Gaining Momentum, While Facing Burnout

In the past 2 weeks, I had a bout of sher laziness and burnout. Which was kind of odd. I had all my blog articles ready to be typed in, yet somehow I couldn’t even lift my hands to type on the keyboard. While I could rattle on how the constant loss of moving caused me to lose my business momentum and so on, I decided to instead talk about ways to prevent burnouts and possibly recover from them.

Burnouts are harder to deal with in beginner home businesses. Its frustrating to do so much work yourself, even if its less than what you might do in a typical workday, at your job; then have no results seem to happen. Its also common to have unrealistic expectations regarding your results. You can have burnouts in a mental sense, a financial sense, or a physical loss sense(loss of property, or even loss of energy, due to bad health or stress) Most blogs think burnouts are a matter of self control. Even the most productive, end up throwing their systems away for a day or two, or at least they take an afternoon nap! So maybe taking the idea of rest, instead of self control is better. Take 1-2 days off your business, like you would do from work. If your most productive days are your weekends, just use another time in the evening to work something else.  Sunday and Mondays are my days off, for example. Use this time to tend to another hobby, maybe catch up on the tv shows(DVR’s are huge time savers) or play a video game. I try to balance my hobbies too, instead of going hardcore at one for one month and then moving on to the next one for another. This way I don’t end up crashing, even as OC it sounds, plus that behavior could translate out into your business without knowing. Aside from giving your business its own weekend, the ability to start moving again when you burn completely out, is a hard one. Its just a matter of just doing it. Slowly creep back, lower the size of your to do list even if its down to one thing, just make it count.

Financial Burnout
Its really easy to not spend any capital investing in your home business. In these internet days, its even easier. However, some capital will be needed to sustain and grow, or step up to the next level. It doesn’t have to be much.
Where I was personally hit by when to start using capital, was when I was learning at Wealthy Affiliate, where they teach about starting out with bum marketing, where you use free resources, and write product reviews, and other articles about products. The amount of volume needed to get a bite, is understated a bit, but its easy to get burned out(mentally, not financially, unless your buying products at the same time), by not getting any traffic. I needed to make some changes, by increasing not only my volume, but maybe investing in creating websites to drive traffic to. That requires investing in a domain, which is less than 10 dollars a year(my WA membership includes hosting). But, its easy to say, no I don’t need to spend any money in till I make a profit to reinvest, even more so if you have an entirely broke mindset. So, you keep getting burned by not having any bites(mental) and you cannot then fulfill your money goals, when you could just spend some money you would spend anyways in investing in your business. The opposite can happen too. You spend too much on everything about learning, and not starting on doing, or you end up spending too much on towards a problem that need to be more tweaked or dropped, instead of its capital(*cough* our government *cough*).
Instead of becoming like the many who spend and end up failing before they could make it, just adjust capital slowly, from your own sources, making sure that it will truly benefit you in the long term.

Physical Burnout
This is a combo of mental that goes with this. You get tired and your health isn’t so great. You decided to place it on hold till you have the time freedom. Or you get a physical loss, like your computer is stolen, or it becomes broken down. The health one is easy to answer, the loss and malfunction- not so much. here some guidelines.
The loss of equipment can be a nightmare without a backup. But sometimes you can lose your backup too! Push to saving as much data you can onto the the web, using an email account, or Google Docs, etc. I have some redundancy for my writings, since I write drafts in notebooks. If your data is small enough, save it to a USB thumbdrive and keep it on your keychain.
Normally also to keep in mind of computer breakdowns, its only due to one part of a system failing, not the entire system. So, it may not be the hard drive. If it is, normally its very audible, you hear more grinding and files seem to take a bit to open, than normal. Thats when you need to get that data off quickly! Keeping some cash to drop about 200 or so dollars on a older system with a CRT Monitor from a local mom and pop store, and a up to date burned dvd of Linux somewhere, could get you back working in till your able to replace it with insurance, or rebuild. Or just ask around, some geek might have a collection going that you could borrow some parts from.
For your health, just keep it in balance. If your relying on 3 red bulls a day to go, something out of whack. Take some time to balance some time in to exercise, and eat a bit better everyday.

Rebuilding from a burnout is hard work, and instead of just trying to get back into the swing of things again, it might be better to just keep things balance, and aim for it. Its harder to maintain it this way, but done in small ways, you will feel a lot less guilty when your not doing anything, and fight your fear of failure.  Plus, remember even the productivity bloggers have days when they chill out for a bit.

