I don’t like my job and it frustrates me to the point of tears sometimes. Late last year, I cried at work three times in a week. Each time I felt the tears a-comin’, I hightailed it to my hiding spot until I calmed down.
However, this last week I cried a big, ugly, can’t breath cry. In my manager’s office. In front of two of my managers.
I’m not sure where it came from (I’m quick to blame PMS because it’s easy) and eventually I was just crying because I was crying in my manager’s office. I know I didn’t explain myself nearly as well as I would have liked, so now I feel like an overly emotional little girl (hello, not helping the “little one” nickname!).
Once it was over, I had to walk from her office through a hallway of other offices that sometimes can be a ghost town, but of course at this point was crawling with managers. All day long people were asking me if I was okay and being an overly emotional girly girl that day, it just made me want to cry again.
All I could think of was that I’m doomed at work now. You’re just not supposed to cry at work. Can I overcome it? My mom tried to make me feel better saying that it showed how much I care. Truth is I don’t, but if that’s the illusion it gives, I suppose I’ll go with it.
Do you ever consider what it’d be like to jump into a new career, convince someone you know what you’re doing and just give it a whirl… just like they do in the movies? You know, they don’t always check your employment background. It’s based on trust. So say tomorrow I wanted to get a job as a cake decorator but never touched a cake in my life, could you pull it off?
PS. I did not do that for the job I just got! Just an idea… a thought… something craZy going on in the mind of Nibby…
How do I prioritize my work? Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive time management and productivity training program. If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com, and enter your name and email address. You can watch this video worth $100.00 for free.
Let’s talk about how to prioritize our work to get the right things done and to become very productive. One of the things that I’ve learned in business is that there are only a few things that matter. If you only worked on those few things, you would get very, very strong, very, very profitable results. If you don’t do those few things, then you’re going to get horrible results. Now, because most of us are distracted, and we’re interrupted, and we’ve got a lot of things on our minds, and we’ve got a big list of To Dos, it’s sometimes not easy to remember to just take a minute and ask, “What are the important things?” When we do take a minute to ask, “What are the important things?” sometimes, we don’t have tools that allow us to value the different things on the list and to get the important things to the top. I’m going to give you a couple of tools right now.
The first tool is what I call my productivity pyramid. The simple way to use this tool is to start, take a blank piece of paper, and draw a triangle or a pyramid, and break it into four levels. The bottom level – inside of the bottom level, write, “Zero value or negative value.” The second level, write, “Low dollar per hour activities.” The next level up or the second level from the top, label that, “High dollar per hour activities.” Then, the top, the capstone of the pyramid, that’s, “High lifetime value activities.”
Now, zero value or negative value, these are things that you do that literally have no value or they may have negative value. These would be things like gossiping or complaining or eating junk food because you feel like you have low energy. They’re things that actually bring no value or possible they’re counterproductive. They have negative value.
The second level, which is low dollar per hour activities, this would be all of the administrative work that you do. Like if you’re mailing out several pieces of mail: if you’re writing the address and putting the stamps on the envelope and bringing them to the post office. This is low dollar per hour activity. This might be $10.00 or $20.00 per hour activities.
The next level, which is high dollar per hour activities, this is where it starts to get really interesting because this is where you’re doing things that are actually creating results very quickly that bring in money or bring in value to you and your business. A typical example might be talking to a customer who’s interested in buying something from you. That would be maybe considered a sales call or a sales conversation because if it results in a sale or a customer buying something, that brings in a lot of money right now.
Now, at the pinnacle or the capstone, this is high lifetime value activities. These are actually the most valuable activities that you can do. As it turns out, they’re the things that we usually don’t do because they’re not that urgent. Stephen Covey, in his four-quadrant time management system, he talks about these. These are really part of the Quadrant 2 – things that are important, but they’re not really urgent. Things that if you do them consistently over time, they build a lot of value. They build a big foundation for value creation and income, but because they’re long-term projects, and they require a lot of investment, we don’t get around to them.
In our personal lives, things like exercise and creating a diet plan that really works. These are high lifetime value activities. They pay dividends for life. In the business sphere, some of the high lifetime value activities would be creating a new product or a new service that’s going to be sold over and over and over again. Another high lifetime value activity might be creating a marketing piece or something that you’re going to give away to customers to entice them and get them to check out your business. This video right here is a high lifetime value activity for me because thousands and thousands of people will watch this over the coming years. They’ll learn about my products and services, and they will come and visit me. It has high lifetime value.
