Productivity

Dear past me,

Let me tell you something about achieving your dreams. Because god knows you have them. So many, that you’re barely able to sit down, focus, and work toward any of them. Some of those dreams are so big, so scary, and look so ridiculous you barely even talk about them to others, let alone yourself.

Oh, what big mistakes you’re making.

Believe me when I say that one day, you’ll look back at this moment and laugh. All those fears you thought you had? All those obstacles you thought were standing in your way? Those doubts and uncertainties? All of them, one by one, are not even worth worrying about.

You’ll figure things out. You always do.

But that’s only under a specific condition. The condition is that you dare to visualize those dreams, create a plan to reach them, and commit to sticking to the plan, no matter what happens.

And before you lose focus of the bigger picture…

The ‘plan’ isn’t the important part here. Yes it’s necessary. But your plan will fail. It will crumble. And it will change.

What matters is that you have one, no matter how badly it reflects reality or how differently things will pan out. What matters is that you tell yourself what to do and actually commit to doing them.

Not thinking about them. Not writing them out. Not telling other people about it.

Do all of those things if it eases you.

But make sure, above all else, you commit to actually doing the things you tell yourself you’re going to do.

As Dan Kennedy wrote in his book, “No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs”:

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“In the end, your success depends on how much of what you need to get done gets done when you want it done, the way you want it done.”

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Don’t be an “idea guy”.

Be the guy who implements a lot of ideas.

And on that note, a major part of implementing those ideas will involve lots and lots of persuasive writing. Email writing more specifically. I can’t tell you how much developing this incredibly valuable skill has benefited me (your future self) in my (your future) life already.

So you might want to check out this amazing course called Email Valhalla.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

Here’s an interesting fact I’ve found out to be true:

The more tasks, projects, and responsibilities you take on, the more productive you become.

Coincidentally, becoming more productive also allows you to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing a lot more.

Do with this information what you want.

But if you’re interested in learning how to not just enjoy but absolutely adore and love the writing process, then you might want to check out the book I wrote about it.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/loving

I’m always working on something.

Whether it’s writing an email, reworking a sales page for the 10th time, crafting a new offer, batching social media content, working with clients, or updating a product I made a while ago.

This might look overwhelming to many people.

More.

Some might fall into the trap of working on their stuff indefinitely, trying to get it “just perfect”.

Yet this is the least productive task you could probably spend your time on.

That 100th revision won’t make the difference. That one typo you fixed in your 2,117-word email won’t make you more money. That logo you redesigned won’t magically land you more clients.

Creating more content, launching more offers, and talking to more people. Now that will make you more money.

Which brings the question: how do you handle saying to yourself “it’s good enough” and just go with it.

My answer?

Public deadlines.

See, I’m a big procrastinator.

Always have been and always will be. I never get anything done unless it’s absolutely necessary. This has put me in a lot of trouble in the past. But it didn’t need to.

I realized last year that I could use this to my advantage.

How?

By setting deadlines.

Whether artificial or real—setting deadlines is the secret to getting things done. Especially for a procrastinator—they get extra productive when those deadlines come close.

So imagine I have to write an email that has to be published by 8pm.

There’s no way I’m procrastinating on that one when the clock strikes 7.30. Neither will I avoid researching a topic for a coaching call an hour before I’m supposed to hop on the call.

But there’s one problem.

What if there is no deadline?

Imagine if you wanted to launch your newsletter or create and sell a new product. It’s your own project. You don’t have a boss to tell you when something is due.

But you do have (potential) customers, readers, followers, or whatever you call the people who like your stuff.

The solution?

You announce that you’ll be launching a new product before you even start creating it. Tell your followers that your course will launch in 2 weeks. Even stronger. Announce that your product is available for early purchase at a discounted price.

Now you have no choice but to 1) create a sales page 2) write those promotional emails 3) create a curriculum 4) design your product 5) figure out your pricing and most importantly 6) get everything done in 2 weeks.

No time to mess around. No time to procrastinate. And no chance for you to “keep gathering information and not take action”.

Now I’m sure this might not be possible with everything in life.

But so far I’ve found a way to apply this trick to everything that’s functional and important in my life.

Try it out for yourself and see how much you can truly get done in a short amount of time.

On another note.

If you’d like to discover my framework for writing high-converting emails that keep your readers engaged and coming back each and every day, without having to spend hours writing them (in fact, you could easily start writing emails in less than 5–10 minutes), then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Well, not literally of course.

See, I’ve previously spoken about “lighting a fire under your ass” and the benefits it brings.

In fact, I haven’t found any other way that’s better at effortlessly increasing your motivation, discipline, productivity, and everything else that goes along with it (including your enjoyment of the process) no matter what kind of work you do.

