6 Ways to Improve Personal Productivity During the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020!
The good and the bad of being stranded at home for weeks at a time - especially if you’re doing business online...
The Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020 has caused angst for a lot of folks because they’re not taking charge of their personal productivity, so I decided to write about 6 methods that I’m using including eliminating the psyche-killer: Energy Loops.
Unfortunately, I kind of love the lockdown. Not people getting sick, of course. That sucks, but I love being forced to re-evaluate and re-focus.
This feels like a forced reboot, just like I have to do with my computer when it gets sluggish and on memory overload.
But frankly, I've never been so productive.
Now, I have a really good excuse to be isolated in the woods - without feeling anti-social.
Someone asked me the other day if I'm seeing more of my neighbors since everyone's home during lockdown. Heck, I'm so deep in the woods, I haven't seen most of my neighbors in 15 years. I wouldn't know them if I ran into them on the street.
But productive? Holy Cow! I've been so productive that I could hardly find time to write this post.
When the coronavirus started causing shutdowns across the country, my daughter Jen and I started talking about how we could help people get some control back in their lives - and fast.
The Fast Business Startup Virtual Workshop was the answer. It was 2 days of intense focus on setting up an online income stream by focusing on numbers, not products or launches, or all the other stuff people tell you you have to do.
We focused on numbers. Four numbers.
- Clicks
- Conversion
- Price
- Revenue
And it blew people's minds.
You can find out more about this here.
But now, I'm taking a breath.
The 2 days were exhausting, but now we had replays to edit and transcripts to create. Plus, I decided to do a Case Study on how we used a $1 ticket to a virtual live workshop to drive more than $20,000 in profit AND create a new income stream for ourselves.
Want a copy of my Case Study: How A $1 Ticket To A Live Virtual Weekend Turned Into $20k In One Weekend
So, finally, I'm taking an entire hour to write this post all about how to improve personal productivity, staying positive in difficult times, and what I've noticed during the lockdown.
1) Being home is awesome.
But that may just be me because I'm easily distracted. It forces me to stay in one spot and focus on what's in front of me. Being home and reducing travel to almost zilch has also allowed for more continuous and focused effort without the start and stop disruption.
I noticed that when I looked back at my coffee shop visits, I was really looking forward to seeing friends who didn't even know my name unless it was written on a coffee cup.
2) I have an Internet challenge.
Like really slow DSL at the house with no alternative. I've complained about it for 15 years and used it as an excuse to not do some things (Facebook Live - I'm talking about you...) It's time to get over it.
When the major news networks are doing live interviews with people in their bedroom offices with kids screaming outside the door, we all have permission to focus on the content, not the flash.
And I'm 15 miles from town - any town. So I used to spend a lot of time on the road going to Starbucks or other fast internet spots. During this time, I decided not to do that. (Couldn't actually, since nearly everything is closed.)
3) Closing the social media black hole.
I was at my mother-in-law's the other day (my one day a week trip into town to check on her and work on high-speed). And I was making a cup of coffee in the kitchen. She came out of the bedroom, sighed, and said, "I came back here to clean up the kitchen, but I got on Facebook instead - and that was over an hour ago."
And she's 97!
Social media is a tool, but easily becomes a thief stealing our best hours. I'm holding steady with that by limiting my time to morning and night.
(**Want to know how to stay focused all day? Start by scheduling your social media to specific time slots in your calendar! Then close out all social media apps, web pages etc. until your scheduled time.)
4) Email. This is our life blood.
Email marketing accounts for about 80% of our business in some form. But I hate email personally... And I'm now only checking my personal account 2 to 3 times a WEEK.
I can do that because I've set up systems. I have a private account for coaching clients only. And when I get an email to that account, I get a text message on my watch and phone so I can respond fast.
JV Partners know to skype or Facebook message me. And Insiders and other product buyers go to our support desk, chat on the site or one of our product specific Facebook groups.
5) Turned off the news.
I limit myself to 30 minutes or less of news each day. This is a sure-fire way for staying positive in difficult times. I will catch up on news using my Flipboard app at night. Short of a nuclear bomb, nothing needs my attention right now!
I'm amazed how I get sucked in by the rubber-neck syndrome. Watching the news can be an emotional pot that gets stirred way too easily. Not only does it affect me then, but it lingers in my psyche for a while.
And for me to do this is a massive change. I’m a proud, former journalist who worked in newspapers and magazines. The main reason I left the news business though was all the bad stuff we saw and reported each day made me crazy. So, I had to quit.
6) Energy Loops.
You've read this entire post so far to get to this point. I could write all day about energy loops.
Recently, I read somewhere about energy loops causing us all kinds of grief. I'm not talking about woo-woo universal energy (although I believe that too), but personal energy expended with our mind and our labor.
It’s wasted energy. The very definition means nothing gets done.
