This Is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 27

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 27.

You are listening to the MasonWorld.com Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time. Making Time for Your Internet Business

That’s Geoff Smith on guitar there with the unplugged version of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast theme. That’s terribly cool. Thanks for letting me indulge you with that. I’m totally digging the unplugged version of the theme song.

Unplugged seemed appropriate, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve been on the mic so I’ve been a little unplugged myself and I thought I’d roll out that unplugged version. I though this episode what we ought to do is talk a little bit about part time internet and time management.

How in the world do you find the time to run a part time internet business if you’ve got a day job? That’s a question a lot of people have on their mind, I get that question all the time.

I got this tweet the other day from Dewayne Marion

Your life is busy, so what do you do? I’ve got some tips on that. I’ve been doing this for three or four years and I can talk to it a little bit. I’m going to tell you everything that I know about it and then I’m going to cut to an interview with Jason Van Orden.

Jason has a really cool course on how he and Sterling manage their time. It’s one of the best time management courses that I’ve run across, and the only one I’ve ever seen that’s specific to online business. It’s really good. I’m going to give you some really good free tips here as well. Jason and Jay’s course is very affordable, but it’s not free. We’ll point you to that here after Jay’s interview here.

I thought before we do that I’d talk to you a little bit about what’s been going on in the last week since we last spoke. I think the last time I talked to you I was broadcasting from Taiwan. Since then I’ve been back and doing a lot of work on this Google business. Does Exact Match Anchor Text Matter?

There’s an excellent article I want to point you to on Jonathan Leger’s blog, JonathanLeger.com. He’s got an excellent article where he does something pretty cool. Jon is an SEO, but he’s also a darn good programmer. Jon is able to have an idea about how to attack a problem and instantly write out some code.

He’s been doing this for years, so he’s got piles of code laying around the shop and lots of code based products out there. So he’s able to put together some pretty cool stuff very fast.

He was sitting around trying to figure out whether or not exact match anchor text matters in the latest Google update, the one that most people are calling Penguin, some people are calling it Stinky Penguin, which I kind of like.

So what he did was instead of just talking about two or three sites that are ranking or not ranking, “I’m going to study the top 10 results of 15 keywords across a bunch of different markets.” Literally, 1,500 keywords. “I’m going to pull all of those rankings, I’m going to look at all of that anchor text, and see the backlinks to those sites that are ranking, and I’m going to figure out if exact match anchor text is really an issue.”

A lot of people have been saying that one of the reasons that sites recently got penalized by Penguin is if they had a big bunch of exact match anchor text. Jon finds two results that are very interesting and you can read about them in his blog post. (http://www.jonathanleger.com/anchor-text-optimization-how-much-is-too-much/)

One is too much exact match anchor text does appear to be bad. If most of the anchor text coming to your site is exact match it looks like that is a problem and you don’t want to do that. So if you’re trying to rank for “blue suede shoes,” it’s not natural for people who are linking to you to link to you all the time with the exact phrase “blue suede shoes.”

In fact, some people have speculated that you want that less than half the time. What Jon finds is that most of the sites that are ranking now have exact match anchor texts below 20%. He hits industries like agriculture, plumbing, aerospace, email hosting, virtual servers, technology, startups, and semiconductors. He’s all over the place with this study.

One of the things that his research turns up, which is really cool, is that there seems to be a free pass given to people with exact match domains. If your domain is BlueSuedeShoes.com you are naturally going to have a lot of anchor text that has the words blue suede shoes in it because that’s the name of your domain.

That’s the theory anyway. That’s what Jon finds as very interesting and I definitely recommend that you go check that out over at JonathanLeger.com. Ten Internet Business Time Management Tips

That gets us to one of my favorite topics, which is time management. A lot of times I get asked, “Mark, you’re running this business, you’ve got a big day job, how do you do that?” You’ve got a family, I’ve got a family. I have four kids, they’re awesome. I’ve got a lovely wife, a dog named Sport who is a total knucklehead, I even have a cat.

So there’s a lot going on around my house. The question is how does that all get done?