What I’d like you do is make a pyramid for yourself, and list out the things that you do every day, all the typical things that you do. What are the things that have zero or negative value? What are the things that have low dollar per hour value? What are the things that have high dollar per hour value? And then, what are the things that have high lifetime value? And just by looking at them, by seeing them and understanding their relationship to each other, that’ll create some awareness, and it’ll have a click, and it’ll let you know which things to prioritize at the top of the list every day because those are the things that bring you high lifetime value and high dollar per hour value.
Now, the next thing I’d like to teach you is a concept that took me a long time to realize. In business, there are only three things that really ring the cash register, increase the value of your business, create value for others and actually make you a lot of money long term. Those three things are products, marketing and relationships. Let me say them again. Products, marketing and relationships. These are big categories, and obviously, a lot more than just products fits in the products bin because it can be products, it can be services. It can be an integration of the two. Things that you’re going to sell are what I’m talking about. Marketing is all of the marketing and sales activities that you do. Things to bring in customers, and maybe you might consider good customer service in there because in a lot of ways, good customer service is good marketing.
And then relationships. Relationships with partners, people who would like to sell your stuff for you, employees, team members, people that work with you, that type of thing. Here’s what I’ll tell you. If you want to have a dramatically more successful business and dramatically more successful life and make a lot more money in a lot less time, invest 80 percent of your time working on products, marketing and relationships. Products, marketing and relationships. If you just prioritize products, marketing and relationships to the top of your list every day, you will wake up three months, six months, nine months, twelve months from now, and your productivity and your income will be skyrocketing. So those are a couple of great tools and ideas for prioritizing your work and your life.
Finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.
The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success and productivity all for free.
Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.
So I recently put 2 and 5 together to sort of kind of figure out where the $17.53 went missing.
Well, on that very Sunday that I calculated my net worth, I totally forgot that I did LAUNDRY! That was exactly $7.50. It was also an 1.5 hours of my life that I will never get back. So sad. As for the $10.03, I’m thinking that I may have forgotten to include one of my church donations ($10.00) and I may have dropped 3 pennies somewhere. My wallet, even though it is cute, has a gaping hole on the top so one sudden movement and there go my coins flying all over the place.
Although this is a giant conjecture, I am glad that I can finally get some sleep at night, because it was really bothering me. I was having nightmares where a gang consisting of a $10 bill, a $5 bill and two $1 bill would chase me. And they were using quarters and pennies as ammo. Ok, ok, it wasn’t that dramatic, but isn’t that just a scary thought?
Well, I may have solved that case, but now I have other questions lingering on my mind:
1) So I bought tickets to go see Avatar in December. Except I didn’t pay the bill until February. Now, since I didn’t have a budget in January and February, I can’t say that I stored that cost in anticipation for the bill. Does this mean that this will have to deduct this from my February entertainment budget? Cuz that would be sad. Very, very sad. Or, should I create a new category called Stuff That I Bought Before but Forgot to Pay for Until Now?
2) Although I created the Misc. purchases category out of sheer laziness, should I break those costs down into their respective categories? My thinking was that if I bought food from CVS, for example, then that would be food that I wouldn’t be consuming outside, hence maintaining the balance in the universe. But now I’m slowly seeing my Misc. category grow and I’m wondering if maybe I should ixnay the laziness.
3) Why is that tracking your expenses increases instances of buyers’ remorse? Gosh I felt bad about getting a deal at CVS (buy one get one free cereal. That’s two boxes for $4.49!!). I used to get annoyed when PF bloggers would write about how they bought something and how the shame of the world descended upon them for their purchase. Then they would proceed with self-flagellation as repentance for their sins. Except now, I’m all like, omg, did I really buy something again? Newbie, you’ve GOT TO DO BETTER.
But then I walk out of the store and gorge on the pint of ice cream I just purchased and the pain just goes away. But the question still stands: why does budgeting make life feel bad?!!
I may be a detective, but I am not a one-man show. Would love to hear your thoughts/solutions on my pending questions/investigations.
