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“Amazing noise canceling for Zoom or Cell calls” – Krisp App

Exit a boring Zoom call due to technical difficulties

Apple iPhone or iPad instant notes

Book Report – Cal Newport – Deep Work

• Shallow work is being more common and does not create value
• Set yourself up: cabin in woods, get a hotel, fly on airplane
• Serendipitous encounter where there is collaboration open office vs solo thinker
• Hub and spoke technique
• Buy here

Change Your Cell Phone Reminders

You can change the sounds your cell phone makes and those sounds can become triggers, reminding you to engage in a good habit. The theme from the movie Rocky can serve as a reminder to stop watching TV, get off the couch and exercise.

You can set your cell phone reminders to anything that serves to remind you to engage in a particular new, good habit.

Post Pictures Where You Can See Them Every Day

Every day, millions wake up, head for the bathroom, gargle and brush their teeth.  The bathroom mirror is the first thing many of us see in the morning.

Pictures are effective in forming new habits, but not so effective in eliminating old, bad habits.

If you want to stop eating, place a picture on your bathroom mirror of the figure you desire to have. This will act as a trigger to exercise (new habit), and exercise is one of those keystone habits that affect other habits, such as eating junk food.

You can also download a picture to your cell phone and make it your background picture, something you cannot avoid seeing every day.

Remove Environmental Triggers

If you have the habit of watching TV after eating your dinner, which triggers sitting on the couch and drinking alcohol, put a sign on your dinner table that says “Read” or “Exercise” of “Go For a Walk”.

If your kitchen cupboard is a trigger to snack on junk food, then remove all of the junk food and replace it with some healthy alternatives.

If McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts is a trigger to eat junk breakfast food, then change the route of your commute to avoid seeing those yellow arches or that big donut sign.

Depending on the study, 40% or more of your daily activities are habits. Since habits are a major factor in determining the circumstances of your life, changing them must become a priority, if your life is not what you desire.

No more Passwords!

The most frustrating thing is to lose an hour of productivity every few weeks when your cookies on your computer refresh and you have to remember and change your passwords. Try LastPass to make this first world problem go away!

Purchase annual Premium subscription for only $36/user/year

8?s to Identify a Real Problem

Why isn’t this problem already solved?
Why am I not where I want to be?
How did this get to be a problem to begin with?
What have been the impediments or constraints that have hindered me from solving this problem? (skills, desire, resources, time, discipline, environment)
If I could only ______ really, really, well, I would have it all figured out
What could I do to make this problem even worse?
What can be done today to improve this situation?
If I only had ____, I could solve this problem.

Return Amazon stuff to Kohl’s 19.04.24

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/24/716757082/kohls-will-now-accept-amazon-returns-at-all-its-stores

*Unfortunately there are no Kohl’s in Hawaii :/

Track you mileage for taxes – 19.04.22

Link to MileIQ

Taking leaps of faith bring out our best (and worse)

Heros are not born but they are created out of circumstances. Unfortunately what we never think of are those who crumble under circumstances.

The great thing about entrepreneurship is you don’t have to go to college but you do have to pay tuition through repeated failure and broken hearts & shattered dreams. Of course all that money you lose on your first few ventures. It’s all part of this tuition. Some call it UHK University of Hard Knocks.

We all know the ford motor company’s legendary founder Henry Ford. He to went through these”college years” so to speak. Ford spent 8 successful years at the Edison Company and in 1899. He was offered a big promotion to a supervisor position (with large annual salary of $1,900 dollars a month at the time) but Ford turn the offer down and instead decided to become an entrepreneur and start his own company.

It seemed like a really bad decision because instead of earning $1,900 dollars a month he was having to figure out how to live on a 150 dollars a month. Within a year he was out of business. Ford started another company making racing cars that soon failed too. Then Ford started another company and that third company was the Ford motor company in 1908. It took him 8 years after getting rid of the easy W2 job and enrolling in entrepreneur school.  

Automated email reminders via a Follow-up-then 

You can get creative with this stuff as I do with some examples below:

EveryOct21@followupthen.com   Subject: Mom’s birthday

1year@followupthen.com  Subject: Book flight to Mari Gras

4day@followupthen.com   Subject: Remind the broker to list your property… AGAIN!

EveryFriday5PM@followupthen.com  Subject: Post in the Secret Mastermind: Journey to Simple Passive Cashflow facebook page

Tony Robbins priming exercise

Here is the Tony Robbins Priming video to use at home. I ripped the mp3 here if you want to download and store on your phone for quick reference. If you propeller hats out there want to add it to Alexa/Siri’s quick play as your morning ritual good for you! Check out more books of his here.

