bullshit.  I know it’s classic 4 hour workweek to shut all that out while you’re working, but when you have to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day, sometimes it feels like you need to blow an hour or two in useless entertainment.  Of course, that hour or two quickly becomes the whole day and you haven’t written a god damn thing or done hardly anything.

So I’ve gone back to creating to-do lists for every day, and it has a marked effect on my output.  I also noticed that once I’m in that mood of getting things done, it becomes addictive and I want to add more accomplishments to the list.  Now I’m almost restless when I don’t have a task.  Structured life can be very good for you.  Try it tomorrow.

I’m building a review site right now for online dating offers.  I didn’t realize quite how much work I would have to put into it, but it has been a lot of hours at this point.  Nevertheless, I feel great about it.  The reason I’ve been able to work so hard is because I’ve been breaking the entire project down into lists of steps that I have to follow.  I talked about this a couple days ago when I wrote about keeping records of everything you do, and also with the affiliate review site “formula” I posted about a week or so ago.  It was a formula, but I regret to inform you that there are a ton of little steps in between that I did not foresee.  Nevertheless, it still is a rough outline of what needs to be done.  It’s just that there’s a lot of grunt work in between.

I feel that I’m not at the level with this review site where I should be outsourcing everything yet, simply because I want to turn a profit on it first and see what kind of potential it has for the first one.  If it works out the way I hope it will, then I will feel much less guilty spending on outsourcing a few more when I know that there is almost certainly money at the end of the tunnel.  I feel very confident that there is, but I also feel that so long as I’m forced to sit at work for 8+ hours a day, I might as well be getting things accomplished.  So I will be my own bitch for now.  The me who thinks up these projects will hire out the me who sits at work all day to do the grunt work.  Fine.

I cannot express how greatly my new habit of breaking projects down into simple to-do lists has improved both the amount of work I’ve put out, as well as the quality of work I’ve put out.  By designing the project from start to finish, I set a clear road ahead of me.  I made a number of adjustments and additions to these steps, but that was only in the midst of trying to accomplish them.  That’s where the real learning occurred during this process – in the doing.  Furthermore, by having this clear list of things to do, and by putting my blinders on and not allowing myself to get distracted from this project, I have had only two options each day – perform the steps set out on the list from the day before, or don’t.  If I don’t, then I am on the path to nowhere (failure).  The only other option is to work on the damn project.

Make a giant to-do list, small-chunk it, and then work, work, work.  Then you can sit back and marvel at all the things you’ve learned and created.  I’m now convinced this is the only way to go.