The truth of the matter is, and I’ll just be right up front with you about this, I’m a terrible time manager. I could be a lot better and it’s something I’m constantly trying to improve, particularly when it comes to managing details. My wife will to testify to this in a court of law, when it comes to getting down to the nitty gritty details a lot of times I’m easily distracted and I mess those up.

Nonetheless, I have picked up about 10 good tips that I can share with you about how to manage your time if you’re trying to run a part time internet business. I have good intentions about managing my time, but this is definitely one of those do as I say, not as I do type of things.

One of the things that I typically do is over-commit and under-deliver because I have these great intentions and my goals sometimes aren’t super realistic. That’s part of my problem.

If you’re trying to run a part time internet business I’ve got 10 really good tips here for you that you can really take advantage of. These are actionable things that you can do today. You may be tired of hearing me say this. The very first thing, and I think the most important thing, is to make sure that you’re working in a niche that is both profitable and that you have passion for.

Obviously it needs to be profitable. People want to talk about passion, but they don’t always tell you why you should follow your passion. They say, “Follow your passion. One of the reasons why is that sometimes you’re going to have to choose between working on your internet business and doing something else that’s fun.

If you don’t care about your internet business area, if you’re not passionate about the thing that your internet business involves and it’s 1:00 in the morning and you have to decide between going to sleep, which is fun, and working on your internet business – working on your internet business better be fun too.

That’s the first tip. That’s a real tip. This is not pie-in-the-sky work on passion, follow your passion. This is a practical thing that is just a common sense idea that if you like your stuff you’re going to be more inclined to work on it. So that’s the first tip; choose a profitable niche about which you are passionate.

The second thing, and I think this is really key too, is to have a great plan. It’s really important to know what it is that you need to do. One of the problems that I often have is it’s time for me to work on my internet business and I’ve got so many things that I could work on, I’m not sure what’s most important and in order to get started I’ve got to make a choice.

It’s much better if there’s no choice to be made. You sit down, it’s time to work. It’s 11:00 at night, but you know the three things that you need to get done before you go to bed. So tip number two is to spend time having a plan.

I think some of you are aware of this, I use Omnifocus now and that’s helped me a lot. That’s a Mac specific task management tool that’s actually quite expensive. Sterling and Jay in their time management course that I’m going to talk about at the end of the podcast have some less expensive very simple methods for making sure that you know what to work on that they describe in some detail in their course.

However you do it, even if it’s not exactly the right thing, don’t waste time trying to decide what you’re going to be working on when you finally do have time. Have a plan and go do it.

The third thing, and this will save you, one of the key things with a part time internet business is that you should try to accomplish something in your business every day, even if it’s a small thing. Don’t let your business for two or three days. Those two or three days will turn into a week and before you know it a month has gone by and you haven’t really done anything substantial in your business. That’s a bad thing, don’t let that happen to you. Try and accomplish something every day, that’s tip number three.

Tip number four is something that I stole from Sterling and Jay years ago. You should go on an information diet in your business. If you are one of these internet marketers who is tied up reading every blog post, every newsletter, every sales pitch that comes out, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the stuff that you need to know right now, then you need to go on an information diet.

It doesn’t make any sense to study traffic generation methods for your sales page if you have not yet written the copy for your sales page. Get the information that you need now, work on the stuff that you need now. That’s an idea that’s taught in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, that’s where I first learned that. Sterling and Jay are over there teaching that kind of stuff. You can check that out at MasonWorld.com/academy.

A lot of you know I’m a charter member of the academy and I still hang out over there. If you want to find me online and ask me questions, if you’re a member of the academy, I’m in there a lot of times. It’s kind of a close knit group and really cool. We hang out in there and I usually visit there a couple times a week and answer posts. I’m a moderator in the forum, so that’s a good way to find me.

Tip number five is latch onto someone that inspires you. For me it’s guys like Pat Flynn, Cliff Ravenscraft, Sterling and Jay. Guys that really capture your imagination. Use their example to fuel you. When you’re not feeling that motivation and you can’t quite get over the hump, you can think about what those guys are doing and use that as fuel to your fire to get you going.

