Your Time Is Worth Money, So Stop Wasting It.

How much is a work hour really worth?

Studies show that employees spend about 31 hours per month in meetings, and spend less than 60 percent of time actually working productively.
Having gone to work for a major public relations firm right out of college, I came to understand the value of an hour very early on in my career. While I made far less than my billable rate, clients paid just over $100 an hour for time I spent working on their account. For each 15-minute increment I billed, I had to justify the work I did. If a project gave me difficulty, or I was just having a particularly unproductive day, I’d adjust my hours accordingly.

Though I no longer have to enter my time and match it up with billing codes at the end of the day, the mindset has served me exceptionally well. I’ve found that it’s incredibly helpful in any workplace -- even in the nonprofit sector, where making money isn’t even part of the objective. The hours of the day are finite and intrinsically valuable, and the most successful managers and entrepreneurs are those who not only properly manage their own time, but the time of others.
I’ve since left the world of public relations firms, but I continue to assign a dollar amount to my hours, and I recommend that anyone else who regularly juggles tasks do the same. If you look at the first hour of the day as, say, $100 instead of 9 to 10 a.m. on your calendar, it becomes easier to prioritize important tasks by planning your hours, days and weeks around major objectives. It can also help you cut back on time-sucking activities that you might have thought were worth your time, but in a new light, simply aren’t worth the money.

As a manager, it’s equally important to place a value on the time of your colleagues and employees. My time is worth more than my staff’s, and their time is worth more than an intern’s. Everyone understands this dynamic and plans accordingly. It helps them to decide whether a task is better left to an intern or if it might be better to manage up and ask me to take something off their plate. By determining the relative importance -- and time-sensitivity -- of tasks, it makes it much easier to assign and complete them in the most productive manner possible.
Assigning monetary value to both tasks and employees helps clear schedules of time-sucking activities that drag on production. An hour-long, 20-person meeting where only 10 people really need to be in attendance translates to more than a full workday’s worth of wasted time.
For workplace veterans, this line of thinking may be second nature, but for young professionals, the value of an hour wasted doesn’t always ring true. Regardless of whether the billable hour is on its way out as a billing mechanism, it’s a valuable mental model to apply to almost any career. If we all treated our minutes a little more like dollars, there might be less time spent on Facebook and fantasy football and more spent moving our organizations forward.

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10 Ways To Make Your Life Better Today

1. THE ALIEN TRICK.

This is the main trick for me that works. And it's stupid. Skip ahead if you want.

I imagine I'm an alien and every day I land on a new planet in a new body with no memory of where I was yesterday and no idea why I'm here today.

Right now I woke up in a body in Miami.

It's foggy and blurry. I have to figure out: am I in a city of ghosts? What are those lights moving in between the bodies of gray blue waves. I take a deep breath.

I have no worries because tomorrow I will be in a new body. 

No envies. No worries. Only new things to explore. I just have to figure out and do my mission today.

That is a relaxing feeling for me. A relief.

2. SAY NO. 

People ask me: what can I write about.

Here's an idea: write the list of 10 things you will say "NO" to today.

I've given you one thing below: say "no" to news.

You can also say no to people, to meetings, to events, to things in the distant future, to some of your universe of possibilities.

You can say no to people who make you feel bad about yourself. To people who backstab you or make you feel anxious in any way.

But, you might say, "I have to pay the bills. I have to work with a boss who I hate."

Ok, but say "NO" to saying one more word to him than you have to. 

Fine-tune your "No." "NO" is a beautiful musical instrument you learn how to play.

The consequences are never as bad as you think. The benefits are:

• More energy
• You don't do things you don't want to do.
• You save the "opportunity cost" of engaging in activities that take their toll on you.
• The cliche "life is short" means NO becomes greater in importance every single day of your life.

If you hoard your NOs then on your deathbed the only thing you will have left is "No" and you will regret never letting them all out.

3. ASK QUESTIONS.

But don't have answers. A question opens a world of possibility.

The universe is not one place but a spectrum of possibilities. I don't say this in a pseudo-quantum-mechanics way.

It's just true. There's no one answer that's correct. If you ask people how World War I started you get 10 different answers. If you ask people: paleo or low-calories? You get 10 different answers. 

If you ask yourself, "will I be successful?" there are many many answers.

Many possible universes. You get to choose which one you will land in.

Be ok with no answers. That means you get to explore. And to guess. And to speculate.

Answers are the death of possibility. The graveyard of intuition and creativity.

Just ask more questions.

4. SLEEP 8 HOURS: To be relaxed and well-slept gives energy to have ideas, to execute on ideas, to surprise a loved one, to take advantage of opportunities. And it's fun to dream.

5. NO NEWS: Nothing in the news will make your life actually better today. 

Most news is reported by very bad reporters who are encouraged to use scare tactics to keep you in submission and slavery (i.e. reading the vomit they throw up in your mouth).

6. DON'T MAKE YOUR SH*T DIFFICULT.

Life is better when your sinuses are clean, when your arteries are clean, and when your digestive tract is clean.