USPS “informed delivery” 19.03.12

You sign up for free to and get an email or app updates with scanned images of the mail that is expected to come later that day (even junk mail). https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action

Ask yourself WHY!

When your stuck or screwing up, you start writing. I’m afraid because _____ and because of that I’m afraid of because _____ until hopefully you get to something pretty deep and universal. “I’m afraid that if I ____ , then everyone will know that I am truly a phony, and unlovable”. or something like that. Then you write out what you might say to a child who was experiencing that emotion. Reframe that fear into an empowering statement. Then acknowledge that you might still feel the fear, but use the empowering statement to take immediate action, on whatever the next step is. It’s like another thing called “Why5” (Why 7 if you are a guy or a really messed up gal and have a lot of insecurites and can’t get real) You keep asking why do you want something or do something… it starts trivial then should get more and more to the essence of what drives you as you peel back the layers of the onion (tears/emotions).

Stoic Hack

An unexpected expense messes up your vacation budget. Hitting three red lights on the way to work makes you frustratingly late. You bump your elbow just the wrong way at just the wrong angle—a freak shot—and it breaks in two places. What terrible luck. Exactly when you don’t need it. The world can be a cruel place.

That’s one way to look at it. Of course, the other would be to remember the times you thought something was going to cost a lot more and ended up saving money (or that unexpected pay raise). Or the time when you hit so many green lights in a row it seemed like your drive was blessed. Or the time where, had things gone slightly differently, you would have been glad to escape with only a broken bone—the time when you easily could have died.

There are two ways to do math in this life. The one that looks at the odds and says, Why me? and the other that looks at the same odds and thinks, Why me? Why am I so lucky? That’s what Epictetus meant when he said “every situation has two handles.” We can see all the things that go wrong in the world, all the breaks we didn’t get, all the things we wish went differently. Or we can see how truly fortunate we are to be born here and now in a time of antibiotics and chemotherapy, to have the privilege of even owning a computer to look at this email, to count our blessings and acknowledge how far ahead we have come out so far.
We choose which handle we will grab, which math we will do. And this decision determines the quality of our life, long or short, easy or arduous.

Jobless Claims

I do a lot of weird stuff. But seriously I have a degree in industrial engineering… this list is credited to that expensive degree. Thanks, mom and dad.

Something I am watching lately is the jobless claim stats which seems to be a more of a direct indicator that the manipulated unemployment stats. To use a medical analogy, the jobless claim is like your blood sugar level where the unemployment stats is your longer term A1C number.
Jobless Claims are:

1. Complete data – not sampled.  Most official data is a partial sample.  Jobless Claims are conducted across all parts of the US.
2. Not modeled.  Most official data gets modeled and extrapolated.  That means inflection points and disruptions get missed until the model is ‘corrected’.  Jobless Claims are pure
3. Actual data, not opinion.  A lot of data points are actually just opinions and soft surveys.  (Q: How do you feel about prices?  A: I dunno.  ok?)   Conversely, each Jobless Claim required an individual to raise their hand and say they were just fired.
4. Frequent and Real time.  Jobless Claims are published each week within days of filing.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Getting Things Done is a thoroughly practical method of handling the little things that over time comprise the big things in life. I picked up this book over a decade ago and honestly this book has been much more impactful on my life than the little purple book RDPD by Robert Kiyosaki.

It’s a mindset and methodology written by David Allen who sort of looks like Bill Gates.

I think within the first chapter you will find that you will be making better use of you day, increasing your productivity, and feeling most importantly feeling happier and less anxious.

The techniques allows you to get more stuff done but it takes it a step forward by allowing you to achieve a clearer mind so that we can focus on our meaningful, long-term goals in a more creative way.

This book is full of tricks to help you get things done, but just like the tag line for this website SimplePassiveCashflow.com is the Passive Cashflow is the easy part but what you do after that is the hard part yet to be written.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen
2001, 267 pages $10
Amazon

Takeaways

Allen’s favorite state of “mind like water,” where every event is fluid in the system and allows you to work more effectively and be ready for the days fires and office drama.

Why Things Are On Your Mind
Most often, the reason something is “on your mind” is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:

you haven’t clarified exactly what the intended outcome is;

you haven’t decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or

you haven’t put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust

Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.

Give yourself permission to capture and express any idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it. If nothing else (and there is plenty of “else”), this practice adds to your efficiency – when you have the idea, you grab it, which means you won’t have to go “have the idea” again.

In mind-mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it.