Tags: Procrastination, Burnout, productivity, home business

 

A Late Reminder to Interact

Its is more by far a media producers, than media consumers world these days. People write blogs, produce videos on YouTube, and share other media works like photos or a useful shell script. People are getting more active, than ever before, and the consequences of this is good. Its not a taboo to teach another even if themselves are not a master(myself included). YouTube proves this often.  I saw a small lesson on  learning Arabic and a person complained that a newbie shouldn’t be teaching, this due to her ability to not  pronounce some words correctly, even if she admits it. The true reality is this – its better to provide a seed, to plant an interest, than it is to expect someone to suddenly only teach when they have bloomed already.  By  becoming active in the learning process , by teaching a skill to someone, even if incomplete, you end up learning more. One way is by comments on how to suggestions how to do something correctly.

Is it time to get public with your exploits? I think so. Why would you want to? To build a support group mostly. One of the keys to self improvement is to surround yourself with other successful, or wanting to succeed, like-minded individuals. By contributing information, and getting comments, like “keep up the good work”, or “awesome”, and “this video sucks,”(whoops! thats not suppose to be there!) you get the feed back you need to fill yourself with to keep on going.

Most books that cover this tidbit, make it sound like you just suddenly have it happen as more and more your exploits attract the attention of others. But reality is, you have to work for your fans. Blogging exposed this to me a bit. For example, for traffic, you just don’t throw a post up with reverent tags and then hope for traffic. No, I have to work by going to forums, or being part of some group, and interact with others, and someone might click on my signature link. I brought more people to my blog that way than just tagging.
Its really time consuming, and I can always do more, but for now I hope to benefit my core niche a bit with what I have currently(I hope).
Find ways to work for your customers/audience, and if your consistantly give them wat info nuggets they need, over time, they might return a favor with a sale or a nugget of info you need. Utopian? A bit, I admit. But it works, and thats all that matters.

An Update Note on Action Steps
Once again, I am reworking the action step section on my blog. I have let it slip to inactivity while I was lazy, and now when I am working on my business much more. Mostly, I am thinking about creating a whole blog about it, where I have nearly a post per week covering each of the steps in detail, but I have to build up the articles first before I attempt to do that. So right now its the early phases of being redone. Last time I got stuck on the muse part, since thats what I’m currently working on, and really didn’t have a game plan. Now, I think I have a bit of an idea what my muse goals should be. So sometime in September, or so, I will have some idea to do with that section. Till then hold tight, and I apologize for the time delay. I want to let my business dictate the direction of things, instead of just picking stuff by theory, which wouldn’t be as relevant. I will not be taking the section down for the time being, since there really no appealing reason to.

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Tags: seo, internet interaction, web promotion, internet promotion, home business promotion, action steps to building a home business

 

Developing My Sense Of Urgency

Building a muse, even a small one like mine, has been more about finding quick tips to avoid real work aka generating content. Its not that generating content is hard, or time consuming, its more like ” do I really want to?” type. This thought became more and more stronger not only in my business, but for everything I did from exercising to my obligations at work.
Before anyone screams manic depressive(going from super worker, to wanting to lay in a bed all day watching TV), all I really was facing is a bout of laziness and motivation. I was still interested in my muse, but I didn’t want to do the work. Obviously, when I didn’t work on it. Nothing happened, adding fuel to the fire, to continue the laziness.

Nowadays, with rising costs to live and not being in any situation to have a safety valve from it till things balance, I have developed a new sense of urgency. If I don’t build my business, well guess what?
I am going to be stuck in a endless loop of catch up to live. Its very depressing. It took us longer to feel the pinch than most, but when you do it turns into a a punch to the stomach. It literately, came on like, a switch, with this stark realization. I have to fight my sense of idleness, and really just do some things differently. Its really crazy, when you have some stuff that needs to be put out, and its just sitting there like its needs to be polished again and again, when its already good enough to go. Now, that laziness is sure beginning to sound like perfectionism, or the fear of failure. And quite frankly, the more I let this content sit, the more frustrating it will be if it doesn’t pan out.

 I have set up a counter, starting tonight. I have 60 days to build my muse and produce any income, even if its just one dollar in profit,  or else I need to pack my bags, and try a different tactic. For the next two months, I’m going to be journaling about this, to make sure I’m making progress. I will add a Facebook blog about it and edit it whenever I make changes. That way I won’t bore anyone with personal activities, unless your truly interested. The link will appear in a week(I mean it!). I hope it will inspire you and help you make less mistakes than I do. This blog focus will still be about general home business topics. I’ve been running out of contently lately due to..laziness, but I already brainstormed some ideas, that will pan out into something worth reading.

Now, excuse me, I have some work to tend to…

And its not organizing file folders(thats another topic, for a later time)

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Tags: urgency, lazyness, muse building, home business building, getting work done, freaking out

 

My Creative Shock Therapy Experience

Way back when I was a bright and snotty graphic art student, I would cram every book, magazine, and websites about design. I spent hours flipping through Wallpaper, Graphic Arts and 3d Artist. I would be in awe about The Designer Republic, and other British graphic firms. And I would browse odd collections of design from art books at the local half-price book store. I was very inspired at all hours, and it would reflect in the backgrounds, and the handful of sites I designed for friends.