It’s like jumping out of an airplane and crafting yourself a self-made parachute while you’re falling.

Which sounds scary, and it can be, but it doesn’t have to be nearly as life-threatening or career-destroying as you might think (which, trust me, I know isn’t something you‘ll likely want to do)

No, instead, there’s a few methods you can use to light the proverbial fire under your ass to get you going and increase your productivity (and feeling of progression, aka, enjoyment) without risking your career to go to waste.

I use these methods all the times.

And I teach them to many of my students and clients alike, with great success.

In fact, one of these “strategies” is one of the foundations of the product creation framework I teach in “Product Creation Made Easy” where I teach people how to easily and effortlessly ideate, create, and launch digital products in 21 days or less.

And it works absolute miracles.

It works so well that even I, the self-proclaimed king of procrastination around town, am able to use it to actually get shit done on time.

So you better be sure that it’ll work for you as well.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about this strategy, you can do so by checking out Product Creation Made Easy here: https://alexvandromme.com/product

I’m always working on something.

Whether it’s writing an email, reworking a sales page for the 10th time, crafting a new offer, batching social media content, working with clients, or updating a product I made a while ago.

This might look overwhelming to many people.

More.

Some might fall into the trap of working on their stuff indefinitely, trying to get it “just perfect”.

Yet this is the least productive task you could probably spend your time on.

That 100th revision won’t make the difference. That one typo you fixed in your 2,117-word email won’t make you more money. That logo you redesigned won’t magically land you more clients.

Creating more content, launching more offers, and talking to more people. Now that will make you more money.

Which brings the question: how do you handle saying to yourself “it’s good enough” and just go with it.

My answer?

Public deadlines.

See, I’m a big procrastinator.

Always have been and always will be. I never get anything done unless it’s absolutely necessary. This has put me in a lot of trouble in the past. But it didn’t need to.

I realized it last year that I could use this to my advantage.

How?

By setting deadlines.

Whether artificial or real—setting deadlines is the secret to getting things done. Especially for a procrastinator—they get extra productive when those deadlines come close.

So imagine I have to write an email that has to be published by 8pm.

There’s no way I’m procrastinating on that one when the clock strikes 7.30. Neither will I avoid researching a topic for a coaching call an hour before I’m supposed to hop on the call.

But there’s one problem.

What if there is no deadline?

Imagine if you wanted to launch your newsletter or create and sell a new product. It’s your own project. You don’t have a boss to tell you when something is due.

But you do have (potential) customers, readers, followers, or whatever you call the people who like your stuff.

The solution?

You announce that you’ll be launching a new product before you even start creating it. Tell your followers that your course will launch in 2 weeks. Even stronger. Announce that your product is available for early purchase at a discounted price.

Now you have no choice but to 1) create a sales page 2) write those promotional emails 3) create a curriculum 4) design your product 5) figure out your pricing and most importantly 6) get everything done in 2 weeks.

No time to mess around. No time to procrastinate. And no chance for you to “keep gathering information and not take action”.

Now I’m sure this might not be possible with everything in life.

But so far I’ve found a way to apply this trick to everything that’s functional and important in my life.

Try it out for yourself and see how much you can truly get done in a short amount of time.

On another note.

If you’d like to discover my framework for writing high-converting emails that keep your readers engaged and coming back each and every day, without having to spend hours writing them (in fact, you could easily start writing emails in less than 5–10 minutes), then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Here’s a weird observation I made recently:

The more responsibility I take on, aka the more stuff I have to do each and every day, the more work I get done each and every day.

Which, while reading it right now, you might think “uh, yeah, no shit Sherlock.”

But if you’d look at every productivity book out there or listen to any so-called productivity experts, you’ll always hear the same advice of only taking on a couple (2 or 3) of tasks each day, as to not to overwhelm you with the amount of stuff you have to do—for which the reasoning is, the more stuff you do, the more stress you have, the less stuff you get done, so you better take on less responsibility and make sure to only do the important stuff.

But that’s not at all what I found to be true in my own life.

In my experience, it goes something like this:

The less I have to do, the more time I have to do these things, the lazier I am, the less I do, and then because of that laziness I sometimes even procrastinate on those 2 or 3 important things I was supposed to do.

That’s something that, once again, never ever happened to me when I had a lot, some might even say way too much, stuff on my plate.

In that case, I knew there was no time to fuck around, no time to be lazy, and I’d get to work all day every day

Resulting in me getting ten times as much stuff throughout the day as I would otherwise.

Goes to show you to not blindly trust other people’s advice and test things out for yourself.

Anyway.

