Productivity Boosters | Finch Sells

Make More Money… By Not Being An Unhealthy Bastard

Jun 06 2011

As far as case studies go, this probably isn’t going to win any awards for innovation.

A few weeks ago, I decided to change my life for the better. I knew that it was time to look myself in the mirror, face up to the truth and ask “Finch, you unhealthy bastard, do you want to be a stud muffin or just a slob who ate all the muffins?”

By saying adios to junk food, crappy eating and lack of sleep, I theorized I could create a lifestyle change that would snowball in to something resembling vitality and full health. This, in turn, would allow me to thrive in the workplace with optimal levels of concentration and focus.

The ultimate goal was an improvement in mind, body and spirit. It was time to say “kiss my balls” to the unhealthy bastard in the mirror, Michael Jackson-style, minus the unhealthy interest in kids.

The Challenge

I spent days, literally days, hunched over a laptop in Cambodia researching the best possible diet to give my body a healing rest from it’s regular abuse. Detoxing is a controversial subject. It’s very hard to strike a balance between listening to the raw food psychopaths who’ll give you dirty scowls for even glancing at a cow in the wrong way, and the All-American Americans who believe eating an entire livestock of chickens isn’t just a delicious choice, but what the chickens wanted.

I decided on a 4 day fruit detox, followed by a slightly more lenient diet that would be more sustainable for my non-commital ass in the long run. Minimal processed foods, minimal caffeine, no added salts and sugars.

I haven’t tasted alcohol for over 6 weeks now, so that was never a problem. No doubt my tolerance will be tested when I return to London, however.

Surviving The Detox

For those of you who haven’t tried a fruit detox, the first effects are typically a raging headache and the growing despair that life is not worth living. “How am I to survive if I don’t find a kitten to kill soon?”

Detox symptoms vary from person to person. The heavier the symptoms, the more toxins you’ve accumulated in your body that are struggling to come out.

What follows is a detoxing process known as “retracing”. This is where your body undergoes the strange sensation of re-experiencing recent illnesses and weaknesses. If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume that the detox is adding to your woes rather than working for the greater good. But it’s all part of the recovery so don’t go quitting while the going is tough.

Your body is actually flushing harmful toxins in to your bloodstream at a rapid rate, much faster than the body can dispose of. The toxin-filled blood rushes to the brain and creates a surreal sensation where you experience many different pains and illness symptoms in short bursts.

The symptoms were always there. But it’s only when your body is in “recovery mode” that the organs can actually deal with them. Of course, this triggers the instinctive “I feel worse than when I started. Somebody get me a burger. Cheeseburger. Shit, it’s getting worse. Get me some extra cheese with that…”

This period of headaches, fatigue, volatile stomach reactions and irritability lasted for a couple of days on my detox. Caffeine withdrawals can lead to massive headaches, and if you like your sugar – which I don’t – you’re also going to suffer. My longing for food with meaty texture almost lead to the butchering of a gecko outside my hotel room. It’s not easy to fight your cravings under a barrage of physical aches and pains.

But when the symptoms begin to pass, and here’s the big incentive, you truly do feel a million times better than you did before. Your body begins to accept and use the nutrients of the fruit to your advantage, unleashing enormous swirls of energy and a sense of clarity the likes of which I’m still wondering how I ever did without before.

It probably helped that my detox was aided by an endless supply of fresh coconut and grapefruit juice, two of the most renowned superfruits in the world. I have since re-introduced lean meats in to my diet, but never at the expense of leafy greens and an overcompensation of fruits. I’ve replaced alcohol with smoothies, diet coke with water, and coffee with green tea. The effects are here for me to see, and I’m very happy with them.

33% Diet, 33% Exercise, 33% Rest

No healthy lifestyle can be sustained by simply eating the right foods. It’s just as important to exercise and get a sufficient amount of sleep. Even though I have a gym and swimming pool downstairs, I’ve often found my work “too pressing” to find time to exercise as much as I should have. That is changing by simply forcing a work-out in to my daily schedule, no matter how many servers are crashing and burning around me at the time.

My sleeping habits, ironically, were fixed when I started my detox. The overwhelming fatigue that I felt after a few days of eating only fruit was enough to get my body clock back on track. The sensation of waking up naturally at 8am, fresh, energised and blessed with clarity is a million miles from how I felt just two months ago. Then I would slip out of the bedroom at 1pm, feeling just as lethargic as I had when my body finally passed out the night before.

A good sleeping pattern makes such a huge difference to what I feel capable of achieving in a day, and certainly to my attention span while I’m trying to achieve it.

Many entrepreneurs argue that they’re “not morning people” and work most efficiently at night. While this may be true for some, I would bet that the majority are simply closet insomniacs making the best out of a bad situation.

Finch’s Sickly Generic Final Thoughts

Striving for a healthy lifestyle isn’t something that should be born out of wanting to make more money. There’s no point in stacking towers of dollar bills if you don’t have the health and peace of mind to enjoy them. This is something I have struggled and grappled with for a while.

I see it as a common trait of young entrepreneurs. We have so much money, and such little sense of value. If your work ethic is harming your health, the only future you’re contributing to is your own self-destruction.

While I can say that the changes definitely did improve my focus, concentration and work productivity, these are secondary to the satisfaction that came from looking after myself and actually feeling a sense of working with my body, rather than dragging it kicking and screaming through the night against it’s will.

Western society, particularly America, is riddled with quick fix cures for conditions that can’t possibly heal with the popping of a pill. Papering over cracks is the term that springs to mind. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. Many of us will find any excuse, or quick fix, to continue living unhealthily, until it becomes impossible through the damage we’ve already inflicted to ourselves.

If you’re going to try a detox followed by a change in lifestyle, be prepared for several days of complete and utter Hell. It gets a lot worse before it starts to get better.

Be truthful with yourself, get educated, and find ways to cut out the crap that’s holding you back. Your mind and body will reward you by working at their full potential. And if you’ve been operating “half-arsed” for as long as I had, this can feel like an incredible burden lifted.

Recommended This Week:

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Time Management And The Million Dollar Mistake

May 22 2011

If a business is centered around your individual talents, the need for good time management should be as obvious as a slap in the face. Running a business as the solo brains can be a grueling ordeal at the best of times. It becomes a nightmare if you are guilty of mismanaging time.

How often do you use time as an excuse for failing to meet the targets you set for yourself? Anybody who uses the phrase “there simply aren’t enough hours in the day” needs to realise that time is always at their disposal, and the only thing lacking is personal drive. Yes, even for those with four kids, demanding wives and multiple jobs. Good time management backed by decisive action is an unstoppable recipe for success.

I have dozens of websites in my portfolio. Some are fully realised and highly successful, others are half baked, while the rest resemble hilariously ill-conceived brainfarts that never should have seen the light of a GoDaddy domain checkout cart.

Finding time for so many projects can be an enormous headache, particularly when your attention is divided even further by a hyperactive affiliate marketing career.

It’s very easy to label the successful projects as the best ideas, but in the purest sense, they’re simply the areas you chose to spend your most valuable time. If you’re spending all your time on websites that have reached their peak and still don’t provide the monetary return you need to run a successful business, you’re stumping your own growth.

I only started making money online when I established that the correlation between websites I enjoyed building, and websites I made money from, wasn’t as strong as I first imagined. While you should always pursue your passions and aim for something genuine (it gives you a competitive advantage over the majority of Internet Marketers), you have to balance your time accordingly and work where the money is.

The biggest time management mistake, in my opinion, is the tendency to overestimate how long a task will require through to completion.

Before I grasped the error of my ways, I would assign myself task lists that looked like this:

1 hour: Write a new blog post on…
30 mins: Bookmark, update on Twitter, post on Facebook etc…

Now, what is wrong with that schedule? It’s always so tempting to divide our goals in to neat hourly chunks, but it would be foolish to do so. I would typically spend longer than an hour writing the blog post. But my “social bookmarking” spree would spiral in to 25 minutes of bitching on Twitter over nothing in particular. My schedule suggested that 30 minutes was necessary, and my attitude made it so.

You will naturally increase how long each task takes if you assign a longer time frame than is necessary. Doing so invites the draining twin sisters of procrastination and indecision in to your day. Work to a tighter deadline and you will often get a job done to the same quality in shorter time.

Deadlines are often seen in a negative light. They loom on the horizon as threatening confirmations of failure. But enormous power goes to the entrepreneur who can use the power of deadlines to control all he needs to be. I believe deadlines should be worshipped as the necessary milestones for turning our best kept ideas in to something physical.

In those calm moments where we sit down and sketch the steps required to reach our goals, we are using perfect logic. You can often find a great sense of clarity and expectation by scribbling what it is that you have to do. Your brain never betrays you. The steps you write are typically accurate blueprint plans for creating the success you desire. It’s the refusal to set a deadline that stops the plan from coming to fruition.

If your office storage is anything like mine, you already have a notepad tucked away somewhere with a foolproof idea worth millions of dollars. The moment you confined it to the back of your memory by refusing to set a deadline, you said goodbye to those riches. For your best planned ideas to be worth more than the paper they’re written on, they need to be set in to action with a definitive deadline.

Surely deep down, you understand that great achievers are never found guilty of underestimating what they can achieve in an hour’s work. If you spend day after day sending your brain in to a stupor while setting time aside for chores like linkbuilding and commenting on articles, how do you expect it to develop a winning mentality that aspires to be more than just a slave labourer?

But, I hear you say, those small stupor-inducing tasks add up. We need to build backlinks for our websites, and we need to share updates over Twitter. And I can’t deny that it’s often necessary, but it should never be the backbone of your working day. Making it so is time management gone severely wrong.

People forget how the skill of managing time encompasses more than simply assigning scheduling tasks. It also means delegating or outsourcing the simple work. Anything that distracts you from being the creative and innovative brains at the helm of your business is a burden you should do without.

Likewise, cluttered to-do lists are a sign of poorly planned scheduling and short term thinking. A stressed looking businessman with seventeen items on his to-do list usually only has himself to blame. Half of those items should have been done yesterday, and the other half could be done tomorrow. Assigning too many meaningless tasks is the best way to ensure you’re left feeling unsatisfied at the end of the day, and unmotivated throughout it.

When allowed to degenerate, poor time management becomes a vicious cycle. We create new problems and then burden ourselves with enormous stress by losing the clarity of our original plans.

Many entrepreneurs persistently undervalue their time and by doing so, fail to realise the true potential of their businesses. It may start with a notepad scribble, but all achievement has to be nursed through deadlines and bouts of self-discipline.

Being too busy for a moment of inspiration could turn in to your million dollar mistake.

Recommended This Week:

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Enhance Your Creativity With Binaural Beats

May 08 2011

White noise is something I rely on enormously as a way of channeling my focus and getting work done at home. You could probably guess this by my last post, or by the endless endorsements on Twitter. It’s something I genuinely believe in. Some of you are now fans of SimplyNoise.com, while others I’m sure will remain skeptical.

When I discovered the benefits of white noise, it got me extremely interested in how the brain could respond differently to various audio signals. I inevitably found myself researching the controversial subject of binaural beats. Before you judge that I’ve disappeared up my own arsehole in to a world of mystical hyperbole, allow me to explain.

So… what the Scooby are binaural beats?

Binaural beats have divided mainstream and scientific opinion for a long time. They were discovered in 1839 by a dude called Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, who was clearly meant to be a scientist from the second he was named.

Heinrich determined that by playing two audio tones at slightly different frequencies, the brain could be lured in to any number of artificial states by what’s known as the entrainment of brainwaves. If I sound like I’m speaking with a Wikipedia tab loaded by my side, it’s because I am.

By tapping in to the right frequencies, it’s argued that your brain can be induced in to one of many subconscious states. You may feel anything from surges of creativity, supreme focus, states of healing to even telepathic understanding. Now whether you believe this shit or not, it doesn’t really matter. As somebody who investigated the effects for himself, I can say that I’ve found enough common ground to keep myself intrigued.

If you listen to this binaural beats sample, you’ll get an idea for what they actually sound like. Now in terms of raw beauty, Regina Spektor it most certainly ain’t. I should point out that headphones are a must. You can’t expect binaural beats to be effective if you don’t have a good pair of headphones to funnel the frequencies through each ear without crossover.

There are thousands of binaural beats scattered around the Internet. Some are free, some are not. Each beat is crafted to create a shift in consciousness to a desired state. For the self-help freaks reading this, you’ll find a binaural beat for practically every state imaginable. Whether it’s giving up smoking, losing weight or improving your work ethic, sites like The Unexplainable Store have a beat for the occasion.

It would be easy to dismiss these websites as manipulators of unproven science for financial gain. But there truly is a great deal of confusion over just how influential these beats can be. Not too long ago, they were the source of a media backlash dubbing them illegal narcotics.

Personally, I don’t want to oversell what binaural beats may or may not be able to do for you. I believe the effects are psychological and unique to the individual, in such a way that science has no reliable method of classifying them.

If you’ve ever read The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, you are probably familiar with the idea that your state of mind determines the exact environment around you. There is very little concrete scientific proof of how binaural beats can produce identifiable changes in your life. But if your state of mind is right, it’s highly probable that science is still playing catch-up.

All I know is that I’ve extracted a great deal of productivity since trading Spotify for these looping beats. There are many free binaural beats that you can sample for yourself, and if you liked the white noise post, I suggest you check them out!

Recommended This Week:

Check out The Unexplainable Store for the holy motherload of binaural beats and isochronic tones. I believe YouTube has some freebies too
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