Nothing will get you fired up more than going over to Smart Passive Income and reading Pat Flynn’s income report. It’s just awesome the way he reveals all the stuff that’s going on in his life.

If you latch onto people like that that you can know and trust and get to know, that will inspire you and can really help motivate you and help you find time to work on your internet business.

Tip number six is convert your wasted time into work time. My favorite way to do this, and maybe you’re doing this now, is to learn the things that I need to know on the go. For me that means podcasting.

It also means having tools like the iPad with Evernote and the iPhone with Evernote so that if I have an idea for the podcast or if I have 10 minutes to tap out something into the show notes, or if I run across a blog post that I want to cover in the show, I can just jam that into the show notes for the next episode and I’m ready to go and I’ve captured that right then.

So convert those five and 10 minute times when you’re standing in line at the grocery store or stuck at the doctor’s office into productive work time. With the iPad2 down to $350 in some stores, that’s a really viable work platform for this kind of mobile work.

I still don’t think the iPad2 is great as your only computer, but for something that you can have with you at all times where you can work anytime you have a chance it’s an excellent tool. You can develop work flows for reading blog posts, capturing information in your niche so that if you’re trying to become a trusted authority in your niche and you need to consume a lot of information so that you can distill it and give it to your audience those kinds of tools are perfect, and you can do that on the go all the time.

Tip number seven is a hard one for me. Ditch the television. Seriously. This is very easy to say and hard to do. I’ve told you many times I like cop shows and spy show, I like Burn Notice and stuff like that. It’s hard for me to ditch that stuff.

It used to be that I’d struggle in the Fall, but by the time Summer rolled around I would be off the hook because everything would be in reruns. But now they have all these great shows that have Summer seasons on cable and it’s just really difficult.

You really should try. If you feel like you might be watching too much television or whatever your vice, maybe reading too many spy novels or something, one of the things you can do is actually keep a log for a couple of weeks of how much television you’re watching. You might be surprised at how much you’re watching. Just try to cut that out by 20% or something, maybe cut back an hour, drop a show, or something like that. That can really make a huge difference.

Most television that you watch is not doing anything to help you. It’s not helping you from a mental attitude standpoint. Like Zig Ziglar says, “garbage in, garbage out,” stinking thinking kind of stuff. Most of the stuff on television is not very good for your mind. I’m not judging you, I watch this stuff too. I’m just telling you it’s not great.

It eats up a lot of time and it can also demotivate you, because once you get on the couch and start watching television it’s hard to get back off the couch and do something useful. So I definitely recommend you turn down the television and that’s tip number seven.

Tip number eight I already mentioned along with working on the go. Use technology to make your work flows more efficient. If there is something you can do to make it where technology can help you, the example I used was Evernote helps you to work anywhere. There are other tools that can help you to maybe more easily process your audio if you’re a podcaster, or it may help you write blog posts.

For example, if you’re writing blog posts you may find that if you use a tool like Microsoft Live Writer on the PC you may be able to write faster. Use technology to your advantage. Dragon Naturally Speaking if you are needing to write a lot but you’re not a good typist, you may find that voice recognition can help you. Use technology to help you go faster, that’s tip number eight.

Tip number nine is an important for me and maybe it is for you too. Whatever you do to try and manage your time and get a handle on things, avoid overly complex magic systems. I’m always amazed by my tendency to want to find the magical tool or the magical thing that’s going to fix my time management problems. Those don’t exist.

People are out there trying to sell them to you, but don’t pay too much attention to those. In fact, it’s really funny. That’s one of the first things that Sterling and Jay mention in their time management course is there aren’t really any magic bullets where you can pay $19.95 and go figure this time management stuff out.

Stick to fundamental principles when it comes to managing your time and avoid something that’s overly complex. One incredibly popular thing that’s overly complex is the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. I am a big fan of the Getting Things Done system, but I don’t use the whole thing.

It’s overly complex and cumbersome, so I don’t necessarily recommend that you do that system in its entirety. There’s a lot of good stuff to learn there, but that’s an example of an overly complex system that if you really try to fully implement that you’ll spend more time on the system than you will getting things done, at least in my opinion.

That gets me to number ten. This is the time management thing that everyone wants to mention and it’s going to scare you if you’ve done it before. Outsource.

If you are outsourcing things now you understand what I’m talking about and it’s all good. But, if you’re a person who has never outsourced anything before the thing that’s running through your mind is you’re frightened, you don’t want to do that, you’re afraid of giving people passwords and all that kind of stuff. Whatever your objections are, there are many that people have. Or you can’t afford it, that’s another one I hear all the time.

Let me suggest to you that you try a little experiment. There are three places where you can outsource something and it’s not very expensive and you can just do it as an experiment. It will give you a little taste of what outsourcing might be able to do for you. There are three that I recommend you try out, pick one and try it. Fiverr.com, Odesk.com, and MediaPiston.com. Media Piston is partnering with Odesk these days, which is really cool, so you can use your Odesk login to login at Media Piston.

On Fiverr you can get almost any crazy thing done. Some of the crazy voice overs, like the Clinton voice over that you heard on this show, have come from Fiverr. You can get blog posts written on Fiverr or you can get all kinds of crazy things.

You’re not going to get super great quality on some stuff, but some stuff you will be shocked at how good it is. Peek around on Fiverr, find something that maybe you weren’t expecting that you can do from an outsourcing perspective and try that to see what you think. It will only cost you five dollars.

Odesk is a little more wide open. You can get a little programming done. Maybe there’s a little widget on your blog that you’ve been wanting to do but you don’t know how to do it. Maybe you don’t like your footer or you need a new header or something like that. On Odesk you can do that really easily. Graphics and programming are really excellent things to do on Odesk.

My advice to you is when you write your requirements for the job be as specific as you possibly can and tell them everything that you possibly think you might want them to know about what it is that you want. The more you tell people up front the better off you’ll be.

The second thing I’ll tell you about Odesk is pay attention to the feedback. Don’t hire the guy from some foreign country who has no feedback just because he’s got the low bid. Hire a guy with some positive feedback so that you have some idea that this guy or gal has done something before and has some chance of completing a task successfully for you.

The last place I’d encourage you to try is this new place I’ve been using for writing, Media Piston. You go in and specify the kind of thing you want, if you want a 300 word blog post, a press release, an ebook, if you want them to rewrite an article, I think they’re doing spinning and all kinds of stuff.

Any kind of writing you want, they can do. They can do a boiler plate job, which is a certain level of quality. It’s all pretty high quality. They can do a custom job, which is even higher quality. Specify what you want, you’ll know the cost up front and you can choose a writer or they will assign one for you to get something written.

If you’ve got a blog post that you want to do you might want to try this out and see. If it’s something that you kind of want to cover, but you don’t really want to write about it, give Media Piston a try. They’re really cool and I’ve been very impressed with the quality over there.

That’s it. Choose a passionate niche, have a great plan and focus on it, try to accomplish something every day, go on an information diet, latch onto someone who inspires you, convert your wasted time into work time, ditch that television, use more technology, avoid magic systems, and outsource your stuff whenever you can. Those are my 10 tips for better time management when you’re trying to run a internet business part time. Time Management Course

That’s going to get us to the interview with Jason Van Orden. As I said, Jason has got a time management course and it’s excellent. I’ve been through the course, it’s really well targeted towards internet marketers. You can check it out at MasonWorld.com/extreme.

I interviewed Jason over Skype in a hotel room. It was really funny, I was getting echo in there as I mentioned on that podcast. When I did the setup for Jason I didn’t have all the cables and everything that I needed, so I set up Skype on my Macbook and I put my Ederrol field recorder wrapped up in a towel in a pillow close to the PC speaker and that’s how I recorded this interview. When you’re on the road you do all kinds of crazy things.

Without too much further ado, let’s throw it over to that phone call with Jason Van Orden. Mark Interviews Jason Van Orden

Mark: I’m still in Taiwan and I’m very pleased to be on Skype with Jason Van Orden. Jason, how are you?

Jason: I’m good. Thanks, Mark.

