Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Simple Happiness Tip 1 : Get Out Of The Office

I am amazed at the companies that I contract for, when 12 or 1pm comes along each day, how few people take lunch.

I mean really take lunch, get out of the office and have a break from the work environment. The vast majority of workers at companies I have worked for, from insurance to engineering to IT, most people eat their lunch at work. Sure, sometimes it’s good to sit at your desk and surf the net, or sit in the lunch room and make chit - chat with your co-workers, but not everyday.

All through my working life I have made the habit of getting out of the office during my lunch time whenever possible and going for a walk, or a drive to the park. Away from the phones and the work environment for a minute I get a chance to clear my mind. I can look at what goes on in the world during the day, and take some time to just be.

I would bet that doing this you will get MORE work done in the afternoon then the small bit that you would done with a sandwich in one hand while you type with the other.

Small habits like this can make the difference between getting to the end of the day in stressed out, meltdown mode or leaving work behind and keeping some perspective on things as you walk out the door. On my walks I generally go towards a nearby park, or along the city streets, picking up a bit of lunch on the way through, walking as I heat and taking in the sites.

I can definitely recommend it because it works for me.

Not Getting Things Done Part 3 : Forced NGTD

Up to the start of this year, i went along to Yoga every Monday or Tuesday night. As someone who sits in front of a computer for the majority of the day, I found it was great to improve my flexibility, get muscles that I didn’t normally use moving, a fun challenging exercise and it was great for relaxation.

The thing is, some nights after a hard day in the office, and facing a mountain of work that still needed to be done I really had to muster up the effort to go. Even though I knew by then end of it I would feel amazing and re-energized, like I had a solid 8 hours sleep and fully alert. It was hard sometimes to get changed, grab the keys and head out the door. After doing it for a while though, this slowly became less and less of an issue. Time was allocated every week, and I knew that after I got home I would be so relaxed that work would be the furthest thing from my mind. I would then read a novel, or spend time with my wife, or do something creative.

By making that appointment every week for me time, I forced myself to slow down and do something that was non work or responsibility related. If you are having a hard time switching off, or doing something that makes you feel good instead of guilty in your “down time” then join a class, or an activity or a group. Something where you have paid money for, and it would be an inconvenience not to go.

You will thank yourself for it after you have been. This will also make you not bring home any extra commitments on these nights, making it a whole period of time to NGTD and recharge.

Escaping Time and Location Based Work

It was a goal of mine at the start of the year to spend at least a day a week working from home. In reality it has turned out that it more like a day every 3 weeks, but I am gradually starting to finish up a few contracts, and set the terms of the new ones coming up to give me a bit more discretion over my time. It’s great to be busy, and have a lot going on, but I have found the importance of staying in control of your schedule, otherwise your schedule will control you. At the moment I am also doing a wide variety of tasks for different clients. Web development, marketing, business development, seo consulting and some general IT consulting are all taxing different parts of my brains, and often have deadlines competing with each other for my attention. Not an ideal situation, but it is paying the bills and I have kept up with the challenge.

Even though I have little kids and the house is always busy, I really enjoy the variety of working from the home office when I can. It all depends on the type of work I am doing, how often I need to be on the phone, or really concentrating. Just breaking the routine of going to the office everyday gives a some variety to the week and breaks it up. You get more done and everything feels a bit more fresh.

Ideally what I want is to have work that is :

Non Time Based : Work that I can do at anytime, whenever there is time that I have allocated. I don’t want to be constrained by the 9-5 (or 8-6 in reality) of the regular work week. Sometimes I get my best work completed between 6am and 9am, sometimes between 8pm and 12pm if I have the free time. I know that there are times where I can get a ton of work done in an hour, and some where I am really pushing it to get anything done at all. Not often, but it happens.

Hopefully, as businesses move beyond the idea of keeping everyone on a digital leash, they will get more behind the idea of using the technology to free their workers and help to make them happy. Having a workforce of well rounded human beings will be just as much a part of company culture as making a profit. As long as people make the deadlines then they should have the freedom to set the hours when they work. This will also allow people more flexible time to be with family, participate in community activities and reduce the amount peak hour commuters going to work etc.

Non Location Based : Same as above, but not having an actual “workplace” where I have to be everyday. At the moment the contracts I have dictate that I am in the office of the business’s I work for about 75% of the time. I have made it a goal to reduce this by moving away from client based work and towards product based business activities. From a societal point of view, we need to decentralise the way we work. A lot of our tax dollars go towards infrastructure that must be constantly upgraded to allow everyone to work in a central location, the city. Sure, there is something to be said for working with a team, but I know in my current work that I am constantly meeting people in various locations other then the office, or over the web to have meetings and strategise, co-ordinate and collaborate.
I want to be able to take the family away for 3 weeks at a time to various places around the country, and still be able to work a few hours a day maintaining my business.