I thought this might be an interesting observation to share with you.

Speaking of which.

Another observation I made is that people who bought Email Valhalla have, on average, a much more successful business and write much better converting emails that make sales and keep their readers engaged and wanting more.

If you’d like to learn more about Email Valhalla, then click here now: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

I’ve worked many jobs in the past 4 years—many of them pure shyte.

Some notable ones are:

Working in nightclubs, raking leaves, vacuuming wedding venues, scrubbing toilets, cleaning windows, loading in trucks, repairing used festival speakers, guiding traffic at private parking, and many, many more odd jobs like these.

Now I didn’t just work weird jobs.

I’ve also worked more “normal” jobs such as a door-to-door salesman and a bartender when I was younger.

Yet that’s beside the point.

The fact is, I’ve seen and experienced many things, worked for/with, and met countless people in all stages of life, and learned to hate different aspects of every job I worked.

But I don’t regret any of them.

I wouldn’t do it over, that’s for sure, I’d rather stay far, far, far away from all of them, never to get anywhere close to jobs like that in my, hopefully, many years I’ll spend on this earth.

But, yet again, all of those jobs helped me develop into the person I am today.

Even more.

All of those jobs made me appreciate “doing the work” and putting in effort for the things I’m doing right now. Sure I might complain once in a while that I’ve got a lot of stuff to write, or there’s a lot I need to think about, or that a certain promotion didn’t do as well (something I learned not to care about at all, because it doesn’t actually matter at all in the long run and whether I make a sale or not, I’m eating steak either way).

When it comes down to it, I’m blessed to be in the position I’m in right now.

In fact, I’ve got no doubt many would kill to be in this position (chances are people would kill to be in your position as well if you’re lucky and blessed enough to be able to read this email—yet that’s not something we ever realize, much less think about).

The reality is.

Everyone (or at least every man) should, at one point in their lives, have worked a terrible job, with shitty pay, awful working conditions, incredibly long hours, little to no recognition whatsoever, and without any (known) hope of landing a better job in the future.

Why?

Because those jobs are what’s needed to be grateful with the better ones you’ll undoubtedly land eventually.

Just as there’s no light without darkness, neither can there be a good situation without bad ones to compare it to—life only makes sense for us in comparisons after all.

Anyway.

I don’t know what kind of jobs you’ve had in the past or what kind of work you’re doing as we speak. But if you’d like to get to know a better opportunity then I’d recommend you to check out Email Valhalla today.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

A few days ago my dad looked at the bookshelf I’ve got in my room and started browsing through my collection of the 70-something books I’ve collected and (mostly) read over the past 1–2 years.

Some titles caught his attention—either as interesting titles he’d someday wanted to read or simply as titles he recognized and might or might not previously have read himself.

Either way, he then muttered the following in a way that made it seem he was more so talking to himself than he was to me, “I should really start reading more often”.

The thing is, he’s juggling a lot of stuff currently.

Some examples (purposefully kept vague for privacy reasons):

He recently started a new IT consulting job for which he’s taking a lot of additional training, both at home by experimenting with this new (at least to him) technology to learn how to best serve his customers, as Earl Nightingale would tell you are your real bosses, as well as following different trainings through his employer to collect some new certificates.

At the same time, he’s also working on getting his online business gig up and running, regularly working out (6 times a week right now—he’s actually doing better in terms of fitness than I am right now (and I introduced him to it)) which also includes heavily counting his calories and making sure his macros are correct, reading my emails and almost everything else I write (sorry not sorry for giving you extra work to do throughout the day), as well as being a father and a husband and keeping time for family and leisure.

So that made me realize something.

We all have so much stuff we want do, stuff we don’t want to do, and stuff we simply need to do no matter whether we want it or not. A lot of stuff, yet not a lot of time to do everything. Let alone all the stuff we spend our time on that we neither actually want nor need to do (these are the real time-wasters).

You’d be surprised how much time of our day we spent on that last type of activity (I know I waste a ton of time every single day).

Anyway.

I won’t claim to know the solution to fixing your time schedule and being able to doing everything you want to do—I don’t know.

What I do know is the importance of recognizing the problems in your daily schedule and actively sitting down trying to come up with 1) your current schedule (including the time you waste) 2) your ideal schedule and 3) a better, improved, and realistic schedule you could start working towards to make your life and the world you live in a better place.

That said.

Another thing I know, when it comes to working on improving your business AND saving time, is that you can do both of these by applying the tips and principles I teach in Email Valhalla to write faster while also writing more persuasively so you can build a bigger list, make more sales, and build a bigger, better, more thriving business, all while spending less time selling.

Don’t believe my biased ass?

Check it out for yourself here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla