Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love

Just saw an interesting service on the web at snopcap.com

It’s an easy to set up store widget with an integrated player. It is a widget that can sit anywhere on your blog or website, all you need to do is sign up for an account and put a few lines of code up.
To see one in action go over the blog Onesongperweek.com and have a look. There is one featured on the main page of the site, and at the end of every single entry on the blog. It keeps the storefront in the site visitors face at all time, but also provides a service in that site visitors can listen to the whole back catalogue of the artist quickly and easily if you “hook” them and they like what they hear.

The service also integrates into myspace and other social networking platforms. But what do they get for providing the service. 39 cents per track for single tracks, 20 cents per track if people buy a whole album for you. BUT, the service is free for the first 1000 tracks, and then after that if you are running a small label the cost is $100 per year, but you can contact them to work out a deal on the per track fees etc. The other thing is that it is a shared platform for retail as well, people running blogs and sites that promote the sort of music you make can add your tracks to their store, giving you virtual distribution for little effort.

The only other problem for myself and those that I personally know is that the service is only available to artists and labels in the US. I could see myself using this for my own work, and that of the label that I am in the process of setting up. The way that the widget is set up is that you can even host songs from bands that you know, and cross promote each others work on your site.

The address is www.snocap.com , well worth checking out. In fact, I am going to write to them today and see how long till Australian residents can set up an account.

I was thinking this morning about John Chows post about people not being able to monetize Facebook applications effectively. It seems as if the developers are great at making these things, but so far suck at turning the know how into dollars… until now that is.

Here is my fantastic idea of how you, or anyone else you know that can develop a Facebook app. Or, if you are a company, I would be going out right now and hiring two gun Facebook application developers to start work TODAY. Facebook developers do charge a bit for spec work (the best way for them currently to monetise their skills), but if I was a company, a large corporation like Coke, or Nike etc I would be paying a team of developers to build the next killer Facebook app.

It would have to be something amazing, that users just could not do without. A revolution.

Facebook is fairly new territory, so I am sure that there is at least one fantastic idea that no one has thought about. What i would then do is embed my branding in the app every way that I could. Not enough to distract people from using it, but enough so that there would be no mistake who made it. If people familiarise themselves with your brand via repeated viewing, AND also associate it with the great time that they are having on Facebook then it is exposure that is worth major money. People are addicted to Facebook, the use it to plan their lives, keep in touch with friends and have fun. A captive audience if I ever saw one.

The beauty of the idea is that you don’t have to be a big player to get this reach and exposure. A small business, or even SEO consultant or pro blogger could gain a huge volume of traffic to their site and and the way that it could build your profile would be phenomenal. Why not team up with someone that has come up with a fantastic Facebook app, get joint naming or branding on it and then promote it as hard as you can online

If you already have a great Facebook app, go out and try to directly sell advertising for it to a major corporation. Show them the reach figures that your application gets. How many pages it is installed on, how many views those pages get per month. I am sure that they will be staggered at the numbers and pay you something. An up front fee, a licensing fee per month. It has to be better then earning the pocket change that Facebook developers are getting at the moment.

I think I have given away enough money making advice for today, just remember me when you are driving that Porche.