Mark: Everyone knows I talk about the Internet Business Mastery Podcast a lot on my podcast. Everyone knows about you and stuff that you’ve been throwing down over the last five years. I think you and I originally hooked up in 2007.

I got word that you had released a new product on time management and it’s a perfect fit for my listeners. I wanted to see if I could squeeze some free time management advice out of you, understand the motivation for this, and kind of catch up with you and see what’s going on with you and your seven figure internet business over there at Internet Business Mastery. How’s that sound?

Jason: That sounds great.

Mark: I really appreciate you coming on the phone. I mentioned that I’ve got my equipment wrapped up in a towel. I apologize. I’m on the road in a hotel room in Shinshu, Taiwan, I’m out of my studio and I’ve got portable equipment. One of the problems that I have in this hotel room is echo and all that kind of stuff. I think that’s something you’re super familiar with. Right?

Jason: Yes. We do what we can to get the good audio.

Mark: I was telling my listeners that you had this same problem in Argentina and you were podcasting under a blanket for a long time.

Jason: My computer and my recording set up was in a room with 10 foot ceilings and that was the only way to keep the echo under control.

Mark: I want to talk to you about this time management problem that internet marketers have. I thought it was funny, because you and I have known each other for a long time. You at one point in your life were sort of a 16 hour or 18 hour a day guy, right?

Jason: Most definitely I have been there, yes.

Mark: I’m like that. I do my internet marketing late at night, so I have long days a lot of times too. I’m very interested in understanding how your thinking about time management has evolved and maybe hearing a little bit of the personal side about how things are going for you now that you have a child. Calliope is how old now?

Jason: She’s 11 weeks old now.

Mark: How does having a baby compare to what you expected?

Jason: I can say that it is certainly a whole lot of fun having a baby, which I did expect that it would be fulfilling, otherwise I don’t think I would doing the parenthood thing. It’s been a lot of joy.

I often say to my wife, “I don’t know how people are new parents when they don’t have the nice flexible schedule that we do, because it would be really tough if I had to go away to work and commute and be away from home for hours and hours a day when I’ve got this new child around.”

So I’m loving it given that I’m able to spend the time I want with her and I’m not under tons and tons of stress from a job during that the day that I don’t enjoy. I feel like my life is in balance, which is good. In that sense, I’m loving being a parent.

Mark: We’re not going to have time today to go into it, but for people who are interested in it they can go over to the Internet Business Mastery Podcast. You’re all about understanding a purpose, understanding what your goals, not just monetary goals but fulfillment goals.

The amazing thing to me is that what you seem to be saying is that you are managing this big Internet Business Mastery franchise, which is providing for your family, you’ve grown this business, I’ve heard you say publicly several times that you’ve doubled the revenue of that business every year for the last five years.

What you’re telling me is you’re doing this now with a new baby and you’re not working 16 hours a day anymore. What is your day like?

Jason: Right now my wife and I switch off in the morning as to who gets up with the baby when she wakes up around 8:00 AM. For instance, this morning I got up with the baby and I spend a couple hours with her and then she wants to go for a nap. We have the whole baby wearing thing going on, so I might have her napping on me for an hour while I do a bit of work or while I make and eat breakfast.

Then my wife’s getting up and getting ready for the day. At some point she leaves to go and volunteer with this dance company that she’s involved with and takes the baby with her. That gives me a window of two or three hours where I exercise, work on my business for a couple of hours, and interact with my business partner.

Then they come back in the late afternoon and I’m able to just spend time in the late afternoon and evening with them.

The wonderful thing is my business keeps growing – not only maintaining, but growing – with only demanding of me somewhere between two to four hours a day working on my business.

Mark: For people that haven’t been around for you for a long time, that’s a hug shift from where you were even when you first started in internet business. It’s amazing to me that you’re able to accomplish what you are able to accomplish with Sterling and in some of your other ventures and still keep that kind of control over your life.

I know you’re always getting this question and trying to teach some in the academy. How in the world are you able to do that? I guess that’s the point of this latest product is to try and collect up all those lessons you’ve learned over the last five years and try to boil them down into something practical that people can actually go do.

Jason: Absolutely. I was a very different person in terms of how I managed and thought about my time, even five years ago. Of course my businesses (I have more than one) were in more of a fledgling state then, so certainly working more was partly a necessity at the time.

But, also a lot of it was just my mindset and the way I thought about it. I felt like if I’m not putting my nose to the grindstone then I’m not going to get the payoff, which was just kind of a false belief that I had picked up from the past. It’s like “you’re not going to get the payoff until it hurts.”

Thankfully, I’ve learned over the years that the more I focus on my strengths and the more I focus on the high ROI (return on investment) activities of my business that I can grow my business and be fulfilled and see the success that I want without having to put in these painful 10, 12, 14 hour days, and even often without having to work an eight hour day on my business.

It’s been several months now that both my business partner and I have because of anticipating the baby and everything pulled things down to a two to four hour work day. To our surprise, things haven’t shrunk at all. It’s not even like we’ve been in a stagnant maintenance stage either.

If you build your business up in a way that it focuses on your strengths and it’s systematized, there’s that 80/20 people refer to of finding those 20% of the things that are going to give you 80% of the results. Which 80/20 is kind of an arbitrary split but that gives you an idea of the principle there, which I’ve found is a very true principle.

With time I’ve found how to have the systems, it’s a combination of systems and a way of thinking – mindset – that have brought me to this place where I am of being able to focus, not being overwhelmed, growing a business and working so little all at the same time. Mark: It’s funny that you talk about systems, because at the beginning of the course – I’ve been through almost all of it, I hadn’t quite made it when we had to start the call through the back half – one of the things you do up front is myth busting.

I love this myth that you bust about the perfect system or perfect tool is going to solve your time management problems, like you can go get out your MasterCard and spend $500 on a gadget and that’s going to solve your time management woes. The reason that I love that so much is because I was that guy.

Tell me. I know this course is full of information and advice and lessons learned that people can practically apply, that’s the point. But, if you were stuck in an elevator for two minutes with somebody and you had to give them one piece of time management advice that would help them grow their internet business or accomplish whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish in their life and you only had two minutes to give it… what would you say?

Jason: A lot of people get very overwhelmed, and obviously that’s counterproductive to making progress and being fulfilled. Not getting overwhelmed is about filtering the input coming into your life.

One of the key pieces of input for somebody just beginning with an internet business or with any pursuit in life is that they’re so overwhelmed by how much stuff there is seemingly to learn. Everybody has a new system for them to check out, there’s all these books, blog posts, and email newsletters.

One big thing that we often teach about which has changed everything for us is going on an information diet and adhering to a principle called just in time learning. Stop taking all these pieces of input that are not relevant to the most important thing to you to accomplish right now. That might mean even stop watching the news or going after information that in the end is just bringing you down.

If you’re in the beginning stages of your business don’t be devouring this big traffic course, even though somebody makes it sound like it’s the magic bullet of all internet business. You need to find a system and just do the next step, which might be to find your niche. Don’t learn anything or consume anything except for what you need to choose a niche. Once you’ve done that then don’t learn anything or do anything except for how to launch the website, which would be the next step. Then after you’ve done that then don’t consume anything except for if it has to do with how to start creating some content for that website.

Knowing what that next most important step is and if a piece of information doesn’t have to do with that one next most important step it gets filtered, it gets ignored, it gets unsubscribed, it gets pulled out of your blog feed. You’re very laser focused about the information that you allow into your life and the learning that you take in as well.

In that sense you’re going to make a whole lot more progress and have a whole lot less overwhelm. That’s one really key principle I could share in a two minute time frame.

Mark: That’s excellent. That’s something that I learned from you guys. Guys like us – that describe as lifetime learners, and I know that a lot of people on this podcast are like that – we’re interested in learning stuff, all kinds of stuff. I’m an engineer, I’m very interested in how things work, I like to learn about the details of internet business and marketing strategies, I love podcasts, I love to consume information.

At some point you can get into a situation where all you’re doing is consuming information and you’re not taking action. I love that tip, I think it’s excellent. I think people should back up the recording and listen to that last two minutes again, because that’s a really valuable one.

Jason: That changed a lot of things for me when I started thinking in that sense, absolutely.

Mark: In terms of this product, I’m going through it and I appreciated the beginning in terms of myth busting, I like a lot of the things that you implied.

One of the things that you base a lot of your ideas on, but don’t actually use the details of, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. It’s funny, because even last week I actually recorded a segment of the podcast at 38,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, I wonder if I’m the first person to ever do that. Probably not.

Jason: That’s awesome.

Mark: I thought it was cool anyway. We’ll see what my listeners think. I know that the things that you do are influenced by David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, but you’re not one of these people that religiously applies GTD. You seem to have taken the best things out of GTD and applied them in what I’d call a sensible way.

Can you talk a little bit about that and how you use key concepts in GTD to manage your time?

Jason: Sure. This is all about reducing overwhelm.

One thing that overwhelms people – I want to make this point first – is when we do go and read a book about time management or take a course about productivity we can all immediately start feeling overwhelmed because we think, “This is great, but now I’ve got to try to apply this whole system,” and we expect of ourselves to use it all or we expect of ourselves to use it all immediately.

When that doesn’t happen we feel like then either the system is flawed or we’re flawed, and often we turn it inward and say that we’re flawed. Then you get overwhelmed and that doesn’t help at all either. I totally get it, because I tend to be a perfectionist who is like, “If I can’t do it all perfectly, it’s not worth doing at all.”

An important thing I’ve learned along the way is that with these kinds of systems they’re not one size fits all. Even our own course site says my hope would be that you could just take even those few key things that would completely change what you’re doing right now and make it more efficient. For me, GTD did that.

Getting Things Done teaches about the next action – what’s the one next action that needs to be taken? When a piece of input comes into your email inbox is this actionable, yes or no, and making quick decisions about that. If it’s something you can do in two minutes or less just do it now, if not put it into a system where it won’t get forgotten.

All we need to think about is not the whole project of what needs to be done out of this, but just what’s that next action of 20 minutes or less that needs to be done. That’s a key principle that I took from GTD that’s all about reducing overwhelm.

I think one of the biggest things I got out of his book is how he processes input. I’d say that the system we teach in our course is definitely by how he processes input with a little more gearing specifically for internet business, as well as hopefully some simplification to make it less overwhelming than Getting Things Done can be, and in such a way that people can implement it in phases bit by bit and see those incremental improvements in their own productivity, time management, and focus to watch that overwhelm start shrinking away.

Mark: Thank you for that. Since we are talking about time management, I want to be respectful of your time. I appreciate it and I want to let you get back to Calliope.

We had dinner a couple of years ago, you might remember, and at that time I told you and Melanie I thought you would be excellent parents. From everything that I can tell about what’s going on in your life from Facebook, I think you’re exceeding my expectations for you. I’m really happy for you and Melanie and Calliope. I’m excited about this product.

As you know, I only recommend products to my audience that I actually use and that I really believe will help them. I’m quite positive you’re going to help a ton of people with this product. Thanks very much for getting on the phone with me.

Jason: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that.

Mark: People who are listening to this obviously listen to podcasts and I want to tell people if they want another outstanding internet marketing podcast to listen to that really is not just about internet marketing, but about great business principles and things that they can apply to their life, I want t encourage them to listen to you and Sterling. I just wanted to thank you personally for the influence you’ve had over me and my business over the last five years. I’m really looking forward to the next five and I really appreciate your time today, Jason.

Jason: Thanks, Mark.

Mark: Thank you very much. We’ll talk to you soon. That wraps it up for today. I’m headed out on the road again. I’m headed over to Florida for a little while. I hope you have an absolutely fantastic week.

Try and get some stuff done this week and try to latch onto one of my 10 tips here. If I were going to pick one I would probably say try to accomplish a little something on your internet business every day. Don’t let a day go by when you don’t do something tangible. I think that will really help you.

I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day.

To your success!

Mark Mason, MasonWorld.com

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