Think of the opposite. Imagine stuff stuck in your digestive tract. And imagine it stays stuck, and it gets putrid. And you get sick. And it's still stuck. And more toxins stick to it.

Eat stuff that will flow better. So you feel better. 

7. WATCH SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH.

Worry will never solve tomorrow's problems. It will only take energy away from today.

So do something that is the opposite of worry. Laugh.

It's hard to tear yourself away from the addiction of worry. But please try.

Yesterday I watched some "Louis CK." The day before I watched an old clip of Jonah Hill doing standup. Then I compared a Zach Galifianikis standup from 1999 to 2006 to see how he improved.

Just 30 minutes. Laughter releases a hormone, oxytocin, which makes you feel better. Like you are having a mini-orgasm. That's not so bad, right?

8. CARE, BUT DON'T WORRY.

Let's say you want to do something that will improve your life.

Like write a novel so you can get rich and famous and work from home. 

Do the things that show you Care about it, but don't worry about the outcome.

For instance, work on the novel, but don't get anxious: "this sucks!" The anxiety will never help.

But Care moves you close to the universe where your novel goes from imaginary to reality. Worry never does that.

Caring is like water. Your static and miserable life is a rock. Care drips on the rock every day and eventually the rock dissolves.

Tiny small doses of Care.

9. TALK TO SOMEONE YOU LIKE.

We have three needs in life: need for connection, need for achievement, need to relax. (Freud only says the first two but he was a coke addict.)

When you talk to someone you like, at least once a day, you have a chance to satisfy all three of these needs at the same time.

10. GRATITUDE.

I apologize in advance. I feel now it's almost a cliche to put it here. Everyone says it. But I think most people miss the REAL point.

Gratitude is not "good" or "bad," just like "hearing" is not good or bad.

Gratitude is not an emotion. Or a thought. It's a sense: like seeing or tasting or feeling.

When I worry about money, or my daughters. Or Claudia. Or what someone says or does or whatever, I look around me and replace those worries with gratitude.

Then every small thing around me glitters for that moment. 

Gratitude focuses the blur of life for a split-second, so I can Care more clearly, so I can accomplish my alien mission.

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10 Harsh Realities that Help You Grow

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All the world is full of suffering.  It is also full of overcoming.

Character and wisdom are sculpted over time.  They come with loss, lessons, and triumphs.  They come after doubts, second guesses, and exploring unknowns.  If there were a definitive path to happiness and success, everyone would be on it.  The seeds of your progress are planted in your past failures.  Your best stories will come from overcoming your greatest struggles.  Your praises will be birthed from your pains.  So keep standing, keep learning, and keep living.
Over the past decade Angel and I have dealt with several severe hardships, including the sudden death of a sibling, the loss of a best friend to illness, betrayal from a business partner, and an unexpected breadwinning employment layoff.  These experiences were brutal.  Each of them, unsurprisingly, knocked us down and kept us down for a while.  But when our time of mourning was over after each tragedy, we pressed forward, stronger, and with a greater understanding and respect for life.
So my challenge to you today is this:  Start looking at life’s harsh realities and toughest challenges as friends that are going to help you grow.
Here are some thoughts to consider…

1.  The first step is never easy.

The beginnings to good things are always the hardest, but it’s these hard times that pave the path to greatness.  Be strong and keep the faith.  It will be worth it in the end.  The greatest miracle of your success in life will not be that you finished, it will be that you found the strength and courage to begin.
And remember, it’s not that those who are strong never get weak in the knees, or that they never hold their breath before they embark…  It’s that while their knees are shaking, they force themselves to breathe and take the first step.

2.  Good things rarely come quick and easy.

Life is not easy, but it’s worth it.  If you expect it to be, you will perpetually disappoint yourself.  Achieving anything worthwhile in life takes time and effort.  You must align your efforts with your goals and then start every day ready to run farther than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before.
Persistence is the single most common characteristic of high achievers.  They simply refuse to give up.  The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor.  Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration.  No matter how hard it seems, the more you persist, the more likely your success.

3.  You will always have less control than you desire.

The only thing you can absolutely control in life is how you react to things out of your control, and there’s a lot you can’t control.  The better you adapt to this reality, the more powerful your highs will be, and the more quickly you’ll be able to bounce back from the lows.  Put most simply: Living a happy, fulfilling life means being in a state of complete acceptance of all that is, right here, right now.
As your life unfolds, you will often realize that many of the times you thought you were being rejected from something good, you were in fact being redirected to something better.  You don’t have to control everything to find peace and happiness.  You just need to do you best, and then relax and have faith that things will work out.  Let go and just let life happen the way it’s supposed to.  Because sometimes the outcomes you can’t change end up changing you and helping you grow to your full potential.

4.  You cannot avoid risk without avoiding life.

As Henry David Thoreau once said, “When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.”
Living is a risk.  Happiness is a risk.  If you’re not a little scared sometimes, then you’re not doing it right.  Don’t worry about mistakes and failures, worry about what you’re giving up when you don’t even try.  Worry about the life you’re not living and the happiness you’re forgoing, as you merely exist in the safety of your comfort zone.  Give yourself permission to be one of the people who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them and grew into your truest self.