An energy loop equals anything started but not finished yet it lives in our brain. And they are everywhere from large to small. And often, the size doesn’t matter. An energy drain is an energy drain is an energy drain - they’re all equal.
Here's an example.
The picture shows a small tree stump. It's a poplar tree. About 5 years ago, a poplar sprout came up in a 
plastic flower pot that was in (what passes for) my front yard between the crepe myrtles at our house.
It was tiny, like a weed.
Instead of yanking it out of the ground, I thought that I'd just plant it somewhere else on our 95 acres.
After all, we’ve only got about 45,000 of them according to the University of Maryland Extension report on Forest Thinning. I might miss this little sprout though. It could be very special.
Even when my wife asked me what this was, I told her I'd take care of it...
The energy loop was opened the moment I didn’t pull that dude right out of the pot.
This is how it works.
Here's a tree that I'm going to move. It's on my mental list. It staked out a spot on my brain and it's never going away until it's resolved.
That was 5 years ago.
The tree grew fast - as poplars do. The pot had a hole in the bottom for drainage as pots do. The poplar roots squeezed through that hole finding life as they do.
It anchored the little tree in the soil below. I could no longer move the pot because it literally was rooted in the ground.
My wife would point out that the tree is growing fast and it’s really too close to the house. She asked me when I was going to get rid of it. “Soon” was always my answer. I can still dig it up and move it, I told her.
But it didn't just grow roots in the ground.
They were burrowing into my psyche too.
Every time I walked into the house, I'd glance over and see that tree. My mind would nudge me, "You've got to take care of that." And I'd think, "Soon, sure. When I get a minute."
It kept growing...both in the ground and in my brain. It reached 10 feet tall. And I thought about it every day because I saw every day when I came out of the house.
After a trip to Atlanta, I glanced over at the tree. It was about 7 feet shorter.
It had been cut off about 3 feet off the ground. My wife had found a handsaw in the basement and went after it.
The pot was still intact. But it still wouldn't budge because the roots were so deep. So the first step was to remove the pot, then cut the rest of the tree off, and then dig out the roots. "I'll get to that," I told myself. I've got all the tools.
That was 2 years ago.
Because of my internet challenge here in the woods, I sometimes drive to town to work at my mother-in-law's house where I get high-speed cable.
Last weekend, when I came home from a full day of working in town on the high-speed, I walked by the tree, the abbreviated version that's been dead now for a couple of years, and the pot was gone. My wife and niece broke the pot and spread out the dirt in the garden.
Then, she said, "I want to learn to use the chainsaw."
Ok - it's time to get that tree out of the yard. And I'll do it. I've got some time tomorrow 🙂
This is the CLASSIC energy loop.
Five years ago, I opened it up when I didn't dispose of that tree. Thinking about that tree and putting off the solution, I expended enough energy to power a small office building. Unfinished, little or large projects take the energy that we could otherwise use to improve personal productivity and be more productive in life.
When we say we’re tired, often it’s mentally tired because we’ve expended so much energy - doing nothing - on stuff that could have been resolved long ago.
An energy loop is completely unnecessary.
All it takes is little action.
There's an old saying that resolves every energy loop:
"Never put off till tomorrow what you could do today."
We do this at home. We do it at work. And we do it in business.
A productivity expert knows how to eliminate the energy loops by outsourcing and delegating, or just getting the damn chainsaw out of the closet.
In the comments, tell me about your energy loop that needs to be closed.
David Perdew is the CEO and founder of NAMS - the Novice to Advanced Marketing System. He’s a journalist, consultant, and serial entrepreneur who has built one of the most successful and fastest-growing business training systems online today called the MyNAMS Insiders Club.
The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.
He took a year off in 2003 to personally build a 2200 square foot log cabin in north Alabama where he and his wife and two dogs and a cat live on 95 acres of forest with four streams and 60-foot waterfall.
The NAMS team includes his daughter, Jen, who is an email marketing and automation specialist. Jen runs the day to day business and is one of the primary trainers in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.
But let me ask you this… do you think that both of these individuals view business – and specifically, the acquisition of money – in the same way?
You might guess that the successful person who has made millions of dollars sees money in an entirely different way than the person who has never been successful.
One sees opportunity everywhere – the other sees obstacles.
One sees challenges to overcome – the other sees problems that cannot be solved.
One believes leverage is the way to get rich – the other believes hard work will win the day.
One believes money is abundant – the other believes it’s scarce.
One thinks about how to make more money – the other thinks about how not to lose money…
… and so forth.
If you took the second person – the one who has never had a major success – and implant the thought patterns and beliefs of the first person concerning money and business, do you think the second person could then build a million-dollar online business as well?
And just so you know, we did not pull these out of thin air. They come from a very solid book by Steve Siebold entitled, “How Rich People Think.” We’ve simply put our own online marketing spin on them.
If you’ve ever wanted a roadmap on how to be rich – I dare say this might be it.
Take these thoughts and combine them with any proven online business plan, and you should be making money – significant money – in no time at all.
Your results will vary. Remember that making these thoughts yours is just the first step – working your business is the second. And doing one without the other is probably just going to waste your time.
Just to be clear, we’re going to differentiate the two types of thinking as “Non-rich” and “Rich” thinking.
“Rich” is, of course, a relative term. To a millionaire, a billionaire is rich, while the billionaire might think the millionaire is poor by comparison.
Let’s get started…
with them. But why do we do this?
Most likely because it’s easier for us to say they are wrong than it is to become obsessed with success ourselves.
When you’re rich, you have the ultimate freedom to do what you want, when you want. Money is simply a gauge by which you measure how successful you are.
If you can think of business as a game you love to win, then you can become obsessed with success in a healthy, productive manner.
It’s all about what you can accomplish and how many people you can help with your online business.
The primary motivator for many millionaires is reaching a certain net worth – a number that is different for everybody. Assuming your business is legit and helps people – and hopefully, it does – then the bigger the number you reach, the more people you’ve helped.
And think about this: when you hit your number, then you are free to chase higher pursuits such as philanthropy, time freedom and personal fulfillment.
So yes, go ahead and get obsessed with success. If that means working on your online business 14 hours a day for a few months, go for it. Success is calling and it’s time to answer that call.
The non-rich cling tightly to their meager assets because of fear of loss and uncertainty of the future. Then when an economic correction occurs, they suffer catastrophic losses they cannot recover.
The rich, while understanding that saving and investing are important, also direct their energies toward making more money by serving others and solving problems. If a catastrophic loss occurs, they turn their attention to financial opportunities that occur in a downward economy and often become all the richer for it.
It’s a question of whether you operate from fear or abundance. Either mindset can lose money, but only the abundance mindset can quickly recover the money and more.
Focus on building an online empire of several different income streams, not on saving pennies.
Any time you’re trading your time for a paycheck, you’re actually trading the most valuable commodity you have – your precious time – for a fixed income.
If hard work made fortunes, every fast food employee would be rich.
The rich generate money though ideas that solve problems. And since there is no limit to ideas, there is also no limit to the money you can earn.
The right idea at the right time can make a fortune. Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are classic examples of this.
Look to your own online business and you can see this at work. For example, if you write a book to sell to one person, you are trading time for money. This is what ghostwriters do.
But if you sell the book yourself, you can continue to sell copies of it every day for the rest of your life. You get paid over and over for work you did once.
And if you hire someone to write the book for you, now you are experiencing true leverage.
The average person has been programmed to think rich people are somehow evil, dishonest and deceitful.
And while this is occasionally the case, as a general rule self-made rich people have used their drive, ambition, and vision to build something that helps a lot of people.
Believing that rich people are inferior or morally lacking makes a great excuse for why a person isn’t rich – after all, they’re a nice person, and they don’t want to hurt anyone.
But if the non-rich will take responsibility for their financial plight and adopt the thinking of the rich, then they, too, can become rich.
And in the process, they can prove that not all rich people are evil.
When the non-rich folks have jobs, they’re paid for their individual efforts. They’re lone wolves, and they believe that if they start their own business, then they have to do it on their own.
But the rich (and future rich) know that building anything worthwhile is a team effort. Finding the right people and leveraging their knowledge and action is key to achieving success quickly and on a large scale.
The rich are team leaders. The non-rich try to do everything themselves.
The rich know their strengths and weaknesses and find people who fill the gaps in their knowledge and abilities.
The non-rich believe they can eventually learn everything they need to know to become successful.
If you can build a team and share the credit for your success, then you can achieve almost anything, and do it in a surprisingly short amount of time.
But if you go it alone, success will always be just around the corner and just out of reach.
In your online business, figure out what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing. Then outsource everything else. This will shave your time from conception to launch in half or less, keep you happy and more than double your profits.
Try it – once you do, you’ll never go back to trying to do everything yourself.
If you were to ask most people why they don’t have money or even what they think of money, you’ll realize why they’re broke.
They see ambitious people as greedy and self-serving. They think money is a necessary evil that must be managed but should not be their focus.
And there are better things to do with their time than be successful, like watch TV, sports and so forth.
The rich see money as a positive tool that can create freedom and opportunity to do what they want and have the life they enjoy. Money removes restrictions and lets them do what they want, when they want and where they want.
When you have money, you can engage in your favorite pastimes, help out the less fortunate and improve life for others beyond yourself.
Whether you believe money is evil or a tool for empowerment will make the difference between whether or not you have money.
While rich people respect a formal education and encourage their children to attend university, they don’t see it as a way to build a financial empire.
Many self-made millionaires have very little formal education. They’ve amassed their wealth through getting, using and selling specific knowledge and information.
College typically prepares a person to trade time for money, and this is rarely the way to real wealth.
Rich people work from a non-linear mindset, with no limits or boundaries.
Give an employee a problem, and they will try to solve it for the company.
Give someone with a rich person’s mindset a problem, and they will not only solve it but then sell the solution to everyone who needs it, thereby creating wealth.
And if the person with the rich mindset can’t solve the problem, they’ll hire someone to solve it for them, and again sell the solution to make their fortune.
Problem-solving is an asset that can build empires. While academics and middle class see problems as being complex, the rich mindset is able to break those same problems down to their essence to find the solution. Bill Gate’s founding of Microsoft is a wonderful example of this trait at work.
As an online marketer, you have the opportunity to present solutions to people around the world.
And you don’t always have to find the solutions, either. You can act as a reporter, finding out what people need and then reporting back to them with a product that fills that need.
Do you really, truly need that new car? Or will your old one last for a few more years?
Living beyond your means isn’t living at all. It’s self-imposed slavery, where you have to go to work just to keep your nose above water and eek out a meager existence.
The self-made rich only buy the things they truly need and the things that will make them money. True, once they become wealthy they do splurge, but by then they’ve earned the right.
Many self-made millionaires are ordinary people who went without luxuries and extravagances while they were building their fortunes. Instead of lattes and going to the movies, they invested in stocks and real estate.
But the real answer isn’t just to be frugal and live on as little as possible – it’s to double or triple your income and invest a large portion of that.
Ideally, you want to live the good life, and if that means being cautious with your finances for a few years while you increase your income and your investments, it’s well worth the price you pay to then be financially free.
Investing your money in your online business can be the most freeing thing you ever do. Imagine being able to retire in 5-10 years, and then ask yourself if watching your money for that length of time while focusing on making more was worth it.
The answer will invariably be yes.
People love the lottery because they think it’s their only chance to get rich.
Sadly for most, they’re probably right. And it’s not because they’re not capable, either. It’s because they don’t believe in themselves and their ability to create wealth.
The rich know that talk is cheap, and take daily action to build their wealth because they know they can do it.
Beliefs dictate behavior, and behavior dictates results. If you believe you can succeed, then you’ll take action to do exactly that.
That’s why you’re in online marketing – because you believe you can succeed. But do you really, truly believe you can become rich?
If not, you might want to adjust your thinking.
The average person has beliefs that money turns good people into greedy, corrupt, uncaring jerks. This limiting belief not only keeps people poor – it also serves as an excuse for why they’re unsuccessful.
But the self-made rich know that success and money reveal the true person inside. If you were a crook before you were wealthy, you’ll be an even bigger crook once you’ve got money. If you were kind and generous before becoming wealthy, odds are you’ll do a lot of good with your money to help people, animals and the world.
Take a good look at your own personality, and then imagine them amplified by wealth. Do you like what you see?
If so, great. If not, you might want to make some changes now, before money amplifies traits you’re not proud of.
Memorizing information to get good grades in high school or score well on an IQ test won’t make you rich. There is a theory that the “A” students end up working for the “C” students, and this is likely true more than we realize.
Different people are smart in different ways. Some can memorize information, some are good at physical things, some are music smart, and others have an ability to figure things out.
The self-made rich have a talent for making money. Fortunately, no one is born with this talent (how many babies have you seen on Wallstreet?) which tells us that this talent can be learned.
And the best way to learn to make money is to find out what’s working for others and model their success.
That’s why ‘how to make money’ programs are so popular. People want to be rich, but they don’t know how to do it. They want someone to show them the ropes.
This is key if you’re in the make money niche. Explain to your prospects that your system is proven to work because others are already making money doing it.
Just follow the blueprint, and you can succeed. Just make sure your products live up to this promise.
By reading this article, you are now one step closer to becoming rich yourself.
And by knowing, understanding and incorporating rich thoughts into your everyday life, you are setting the stage for your own success.
Oddly enough, this article wasn’t about money at all – it’s about mindset.
And when you have the right mindset, then everything else falls into place.
I’ve never been an Apple computer user, just an admirer, but I always knew there was a fundamental difference between Steve Jobs and most other computer tycoons – especially Bill Gates. Gates, the richest and most influential man in the world of computers, created products that solved problems.
Jobs created products that changed the world.
In this book, I soon learned valuable lessons about being a wild man visionary in a world that wants to make you smaller at every turn.
Just after the Superbowl ad ran, Jobs introduced the Mac to the world.
(Click the image at the right to play the video)
Or rather the Mac, the first talking computer, introduced itself. Watch the short video from that event to see a master marketer introduce a revolutionary product. Notice the attributes of this launch he uses:
