Josh and Joshette’s do you often feel like you are constantly working towards your goal yet never obtain it? I know I’ve had days off from work and wasn’t able to accomplish my goals for that day. I could sit at a computer all day yet not be productive. Find out why in the first few sentences of the next paragraph.

Don’t confuse movement aka “work” with progress aka productiveness. If I sit in front of a computer for eight hours and only type a paragraph then I wasted the whole eight hours. I technically “worked” but I wasn’t that productive. To give a simpler analogy let’s use a quote from Denzel Washington (he inspired this post). Actually his mother “You can run in place all day and get nowhere.” Powerful, that’s why I decided to write about it. Let’s Joshify this topic.

Instead of an unrealistic scenario let’s talk about something that really happened to me. My previous post (Residual Income Debunked) took me two days to write. I released content but I was not that productive. If I wanted to be productive, then I would have written the post in one to two hours max. To some of you reading writing a post in two days might sound like an accomplishment. However, my goals are different than most people. To measure my level of productiveness you would need to know my goals. If my goal is to put out a written blog post a minimum of three times a week while producing my other forms of content. So taking two whole days to write one post and it’s my first post in almost a month is very bad. I am not progressing at all towards my goal. Another real scenario that has occurred to me is my second book. I’ve fallen into the same rut as I did while writing my first book. I was always “writing” my book, yet I never finished it. After six months of actually writing the book I had half of it completed, sounds like good progress but it wasn’t. I finished writing the remaining half of the book in the last two weeks of the year. I was more productive in those two years than I had been in the previous six months. How did I do it? Read on a bit more.

Use the tools that you have and stop complaining about the tools you don’t have. This is blunt but true and I learned it in those two weeks. I didn’t have a fancy computer chair or the nicest laptop but I made it work. I sat at my computer and typed for close to sixteen hours each day to finish the book. I used the one tool I had that many other people writing a book did not have time. At that time I was working freelance and decided to buckle down and finish up my book by maximizing my time. Instead of waking up late and wasting most of my day I did the opposite. I woke up at eight am every day and worked until two am. But I didn’t just work I worked smart. Which means I made sure I wasn’t wasting time by staring at a screen then losing focus and loading up Facebook. Most people “work” but most of the time they are taking breaks every so often to browse social media. So let’s fast forward to the end of 2018. This is basically the two year anniversary of me finishing my first book yet I only have one chapter done on the new book. What went wrong? I’ve had a bunch of movement but not a lot of progress. (This post is literally not going where I planned but that’s alright)

The way I created movement (work in case you forgot) was by using a shotgun approach but only when I found the time. There are two weird sayings right there but I will explain them to you. A shotgun approach basically means trying a variety of different things with little effort in each just like small shotgun pellets. When I found the time means I would use whatever leftover time to produce content. This sounds good but since it wasn’t a priority I would often do other things (Netflix, video games and etc). Since I know what the root of my problem is I can work on fixing it. The first way to fix my productivity is to stop finding the time and learn how to make the time. do me a favor go on YouTube and search Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2018 speech and watch the twelve-minute video. Now tell me that you don’t have the time to accomplish your goals. I need to time manage which means to wake up earlier and be more productive on downtime. I started bringing my laptop to work and on my lunch break, I have been working on my book. The next thing I need to change is my approach. Instead of my old shotgun approach to a quadrant approach just like Steve Jobs. When he came back to Apple, he stopped all of their projects and focused on four quadrants. At the top, he placed Consumer and Professional, while on the side he put Desktop and Portable. This made four squares and he then created a product to fit each quadrant. That is how I need to approach my business, I need to cut all the bs little projects that are keeping me from producing amazing content.

You can’t reach the North Pole if you only go east or west. Meaning you can’t make progress without a goal. So if you made it this far then do me one last favor…. Don’t be like me with my old shotgun approach, focus up and make the time. I’ll catch you guys in the next one so Make It Happen.