To be able to do whatever I want without worrying about
money.
2. My long-term health goal: To be active, fully functioning, and
pain free till age 90.
3. My long-term personal-relationship goal: To be remembered as a
great dad, loving spouse, loyal friend, and charitable soul.
4. My long-term personal growth and development goal: To be a successful
novelist, filmmaker, and linguist.
My Wealth-Building Goals for the Year
• Get a $10,000 raise.
• Take a course in direct marketing.
• Start my own plumbing supply Internet business.
• Make friends with 12 powerful people in the plumbing industry.
My Health Goals for the Year
• Bench-press 250 pounds.
• Run six miles in 40 minutes.
• Get my HDL cholesterol to 80 or above.
• Master the lotus position.
My Personal Relationship Goals for the Year
• Host a monthly dinner party with friends.
• Raise $5,000 for my favorite charity.
• Repair my relationship with Aunt Pollie.
• Develop the habit of remembering people’s names.
My Personal Growth and Development Goals for the Year
• Become a competent judge of good wine.
• Read 12 new books about science.
• Add 50 new stamps to my stamp collection.
• Learn to play something on the guitar.
If you are going to be first in your corporation, start practicing by being
first on the job. People who arrive at work late don’t like their jobs—at
least that’s what senior management thinks. . . . And don’t stay at the
office until 10 o’clock every night. You are sending a signal that you can’t
keep up or your personal life is poor.
One of the yearly objectives in our example is to get a business
started. So you would break that down into 12 monthly goals—what
you need to do each month to get your business up and running, from
doing the initial research to the grand opening.
Then you break each of those 12 monthly goals into 4 weekly
goals. For instance, if your first monthly goal in getting a new business
started is to identify a good business opportunity, perhaps each of your
4 weekly goals will be to research at least 10 possibilities.
Finally, you work your way down to the action you will take each
day to fulfill your weekly objective. If you have made a commitment to
research 10 business opportunities each week, that means one of the top
priorities on your daily to-do list will be to research two possibilities.
Expect to spend one full day planning out your year.
Once a month, you’ll sit down for two or three hours to map out your goals
for the next four weeks.
Once a week, you’ll spend one hour establishing
your goals for the next seven days.
And you’ll spend about 10 or 15 minutes each morning organizing your day.
I know that sounds like a lot, but taken all together you’re really
spending no more than three days a year to map out your strategy for
achieving financial independence in the next 7 to 15 years.
This is how I establish my goals, focus my objectives, and set daily
tasks. It’s not, by any means, an entirely original system. It’s a patchwork
of systems that have been developed by others and added to by me. But
there is something about this particular system that seems to work.
It works so well, in fact, that I encourage everyone who works for
me to use it. Those who do find that it works very well.
(1) Important and Urgent,
(2) Important but not Urgent,
(3) Unimportant but Urgent, or
(4) Unimportant and not Urgent.
If we work with this idea, your daily schedule should be focused
• An A task is something that is important, something you must do.
• A B task is something you should do, yet it’s not an A.
• A C task is something that would be nice to do, but it won’t change your life in a radical way.
• A D task is something that should be delegated.
• And, finally, an E task is something that shouldn’t be done at all.
It should be eliminated from your task list.
Productivity Secret No. 1: Streamline Your E-mail
E-mail has become a way of life for most of us—especially in business—
but it doesn’t have to take a huge bite out of your work life. With just a
few changes in the way you manage e-mail, you’ll save yourself one or
more hours every day that you can apply to constructive goals.
I mentioned earlier that I sift through my e-mail only once or twice
a day (at most) to keep it from consuming hours of my time. A lot of
the messages that I get are questions about problems that people are
looking to me to resolve. Most of them I simply ignore. And I find
that they are usually handled just fine without my interference.
If you don’t micromanage every situation, your staff will eventually
get the point that it’s up to them to take care of most of the day-today
problems that arise. That will make them (and your entire organization)
stronger and thus more profitable. And should an e-mail
message raise your ire, you’ll have given yourself time to cool down
and respond to it in a professional manner.
Here are a few other ideas to help you streamline the process even
further.
• Keep your e-mail messages short and to the point—and ask the
people who e-mail you to do the same. Very few messages
need to be more than a screen-page long—and those that pose
a problem should always be presented with multiple-choice
solutions.
• If you find that you need more than one screen page to say what
you have to say, the subject is probably too involved to be handled
effectively through e-mail. You need to do it over the
phone or face-to-face instead.
• This bit of advice may go completely against your grain, but
I’ll give it anyway: Make it a point to let e-mail messages wait
unless they’re real red-light emergencies. Here’s why I tell you
that. It is said that Napoleon Bonaparte waited a month before
answering letters. “If a response is still needed, I will write it
then,” he said. I feel pretty much the same way about responding
to e-mail.
• In addition to letting e-mails wait, you can cut the time it takes
to answer many of them by creating templates to reply to the
questions you are asked most often. Not only will you save time,
your responses will also all be well structured and well written.
• Give your correspondents the courtesy of knowing when they will
hear from you. This can be done by creating an automessage that
alerts senders when to expect a reply. It will help ease their minds
and keep them from sending you multiple follow-up messages. This
works especially well when you’re out of the office, so you don’t
come back to a barrage of e-mails from testy clients or employees.
• As many as 50 percent of the messages you send could be
reduced to a short statement in the subject line. For example:
Staff meeting moved to 1:30 P.M.
FedEx package just arrived.
Yes, I’ll marry you. (I hope, however, you’ll consider handling
this one in person.)
No need to waste your precious time going into detail about
why the meeting was changed, admonishing people to be on
time, and a bunch of other stuff that nobody cares about. By distilling
your message to its essence in the subject line, you also
save time for the people you’re sending it to. They won’t feel
compelled to respond to it—and you won’t have to bother with
reading and deleting multiple versions of “Okay, I’ll be at the
staff meeting. Looking forward to it.” Just think how much time
everyone in your office and all your friends could save if they
used this tip. How can you get them to do it? Lead by example.
Start doing it yourself. And forward this tip to everyone with
whom you regularly communicate via e-mail.
• One last piece of advice about e-mails: Forget instant messaging!
According to the New York Times, a quarter of American employees
use instant messaging at work. “It’s free and easy to download,”
proclaims the article. “The most productive thing I’ve
ever seen,” rejoices one executive interviewed by the paper.
Instant messaging is great if your primary goal at work is to waste
as much of your time as possible. By allowing your workday to
be interrupted constantly by friends and colleagues out there on
the Web, you can be assured you will never spend any great
length of time focusing. “Clients appreciate receiving an instant
reply to a question,” the executive cited above said. Maybe. But
they might not like it so much if the replies were honest, such as
“I don’t have an answer for you on that now since I’m too busy
answering instant messages.”
Productivity Secret No. 2: Attack Similar Tasks in Blocks
Whether you have to answer 25 e-mails, make nine phone calls, or
write three memos, you’ll easily save yourself an hour a day just by
lumping like tasks together and blocking out time in your schedule to
tackle them all at once.
Assembling common tasks makes you much more efficient. So
group them into one category on your daily to-do list and allot them
a specific amount of time in your schedule.
And while you’re at it, block out some time for yourself as well.
Full schedules without relaxation lead to burnout. So along with the
various and sundry tasks you have to accomplish, you need to give
yourself a few 5-minute, 10-minute, and 15-minute blocks of “me”
time each day.
You might enjoy a walk in the sun. Or a crossword puzzle and a
cup of coffee. I have three routines I like right now. When I’m a bit
pressed, I retire to a table and chair outside my office and read correspondence
and other business papers while I enjoy a nice Dominican
robusto. When I need to have a casual conversation with someone, I
do it over a rack of pool (with cigar smoke mandatory). When I’m not
overwhelmed by work, I smoke a cigar and read a poem.
Productivity Secret No. 3:Take Control of Your
Schedule with This Simple Device
Do you start your day with the best of intentions—organize your
schedule, block out your time, highlight important goals, and vow to
stick to it today—only to find your good intentions shot to hell by noon?
It’s hard to keep track of the time. You bury yourself in work and
the next time you look up, three hours have passed and you don’t have
half the things done you’d planned. I’ve solved that problem with an electric egg timer. It looks like the
conventional, windup kind but runs on batteries. When I begin a
project, I allot it a certain amount of time. When that time expires, the
timer signals me with an ascending scale of louder and louder beeps.
I keep the timer at the far end of the office so that I can’t just reach
over and turn it off. I have to get out of my chair and cross the room.
Then, instead of returning to my desk to start a new task, I leave the
office to take a brief, one-minute walk or stretch. This gives me a
breather and helps me switch tracks to the next project.
Another way your timer can help you control your schedule is
when someone comes into your office and says, “I have a quick question.
Got a minute?” Say “sure,” and set your egg timer for a minute.
Productivity Secret No. 4: Get Company Meetings under Control
I believe wholeheartedly in limiting company meetings. Too much
time gets wasted in daily meetings that stretch on for an hour and two
hours without accomplishing anything of significant value for anyone
there.
Whether or not you’re leading the meeting, you should always
have a plan before attending. Your plan should include a specific personal
agenda (e.g., “I will leave the meeting with an agreement from
Jeff on the new product”) as well as ideas about how to attain that goal
(e.g., “I’ll make him a quick, logical argument—and if he doesn’t go
for that, I’ll remind him of the favor he owes me”).
Obviously, you can’t just stop having meetings altogether. You can,
however, reduce both the number held each week and the time they
take. That leaves an extra hour or more of productive work to advance
your company’s objectives as well as your own career and personal goals.
The biggest challenge with meetings is to start them on time and
keep them short and on point. It’s aggravating when people walk in 10
minutes late and disrupt the flow of ideas in order to be brought up to
speed. It’s even more aggravating when the meeting then drags on,
chewing up an hour or more of your time without accomplishing the
things it was meant to.
If you find that the usual weekly meetings are starting late and going
too long, you may want to try this: Rather than meeting for an hour
every week, meet for 10 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
With only 10 minutes available, the meeting will have to start on
time. You will find—as I have found—that more gets done because
you’re forced to focus on the most important issues right away. You
will save a half hour per week (three full days a year). And latecomers
will learn a valuable lesson about punctuality:There’s no time to bring
them up to speed in a 10-minute meeting, so they will have to catch
up on their own time—and will likely show up when they’re supposed
to next time.
Productivity Secret No. 5: Limit Memos to One Page
Another way you can streamline your day is by changing the way you
write simple business documents. Writing a memo can take 30 minutes
or more. But you can cut that time in half and double the power
and clarity of your message simply by shortening the length and stating
your primary point earlier.
When business writing is bad, it’s usually because of one of four
problems:
1. It’s too complicated.
2. It’s too confusing.
3. It’s too vague.
4. It’s unconvincing.
All four of these common problems can be combated by a straightforward
thesis stated very early in the copy.
Stating your main point early lets your readers know exactly what
you are talking about and why they should keep reading. If your thesis
is strong (i.e., the idea is useful to them), it will appeal to your readers
right away and motivate them to read with attention the rest of
what you have to say.
The shorter the copy, the sooner you need to use your thesis sentence.
Here’s a rough guideline:
• For copy that’s 500 words or less (the length of most memos),
make your first sentence the thesis sentence.
• For copy between 500 words and 1,500 words, state the thesis in
the first paragraph.
• For copy over 1,500 words, state the thesis within the first page.