Over time, as I grew up to old as I am now, design and art began to have a smaller and smaller role in my life, to the point it was nothing more than a afterthoughts in the back of my head. Its final death then arrived some time after marriage. Once the visual creative juices left, life changed. Thinking about design lost out to thinking about paying bills, taking care of the basics, and working. None of these things had much use for a composition, or a perfectly arranged furnishings. Overcoming these things, became my focus, and it didn’t feed the mind as much as creating visual content.

Until last week. I read a copy of the magazine Giant Robot, that was left by someone at work. The next thing I know, parts of my brain started firing, that I haven’t felt go off in some time. My brain rebooted in a small way. Ideas suddenly started flowing and out of nowhere, not only I wanted to illustrate again, I had better ideas for my muse. All because of an single issue of a Asian culture magazine.

Protect your creativity folks. Don’t shut it down, or feel embarrassed and ashamed what it conjure up. Feed it a balanced diet of [insert how you will keep it going] and I promise it will take you places beyond what its tuned for. Mine might be tuned to interesting visual representation of shapes, but it sends “interference” to the thinking process what the mind is consciously focused on.

I know this is sounding a bit Polly Ann’ish(is that even the correct way to write it?), but bare with me, for at least two more paragraphs.

So, was it my design interest was leaking its goo all over my business ideas, or was it the subconscious sending conscious ideas to the surface? I will never know until someone makes a comment or I decide for myself , but I like the results. I like the way how more balanced I now feel.

So I know it seems odd to get a business perspective from a home design magazine, an article about war gaming, a piece of music you haven’t listened to in some time, or for me- a art magazine. Tapping into that hobby will send your brain into overdrive. And when it does, be prepared for a new sense of energy, that I could only vaguely explain.

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Tags: CreativeThinking, Creative Business Thinking, Creative shock therapy, Creative intrests, Design effects on the mind

 

The Weekly Update…

My muse is now slowly ramping up. I have spent only about 30 dollars now, and no return on sales. Oops! So, I am taking a step back from my pay-per-click(PPC)marketing and try something else, before attempting again.

While some tactics at this point would be to offer services of some kind, I’m trying to avoid this to an extent. This would be more like being self employed, meaning once you are not producing, your not making money. Ideally for me, I don’t want to create a new 15 hour a day job. So I’m going to keep “services” to a minimum. There is some natural self employment aspects in the beginning, but you just don’t want to make this your core aspect or the cash cow of your business.

At this time frame, you have to keep reminding yourself your in business. Its one of the hardest things to do. You might want to just run back to just doing more research, where its safe and beat yourself for not having found the magic bullet yet. While dealing with the unknown, your fighting fear. Its not an easy task, nor do I have an answer at this time to cope with such emotions, other than ride it out. I hope your not dealing with the same emotions as I am when you start out!

Working on a new page for the website, where I’m going to discuss my muse in better detail and the programs that I use. Stay tuned for that one, it should be up soon.

 

Muse Start-up(Sorry For The Hibernation)

Let me start off by explaining why I haven’t written for 2 weeks. I’ve been tired, doing probably one of the dumbest things when your trying to just create a new income- start a diet and exercise regime. Starting 2 lifestyle changes at the same time, is quite possibly the dumbest thing you can do. So start one, then once one of the changes is in maintenance mode, follow with the next.

In the opening of my muse, you would think their would be much work to do, things to be busy with and so on.

The start-up of my muse(an affiliate marketing business, the easiest route) , was a task that lasted less than a hour. I have semi-planned by having a list of programs and the places I was going to sell ad time on, which is Google( adsense) at this time, maybe others later such as Yahoo or MSN. I then clocked out after an hour and spent the rest of the evening watching a movie with my Wife.

I imagine more tasks that could take place if you were to incorporate, which would go even with the amount of fanfare as above! Since you can use one of the e-Providers, without really talking to a lawyer(I would feel personally, this would be a better route, for documenting reasons if you were to file for a C corporation). This go around(and I might shooting myself in the foot) I am not spending the cash on a creation of a business entity, such as a LLC. I will later in about 3 months when I can afford it(about $300 dollars, to do it right) and the tax reasons to do so. Transferring should be to complicated.

In other startup activities, I bought a new task chair. There goes something a tax ride off would of been useful for. But since its more as much for personal computing and business activities, oh well. My butt and back feel ten times better than from my previous chair.

With all of this about my startup(finally) in mind, with the start of my first business I’m going to need an opinion. Write about it separately from this blog, do I stay committed to a more general topic range, Or could I just mix and match? Your Option does matter, so leave a comment!