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future.

Most people don’t have a really complete system, and they get no real payoff from reviewing things for just that reason; their overview isn’t total. They still have a vague sense that something may be missing. That’s why the rewards to be gained from implementing this whole process are at least geometric: the more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it. The Weekly Review is a master key to maintaining that standard.

GTD gives you a lot of bottom up tricks but I wanted to balance out today’s #LaneHack with a top-down hack or mindset tip.

An unexpected expense messes up your vacation budget. Hitting three red lights on the way to work makes you frustratingly late. You bump your elbow just the wrong way at just the wrong angle—a freak shot—and it breaks in two places. What terrible luck. Exactly when you don’t need it. The world can be a cruel place.

That’s one way to look at it. Of course, the other would be to remember the times you thought something was going to cost a lot more and ended up saving money (or that unexpected pay raise). Or the time when you hit so many green lights in a row it seemed like your drive was blessed. Or the time where, had things gone slightly differently, you would have been glad to escape with only a broken bone—the time when you easily could have died.

There are two ways to do math in this life. The one that looks at the odds and says, Why me? and the other that looks at the same odds and thinks, Why me? Why am I so lucky? That’s what Epictetus meant when he said “every situation has two handles.” We can see all the things that go wrong in the world, all the breaks we didn’t get, all the things we wish went differently. Or we can see how truly fortunate we are to be born here and now in a time of antibiotics and chemotherapy, to have the privilege of even owning a computer to look at this email, to count our blessings and acknowledge how far ahead we have come out so far.

We choose which handle we will grab, which math we will do. And this decision determines the quality of our life, long or short, easy or arduous.

Reasons you don’t want to buy 50k or under homes

1) can’t leverage them without paying a huge percentage of transaction costs

2) many lends won’t give you a loan that small

3) if you aren’t leveraging you are missing out on the reason we invest in real estate

4) I have found rents under 800 attract the seediest tenants

5) as much as I don’t like investing for appreciation since I am more for cashflow these homes are in the worst part of town and never appreciate nor can they be sold to a retail buyer

6) if you are going to do a BRRRR strategy then you are using up the most value able resource with is time.

Sucker Deals looking for Free Food

If you want to sell sucker auction deals to unsophisticated professional employees who have too much money (and end up biding each other up)… offer free pasta and they will come.

Pay to Play

After I paid for a few masterminds and coaching (I swore I would never pay another person for such thing) I have seen the light and totally on-board with the idea of taking yourself to the next level quicker and easier and with fewer costs.

Common Excuses

The 4 biggest excuses that hold back rookie investors (that I have heard so many times that I instantly call BS)…. “I don’t have the money.” “I don’t have the time.” “There are no properties in my area” or “The properties are too expensive in my area.” “I don’t know enough to invest.”

Block Distractions

StayFocusd– Google Chrome extension that allows you to block certain sites from your browser. You can set your working hours during the day, choose which sites you want to avoid, and StayFocusd will do the rest.

News Feed Eradicator for Facebook– Do you often want to check Facebook, and then find yourself disappearing for hours as you are consumed by the bottomless pit that is the News Feed? Get your life back without having to delete Facebook altogether.

RescueTime– helps you figure out where you need to cut out distractions in your life. This app tracks the programs and sites you spend the most time on and includes some pretty great analytics, such as most productive hours of the day and best days of the week for you to do work.

Set The Mood

Coffitivity– Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better.

ASoftMurmur– Ambient sounds to wash away distraction.

Organize Your Browser

Google Chrome– Set workflow, open as tabs with one click. Option: Create separate Chrome Profiles for each business or major task area.

OneTab– Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.

Accelerate Your Speed

Increase the speed of your mouse.

aText– aText accelerates your typing by replacing abbreviations with frequently used phrases you define.

TextExpander– TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation.

avoid typing the same thing over and over.

SizeUp– SizeUp allows you to quickly resize and position your windows with keyboard shortcuts or a handy menu bar icon.

Moom– Move and zoom windows.

Quix– Quix is a bookmarklet which opens a prompt, and then responds to commands. When you type whois, for instance, it’ll take you to a page with the whois of the domain you’re currently on.

Manage Email

Batched Inbox– Group emails to deliver at specific intervals like 2/x per day.

HelpScout– Email with superpowers. Get client support, team collaboration, and universal reporting in one email management platform. Use it as a HelpDesk without ticketing. My favorite!!

MixMax– Write an email now and schedule it to send automatically later.

Boomerang for Gmail– Schedule an email to be sent later. Easy email reminders.

More to come… Get all the inside scoops here