There is no copy, however long, that justifies a thesis statement made
later than the first page.
For most memos, one page (under 500 words) works best. Mastering
the one-page memo is an invaluable business skill that will not
only make you a more powerful communicator but also sharpen your
thinking. One way to do it is to use this simple, three-part structure:
(1) Tell it, (2) explain it, and (3) retell it.
Before you type a single word, ask yourself, “What is my bottomline
thought on this subject?” If, for example, you are writing a memo
about your company’s new budget, the thought might be “Our revenue
targets are overly optimistic.”
If your idea can’t be expressed in a simple declarative statement like
that, you need to keep thinking until you have it.
Use that statement as your first sentence. Then spend most of the rest
of the page explaining what you mean by it. Don’t overexplain. And
don’t underexplain, either. Provide as much evidence as you need to
prove your point. Finally, compose a concluding sentence that harkens
back to your opening statement and also ties together any loose ends.
Productivity Secret No. 6: Learn How to Delegate
It’s not easy to delegate responsibility when you know no one else can
do the job the way you want it done, when you want it done, and how
you want it done. You’re the go-to person, the one who can answer
questions, explain things, get problems solved. This is a good and a bad
thing. Good because it gives you power. Good because it advances
your goals. Bad because it can overwhelm you if you are not careful.
Unless you are the only person in your business, reluctance to share
the workload will cripple your company. It is foolhardy to think you
can do everything yourself. Beyond driving yourself crazy, you will collapse
from exhaustion and your business will collapse along with you.
At some point you’ll have to learn to delegate or you’ll burn out.
Here are some guidelines to help you pick the right person for the task
and let it go with confidence.
• Decide where you need help. Look at your weekly to-do list. Note
the jobs you really enjoy doing and gain satisfaction from. Those
are the ones you probably won’t want to give up. Then note the
jobs that make the most of your abilities. Those are the ones you
probably shouldn’t give up. What’s left are the jobs you don’t like
or are not particularly good at. And those are the ones that
someone else may be able to fill.
• Select candidates carefully. You don’t want just anyone helping you,
because when you delegate work, the way it is done reflects
directly on you. Look for people who have an interest in the
work, have the skills to do it (or are willing to learn them), and
have the time and initiative to accomplish it.
• Make your case. Be specific about the work you want the people to
do, project goals, and any deadlines. Let them know why you chose
them and how doing the job can make them more valuable to the
organization. Show them that it will benefit them as well as you.
• Seal the deal. For some people, a handshake may be enough. But
to be on the safe side and to make sure you both understand
what will be done, put it in writing. Notify your coworkers that
this person now has the authority to do the job.
• Follow up. Check to see that things are getting done in a timely
way. Keep in mind that if the job is being done differently from
the way you would have done it, that doesn’t necessarily mean
it’s being done wrong. Keep an open mind. But if there is a
problem, address it—without getting personal.
Productivity Secret No. 7: Hire Great People
A friend and colleague of mine is a master of good hiring. His first
hire—an entry-level marketing assistant—bloomed into a world-class
marketing pro who is already running his business for him. The two of
them hired a second superstar who helped them double the business in
one year. Now the staff consists of four people, and they are doing the
business it would normally take eight people to do.
It’s not easy to hire good people, but it’s well worth the time and
effort that it takes. Here are the four most important things I’ve
learned about how to do it:
1. Make the commitment. Anything worth doing is worth doing
well. You can’t expect to hire great people if you spend just a
few hours working on it. I don’t like interviewing, and I’m
always impatient to hire the first decent person who comes
along. That’s a deadly combination.
2. Look for the right things. Intelligence is important, but I’d put it
third on my list of things to look for. I agree with Jeffrey J. Fox
in his book How to Become a Great Boss (Hyperion, 2002) that
the two most important things to look for are attitude and
aptitude.
3. Flee flaws. Generally speaking, you’ll see job candidates at their
best when you interview them. If you notice something that
seems wrong, don’t ignore it—especially if it concerns qualities
that are important for the job. When it comes to interviewing,
I’ve found that personal quirks are like the tip of an iceberg—
what you see on the surface is a very small part of what you
will have to deal with later.
4. Don’t worry too much about specific experience. Of all the qualities
that are important to look for in finding a great employee, specific
experience is not very high on my list. Yes, it’s good to
know that the person you hire can do the technical work from
day one—but on day 7 or day 14, you’ll wish you had opted for
the better, though perhaps untried and unproven, prospect.
Productivity Secret No. 8: Fire Bad Employees
When you want to save a hammock of endangered hardwoods, you
start by chopping down a lot of trees. You must get rid of the younger,
faster-growing trees that threaten the good wood in order to let the
sun come in and give the really valuable growth a chance to develop.
That is how it works in nature. And I have found that the nature of a
business is not too much different.
So how do you weed out the mediocre employees who are interfering
with the growth of your business? A successful newsletter publisher
I know did it this way . . .
With every new person he agreed to hire, he made himself a promise
that he would fire his weakest employee. He reasoned that the caliber
of his workforce would gradually improve, so long as each new
hire was better than his worst existing employee. He found himself
targeting employees with attitudinal problems (those who seemed
always unhappy) and problem workers (those who spent too much
time on the phone, on breaks, etc.).
“The only difficult thing,” he told me, “was learning how to fire
someone. I recognized it was the fear of doing so that allowed me to
tolerate those mediocre people all along. The first few dismissals were
difficult, but after that it became easier. Eventually, I came to feel I was
doing something good for the company, good for me, and good for
the hardworking, serious-minded employees who didn’t want to be
slowed down by mediocre people.”
The program worked better than he expected. Not only did he get
rid of the laggards and sour apples, but the energy of the entire workplace
improved. More work was being done more quickly. Profits and
revenues were way up. Best of all, he no longer had to spend a lot of
his time prodding the underachievers—and that freed him up to do
more of the work he really loved
CAN GETTING RICH BE SIMPLE AND EASY?
In putting together this book, I’ve reduced what was for me a complex,
sometimes contradictory, experience of moving from debt to
wealth into six simple steps.
Are they really simple?
It wasn’t simple for me when I started out. That’s for sure. Everything
seemed like a jumbled blur of false starts, restarts, and retrenchments.
But now, looking back at what I did and having the time to
analyze what worked and failed, the pattern of success does indeed
look simple.
Okay, achieving financial independence is simple. But is it easy? Or
does it require a lot of hard work?
We are all driven by desires—to work less, to enjoy more, to have
more money, to feel secure. Achieving financial independence is a
big part of achieving those desires. And if you one day acquire
wealth, it will be due in no small part to the hard work you’ve
invested.
But here’s the catch: You don’t want the hard work! I know that. And
I know that if I stress the hard work, I’ll probably scare you off. So I’m
not going to focus on that and I don’t want you to focus on that,
either. I want you to think about the money, fun, and power. I want
you to dream about the toys. And when you set your goals, they
should reflect those dreams, not the reality of hard work.
In truth, we all begin our greatest accomplishments with some
naïveté about how much time it will take . . . how many obstacles we
will encounter . . . how much frustration we will feel. If I were to take
the time to list all the things I’ve done with my life—the accomplishments
I’m most proud of—in not one case could I honestly say, “I
knew what I was getting into when I began.”
But that’s fine. The important thing is to begin, to create momentum.
A basic class in physics will tell you that it takes a great deal of
energy to get a stationary object moving—yet once it’s moving it takes
very little effort to make it change course, speed up, or slow down.
So to get you going on your path toward financial independence,
I’ve endeavored to make things as simple as possible. And I’ve tried to
make the work seem easy. The point is to get you in motion. Once
you are up and running, I promise you that it really will feel that way.
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