5.  Your biggest problems are often in your head.

The primary cause of unhappiness and defeat is never the current situation but your thoughts about it.  Happiness and success really comes down to two elements: the way you think and the way you act based upon your thoughts.
Human beings become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do great things, right now, without the need for anything more.  When you believe in yourself, you have realized the first secret of success.  Often finding your way is not about going somewhere new; it’s about seeing familiar ground in new ways.  Once you do, you will realize the only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is how you use them. 

6.  Long-term happiness cannot be bought; it must be earned.

If you’d rather live surrounded by pristine objects of little significance than by the traces of happy, passionate memories, stay focused on acquiring tangible possessions.  Otherwise, stop fixating on things you can touch and start caring about the things that touch you.  Each of us has a unique fire in our heart for something that makes us feel alive.  It’s your duty to find it and keep it lit.
Whatever you do, don’t completely sacrifice your life for your livelihood.  Enjoy the gifts money can’t buy.  Promise yourself that you will stay true to your loves, your values, and your purpose.  Let your heart and mind work as one.  Do what it takes so that one day, many moons from now, you can look back at your life, take one final breath, and crack an honest smile.

7.  Not everyone will support you.

If you take every insult or rude slur of your fellow human beings personally, you will be offended for the rest of your life.  One of the most freeing things we learn in life is that we don’t have to agree with everyone, everyone doesn’t have to agree with us, and that’s OK.  As Bruce Lee once said, “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”  Live by this quote.  Don’t let the opinions of others make you forget it.
It takes a long time to learn how to NOT judge yourself through someone else’s eyes, but once you do the world is yours for the taking.  We have all been placed on this earth to discover our own life, and we will never be happy or successful if we try to live someone else’s idea of it.  So give up worrying too much about what others think of you.  Regardless of what they say about you and your chosen path, remember that the only approval you need in the end is your own.

8.  You are better off without some people you care about.

It’s during the toughest times of your life that you’ll get to see the true colors of the people who say they care about you.  Notice who sticks around and who doesn’t, and be grateful to those who leave you, for they have given you the room to grow in the space they abandoned, and the awareness to appreciate the people who loved you when you didn’t feel lovable.
Bottom line:  Be okay with giving the gift of your absence to those who do not appreciate and respect your presence.

9.  You cannot have happiness without some sadness.

Chuck Palahniuk once said, “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”  Nothing could be closer to the truth.  Some sadness is necessary.  Everything in life is two-sided.  You can’t expect to feel pleasure without ever feeling pain, joy without ever feeling sorrow, confidence without ever feeling fearful, hope without ever feeling uncertain, etc.  There is no such thing as a one-sided coin in life, with which you can buy a pain-free, trouble-free life.
Life is a series of highs and lows – an adventure that requires you to take chances and actions that have the possibility of both success (happiness) and failure (sadness).  

10.  What’s done is done, but life goes on.

If you are carrying strong emotions about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live productively in the present.  With everything that has happened, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift of knowledge.  Everything is either an opportunity to learn and grow or an obstacle that keeps you stuck.  You get to choose.
Take a deep breath.  It’s going to be OK… maybe not today, but eventually.  There will be times when it seems like everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong.  You might feel like you will be stuck in this rut forever, but you won’t.  Sure the sun stops shining sometimes, and you may get a huge thunderstorm or two, but eventually the sun will come out to shine.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of us staying as positive as possible in order to make it to see the sunshine break through the clouds again.

Your turn…

What would you add to this post?  What’s one harsh reality you’ve had to face, or hardship you’ve had to deal with, that helped you grow?  Please leave us a comment below and share your thoughts.
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10 small businesses you can start with 100,000 Naira only

Most of the big businesses around today started very small, the owners have a big dream but little resources so they started with what they have got and grow it from there; a few examples are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Dangote etc.  When you have decided to start you can easily build the momentum to propel you to greatness if you don’t allow other people’s opinion to derail your dream.

A lot of buying and selling is going on right now on the internet and therefore you don’t need a shop or even a website; you need to be disciplined though and reach out to people you already know and then go on from there. We would give you examples of what you can sell, where to find them and how to sell them!

Shoes- This is a necessity especially in Nigeria where few people have cars therefore your shoes must be replaced regularly and when you are known for good quality products then you can move from selling basic ones to designers!

Where can you find them at reasonable prices to allow you make profit which you can then put back in the business? See below:

www.danikids.com/

www.ukshoeswholesale.co.uk

www.cityshoes.co.uk/‎

www.wholesale-footwear.co.uk/‎

www.casandrashoes.co.uk/‎

www.clearancefootwear.co.uk

www.ljr-footwear.com/‎

www.wholesaledeals.co.uk/‎

www.krasceva.com/‎

We would take one product a day for the next 10 days and show you where, how and what to do in order to succeed as your own boss. People in employment would even find it easy to do if they are determined enough and motivated to succeed. For more advice or help to start your business, contact MannaStores on 08145786166 or +447404904612 or email admin@mannastores.com or visit www.mannastores.com

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