Even 5 years ago, if you talked like this people would say that you are an idealist, that you were living in fantasy land if you thought that this was possible. But modern technology, changing attitudes and just the realities of modern life are making these things possible. These practices are good for peoples mental health, good for society, good for the environment.

Start putting your plans to make them happen in action today. I know that I am.

The revolYOUtion Part 3: Spread Free Wisdom

Being Monday I thought that I would share a little bit of blogging inspiration that I have been pondering over the weekend.

One of the best things about blogging is that allows you to interact with people in ways that have been quite hard to do in the past. Before the internet (a time which seems hard for people to really remember what it was like, even now) it could take weeks, even months of knowing someone fairly closely before they would discuss what was really on their mind with you. People would generally stick to the social norm in their personal reactions, before they would open up and talk about life in general , or how their business works, or their spiritual views. Now people are quite free to share it online, and the power of the net allows people to share wisdom of their experience with each other.

Sure there has been newspapers, encyclopaedias, television, radio, reference books and a plethora of other media around in the past. But nothing so immediate, nothing so reactionary or so pro-active. Nothing that had the possibility to give a voice to everyone like online social media. It has allowed people to do the most powerful thing that thinking beings can do. It has allowed us to spread free wisdom. Not pass on the accepted view, but to tell the world that this is how you see it, and why that is so.

Think of all of the fantastic things that you have learned about online, new skills that you have acquired and new possibilities for your life that you would not have seen if you didn’t read blogs. If you are a blogger, think about all of the interesting things, skills and acquired wisdom that you have shared with the world by blogging. You would have :

* Drastically reduced the time or mistakes that someone would make in acquiring a new skill
* Shown someone the world through the eyes of another, giving them a viewpoint that they otherwise would never have seen.
* Allowed two people to connect via your site, allowing them to share wisdom with each other.

Wisdom is knowledge that has been tested in the real world, it is the real “this is what happens when you do this”, rather then only just what you have read in theory.

That’s why I consider the current state of the internet, and the new wave of bloggers to be one of the most important developments in media, society and the way we view “work” in the future. Allowing people to make money by sharing their viewpoints, expressing themselves, giving the world access to the collected wisdom of their years. This is giving true value to society, this is work that makes a difference. Not cooping people up for 12 hours straight in an office, mindlessly pushing meaningless figures from one side of a spreadsheet to the other. I want to see this work for more people, i want to see as many people as possible making money online, at least earning enough to give them the motivation to continue to tell it as they see it, to let me and everyone else into the world of their wisdom.

Share your wisdom with the world, it is really the most important thing you can do.

The RevolYOUtion part 2 : The Real Self Mastery

This blog is not about being successful in the usual meaning of the term. It is not about making more money then everyone else, having more stuff, or a more powerful career.

You don’t want to have a life that is optimized for the attainment of only one goal, you want to have a balanced one. Think about it, the person that works all the time, putting everything into a career misses out on enjoying the everyday, time with his kids or partner as well as their true friends. They have no time to spend doing things they enjoy. You are not here for one purpose only, you are here to experience a wide range of things, and to find meaning in the variety of life.

There is a real fear in people that if they drop the ball for a second, if they just relax and put say 80% of their waking time, and especially their mental energy, into a job instead of 100% that everything will fall apart. This does not only apply to people in the workforce with career aspirations. The same can be said of stay at home parents, students or those that have time consuming responsibilities. Taking a bit of time for you that is outside of the normal routine is not letting yourself or anyone else down.

It’s important for your mental health and sense of self worth.

Why don’t you try a little experiment. Just for this week, if you normally take work home to do at night, just don’t do it. I know that it will be hard, very hard for some people to resist the temptation to at least look at their work email, but resist it. It’s only for a week after all. At the end of the week see if there has been any difference at all to your overall productivity.
If there is a marked decrease in the work that you have done, and it is really suffering, then go back to the way it was and re-evaluate something else. BUT, if there is no difference at all, if everyone is happy with your output and no-one seems to notice then guess what, you just completed a life experiment, and you learned something valuable. You have in effect given yourself an extra hour or two in the day to do what you want, to NGTD as I like to say.

You have a mental ecology that needs to remain in balance or it will do things to restore the balance itself. Like burn out, or stress you to the point where you are so unhappy that you must slow down.
Sure, you can burn the midnight oil for a while, as I have been know to do for up to a month at a time, but keep it up and you will pay the price. You might get that promotion, or 10,000 visitors a day to your site.

Don’t take this as a defeatist attitude, like “what’s the point of hard work, it only results in other problems.” Realise that your life is a system, and it is comprised of a lot of subsystems, one of them being the work system. You, as an intelligent human being have the ability to make a choice. You can determine which of these systems get the most attention. You have the ability with a bit of self reflection to see which one is lacking and why. The “out of control” feeling when we have too much going on in our life is just that, there is one of these sub systems that have got out of control. Only you have the power to put it back where it belongs.

Don’t’ let the systems control you, have control of the systems. This is real self mastery