Some people you just can’t impress no matter how hard you try and even if you do a good job they’ll put you down no matter what. Some people may feel bad about this and some may even know people in the workplace that are this way. All you can do is just congrat yourself for doing a good job and not go by their approval especially since however good you try they just won’t approve. But just keep on trying because that’s all that you can do. Don’t just give up and fail because that would just be worse. Try and try again and maybe someday they’ll approve, but until then see how you’ve improved and done better for yourself. Maybe even make a journal to keep track so that you can tell how you improved and how you can feel better by your results even though it may never satisfy your boss. You’ll know better once this happens and it wouldn’t make you feel so bad about yourself in the end. Keep on keeping on.
Hey friends, this is an amazing story that tells us to always have a plan B in mind…..i am sure you learn a lesson of life at the end of this story…Nice one!!
A pretty woman was serving a life sentence in prison. Angry and resentful about her situation, she had decided that she would rather die than to live another year in prison. Over the years she had become good friends with one of the prison caretakers. His job, among others, was to bury those prisoners who died in a graveyard just outside the prison walls. When a prisoner died, the caretaker rang a bell, which was heard by everyone. The caretaker then got the body and put it in a casket. Next, he entered his office to fill out the death certificate before returning to the casket to nail the lid shut. Finally, he put the casket on a wagon to take it to the graveyard and bury it.
Knowing this routine, the woman devised an escape plan and shared it with the caretaker. The next time the bell rang, the woman would leave her cell and sneak into the dark room where the coffins were kept. She would slip into the coffin with the dead body while the caretaker was filling out the death certificate. When the care-taker returned, he would nail the lid shut and take the coffin outside the prison with the woman in the coffin along with the dead body. He would then bury the coffin. The woman knew there would be enough air for her to breathe until later in the evening when the caretaker would return to the graveyard under the cover of darkness, dig up the coffin, open it, and set her free.The caretaker was reluctant to go along with this plan, but since he and the woman had become good friends over the years, he agreed to do it.
The woman waited several weeks before someone in the prison died. She was asleep in her cell when she heard the death bell ring. She got up and slowly walked down the hallway. She was nearly caught a couple of times. Her heart was beating fast. She opened the door to the darkened room where the coffins were kept. Quietly in the dark, she found the coffin that contained the dead body, carefully climbed into the coffin and pulled the lid shut to wait for the caretaker to come and nail the lid shut.
Soon she heard footsteps and the pounding of the hammer and nails. Even though she was very uncomfortable in the coffin with the dead body, she knew that with each nail she was one step closer to freedom. The coffin was lifted onto the wagon and taken outside to the graveyard. She could feel the coffin being lowered into the ground. She didn’t make a sound as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave with a thud. Finally she heard the dirt dropping onto the top of the wooden coffin, and she knew that it was only a matter of time until she would be free at last. After several minutes of absolute silence, she began to laugh. She was free! She was free! Feeling curious, she decided to light a match to find out the identity of the dead prisoner beside her.
To her horror, she discovered that she was lying next to the dead caretaker.
Many people believe they have life all figured out….. but sometimes it just doesn’t turn out the way they planned it.
If poverty overtake thee, be not sad; for in time the Lord of wealth shall visit thee. Fear not abasement, for glory shall one day rest on thee.
Baha’u'llah
As I am looking for a job these words from the ’Hidden Words’ of Baha’u'llah have given me great comfort and have re-energised my faith that I will find something soon – far better than any job I have ever had before! It also reminds me, given that I come from a Shia background of a Surah from the Noble Qur’an (also holy scripture, as with many other books of world religions, in the Baha’i faith):
Surah Ad-Duha (The Morning Hours)
Bismillah ar-rahman ar-Rahim
By the morning hours,
And by the night when it is stillest,
Thy Lord hath not forsaken thee nor doth He hate thee,
And very the latter portion will be better for thee than the former,
And very thy Lord will give unto Thee so that thou wilt be content,
Did He not find thee and orphan and protect thee?
Did He not find thee wandering and direct thee?
Did He not find thee destitute and enrich thee?
Therefore the orphan oppress not,
Therefore the beggar drive not away,
Therefore the bounty of thy Lord be thy discourse.
Again, this is more proof that whilst we may suffer trials and difficluties in life, God is always there waiting to make your life so much better once you have came through it. It’s as the Buddhist sage Nichiren Shonin says:
