Time Management Myths

Ariadne's got a great post at Neat Living Blog called 10 Myths About Managing Your Time that is a must for anybody trying to get themselves more organised and making more productive use of their time. Especially if you're like me and you've come to realise that a lot of time management advice is bunk and that all you end up doing is spending more of your precious time trying to fit your life into somebody else's system.

If you want to read all 10 myths, head over to the Neat Living Blog, but here are a few of my favourites:

4. People need a "Personal Organizer" or other time management system to get organized. People are not organized because they use a time management system, they use a time management system because they are organized. Personal organization involves breaking old habits and forming new, effective ones. It is a state of mind as opposed to a state of the office. Some people are more organized using a 65-cent steno pad than others are using a 65-dollar organizer.

7. The biggest time wasters include telephone interruptions, visitors, meetings and rush jobs. These are not time wasters, they are time obligations -- they come with the job. The biggest time wasters are self-imposed, such as procrastination, making mental notes, interrupting ourselves, searching for things, perfectionism, and spending time on trivial tasks. We are our own worst enemies. Being effective involves managing ourselves, not placing the blame on others.

10. Time is money. Time is more than money, it's life. You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. It's an irreplaceable resource. When time's gone, you're gone.

One thing I've found that's been helping me make better use of my time is a little tool that helps me answer that age-old question "What the hell have you been doing the last six hours?" It's called TimeSnapper and it's a little program (Windows only) that runs in the background and takes screenshots every few seconds (or at whatever interval you choose). Then you can go back and look at them to see just exactly how you spent your time on the computer, and use that information to change your habits if necessary. It's a really cool little program, and it's free for personal use.

Keeping Busy. REEEAL BUSY!

Talk about a busy week! The kids are on a two-week break from school, my wife is home sick, and I've been working on a new blog and doing lots of research and coding for a new affiliate site I hope to get up and running soon. Add to that the eBay sales, reading paid emails and doing surveys, and even occasionally having to be productive at my "real" job, and I don't know whether I'm coming or going.

But it's all good. Well, mostly anyway. The cool part is that I've got small but growing streams of income coming from a number of different sources. If one thing doesn't work out, I'm not totally screwed. And there's variety, so I don't end up doing the same mind-numbing stuff over and over again.

And the best part is, I enjoy it. Not all the time, but most of the time. And if you can do something you enjoy and make money doing it, I reckon that's A Good Thing.

Latest "Get Paid" Scam -- Look2Earn

One thing that never ceases to amaze me about the "Get Paid" world is the huge variety of shady operators involved in it. And the willingness of the masses to remain blissfully ignorant or happily look the other way while pursuing their never-ending quest for "easy money."

The latest scam is a site called Look2Earn. Their claim is simple -- you help them teach their image recognition software and they'll pay you 1 cent for each image you process. The thing is, there is no image recognition software to teach. Instead, they show you a CAPTCHA image from Yahoo and you then pay you for typing it in for them. Why? Because Yahoo uses those CAPTCHA images to stop people from using software to automatically sign up for zillions of free email accounts. These guys get around it by showing the CAPTCHA image to an actual human and paying them 1 cent for inputing the right code. Then they've got themselves a Yahoo email account they can use to SPAM the bejeezus out of all of us.

Pretty clever, isn't it? And the really sad part of it is that a few people figured out what was really going on, and telling everybody what the deal was, a lot of them just don't care. They don't care if they're helping spammers -- their attitude seems to be that there's already so much SPAM out there a little more isn't going to hurt anybody. Another's excuse was that if they quit, other people would just keep doing it, so they might as well keep doing it too so they get a share of the cash.

Honestly, I like to make money online just as much as the next guy. But I'm not going to do seriously skanky stuff like this to do it. There are soooooo many honest ways to earn money online, why do so many people seem to prefer the shady stuff?

I'm Back!

OK, after a few days of downtime, I think everything is more or less back to normal. To add a bit of extra drama to the soap opera I blogged about a few posts ago, some bright spark decided to do some fairly nasty and quite probably highly illegal things that resulted in the downtime. I've enlisted the help of a computer security company, a forensics expert, and two soldiers-of-fortune who told me to call them "Face" and "Howling Mad Murdoch" (I couldn't afford to hire the whole A-Team) who will no doubt find out whodunnit and deal with them appropriately.

While the site was down, I switched it over to blogspot which is why I'm using the new template. I'll either leave it until I get the new custom template finished, or I'll get the old template back up. I still haven't decided which.

The whole thing was a good reminder that some of the people involved in the PTR industry are total assholes and will do just about anything they can to try to keep their little scams going.

Cooper Cooler and Racquet Zapper - "Must Have" Products

Here are two products nobody should be without.

The Cooper Cooler is a toaster-sized drink chiller that will ice down a can of beer in 1 minute. Sure you can do the same thing by sticking a six-pack in a cooler of ice for an hour, but hey, sometimes you just can't wait! It'll do the same trick for a bottle of wine in 6 minutes.

And when you're sitting out in the back yard enjoying your insta-chilled beer, what's you best weapon against flies, mosquitoes and other pesky flying insects? The Racquet Zapper, of course! It's an electric bug zapper/flyswatter that shaped like a sports racquet. So you can drink beer, kill bugs, and get a bit of exercize at the same time. Sweet!

Unclaimed Property -- Does Anybody Owe You Money?

I came across a link for an unclaimed property database and typed my name in. Would you believe it, my name popped up in a result. Turns out the power company I dealt with when I lived in Houston is holding $15.28 for me. Sweet! If you're in the US, or ever lived in the US, type your name in and see if anything comes up.

As the PTR World Turns

I tell ya, sometimes being involved with PTR reward programs is like being in the middle of a bad soap-opera!

Today's episode involves two programs best avoided -- Bournemouth Breeze and StormOfCash.

The story behind Bournemouth Breeze goes back years, but the basic gist of it is this. There used to be this really popular PTR program called April Gold's. It was the hottest thing around and people were actually paying people in advance to get them to join their downlines. The thing was, it was totally and completely unsustainable. They were selling ads for a fraction of the cost needed to pay members. So they got further and further behind and people were waiting forever to be paid. And the whole time the owner and her cheerleaders and supporters were telling everybody not to worry, everything was fine, they'd all get their money. Finally the whole house of cards fell apart and the owner, as so many other con artists have done, tossed her program like a hot potato to anybody who'd take it, and ran off with her tail between her legs.

Enter the new owner, TonyB, who told everybody he was going to save April Gold's, make it better than ever, blah, blah, blah. Of course none of that happened, and within a few weeks, TonyB had run off too. So April Gold's was gone and neither April nor Tony had ever paid the members the hundreds of thousands of dollars they owed them. Of course they were never going to pay that money because neither of them had the money. All those ads the members had been reading were sold for small fraction of the money the members earned for reading them.

But that's the past. And in PTR, the past is meant to be forgotten as thoroughly and as quickly as possible. Or at least that's what a lot of the shady characters involved wish would happen. Especially shady characters like TonyB, who's back with a new PTR program -- Bournemouth Breeze! He and his girlfriend/co-owner (GeorgieB, who was also on staff at April Gold's) just want everybody to understand that TonyB never meant for any of that to happen and he's sorry he wasn't able to pay the members and anyway it was all somebody (anybody) else's fault so why not just accept everything he says (everything he says now, not the stuff he was saying back then) as the gospel and give him another chance. Well, I say screw that! As far as I'm concerned, none of the people involved in the April Gold's scam deserve a second chance to rip more people off, and I think the best thing that could happen would be if everybody boycotted them and refused to join and/or advertise with their programs.

The second program starring in todays episode of As the PTR World Turns is called StormOfCash. Another very popular program of the past (over 100,000 members!), it's been out of commission for a long while now. Until a bunch of guys decided to buy it and "resurrect it." Unfortunately, the guys that bought it are real shady, including one who is well-known as a scammer and (I really can't think of any other way to put it) a total idiot.

As soon as I'd heard who'd bought it, I logged in and deleted my account. I've learned from long and bitter experience that it's best to just "cut and run" when these sorts of things happen. So you can imagine my surprise when I suddenly started getting emails from them, over a week after I'd deleted my account. Apparently, they expect people to specifically opt-out of receiving emails before they delete their account, or else their system keeps sending them emails. What a mess! Of course I reported them to their host for spamming me, but I doubt anything will be done about it. One of their owners went after me in a public forum, then when he realised how stupid that was, he went back and edited his posts with generic-sounding "customer service" type responses. But as an extra little nugget of nastiness, he did let me know that my account hadn't actually been deleted, just de-activated, so they'll keep my personal info forever. Great. Just what I need.

I keep hoping I wake up in the hospital with amnesia to find out that it was all just a bad dream.

And that I'm married to TWO gorgeous-but-very-psycho twin sisters!

Cheers,

Wil

Blogging is for Everybody

Aaron Brazell is filling in at ProBlogger while Darren is on holiday, and decided to stir things up with his first post -- Blogs Are About Being Elite. The catalyst for his post was Technorati's inclusion of MySpace in its index, and his argument boils down to "it’s a good thing to be in the elite and it’s highly unfair to those of us who work hard to position our blogs in strategically excellent positioning to have the pool of content thinned by less than excellent content."

My response is that the whole 'elitist' thing is a load of crap.

Firstly because it labels as inferior a whole lot of blogs based on nothing but where they're hosted. In this case it's MySpace, but other 'elite' bloggers have said the same things about Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and many others. Windows vs. MacOs vs. Linux. vi vs. Emacs. Movable Type vs. Greymatter. AOL vs. Everybody. Seriously, get over it.

Secondly I disagree with Aaron's presumption that all bloggers do it to make money. News flash, Aaron, it just ain't so. Not everybody cares about their PageRank. They don't care about SERPs and won't even know what you're talking about if you bring it up. Josh, one of the commenters, is right when he says that Technorati (or any other search engine) will fade away and die if it doesn't return good results to its users, but he's totally wrong when he says "Yes, everyone who has a blog works for a high PageRank." That may be true for everyone who blogs for money (or tries to) but I think that's actually a very small minority of people who create blogs.

But the main reason Aaron is wrong is because the whole idea behind blogging was that it was anti-elitist. Blogging software was created so that anybody could publish on the web. Blogging means everybody has a voice. It means everybody can be part of the conversation. Links and blogrolls and trackbacks and blog search engines all help us filter out the noise and find new voices we never would've found on our own.

The beauty of blogging is that almost anybody can do it. The beauty of good search engines and other filters is that if they totally suck, I never have to read it.

Diversify Your Online Income!

As a bit of a follow-up to my last post, Adsense vs Affiliate sales, I think anybody looking to wean themselves off Adsense should read Darren's post called Diversity Your Blogging Income With Secondary Money Earners.

I totally and completely agree with Darren and Andy -- anybody who'se even semi-serious about making money from their blog or website should NOT put all their hopes and efforts into Adsense. When The Goog can cut you off at any time, for any reason and there's nothing you can do about it, you're absolutely freaking MAD to bet the farm on Adsense.

I think I'm familiar with just about all the programs Darren talks about, although I have to admit I wrote ClickBank off long ago, but might have to go back and have another look to see if I can discover some of those 'gems' he mentioned.

Adsense vs Affiliate Sales -- What's Best For Your Blog?

Andy Hagans has a good post at the Performancing.com blog explaining why he's getting rid of Adsense and going for affiliate sales instead. Link: Weaning Myself from Adsense.

Not only does he offer some good reasons why he thinks he made a mistake going with Adsense (not least of which is that it involved putting all his eggs in one basket), but he does a great job of explaining why affiliate sales are more likely to work for certain types of blogs instead of others.

It's all about being a part of the buying cycle. If your blog attracts people who are ready to buy, then all you have to do is put the product in front of them, along with an affiliate link so they can make the purchase. They get what they want, you get your affiliate commission, everybody's happy. But most blogs don't pull in loads of visitors with their credit cards in hand. Most blogs aren't part of the buying cycle. And that's OK. But those blogs aren't likely to have much success with affiliate sales. Which is why I'm glad there are other options (like Adsense) available.

Payments for March 2006

It wasn't a big month in terms of PTR earnings, but with other sources of online earning, it turned out pretty good.

Misty & Sams Cash $5.00
BeezyClickin $2.68
EmailCash $30.00
PolarPTR $1.23
MyPoints $25.00
Ebay $106.34
Total $170.25

Yearly Total $273.29

That payment from Misty&Sams was only half what they owe me, and I've been waiting since Dec. 2004. Another example of a program that was completely unsustainable but just won't go away. Highly NOT recommended!

Once I was paid by BeezyClickin, I immediately deleted my account. I suppose it'll struggle on, but I don't see it having much of a future.

EmailCash is one of my all-time favorites. I think about half my earnings were from purchases this time, and the rest was from free points, surveys, paid emails, etc.

This is my 10th payment from PolarPTR since July 2005. In total, I've earned about $10 from them, and they always pay quickly. But the thing I like about this program is that they don't try to pull any shady stuff to make money. And they don't tolerate it from other programs, either. The owners work tirelessly to track down scammers and not only ban them from being advertised at Polar, but publically name them and shame them and work with other PTR owners to try to get these kinds of scams out of PTR completely.

The MyPoints payment is great. I don't shop through them as much as I used to, but they're still a good rewards program, and I still check out their rewards partners any time I'm shopping at U.S.-based online stores. A lot of members go for their gift cards, but I prefer a Webcertificate, since I can use it at any online shop that accepts Mastercard.

I've decided to change the way I report my earnings from now on by including profits from eBay sales. Most of this is from sales of my wife's hand-made jewellery, but also includes whatever else we can sell or auction off. What started out as a few extra bucks here and there is slowly turning into a regular, but still small, source of regular income.

Frugal Living -- Create Your Own Price Book

I can't remember where I saw the link to the Cheap Ways To... blog, but I owe somebody BIG-time! This is a great website if you're a tight-wad like me. Cara Davis is the author of a book called Cheap Ways to Tie the Knot, but her blog is full of all sorts of money-saving tips, not just things related to getting married on the cheap.

The other day, she wrote about a site called TheGroceryGame.com that helps members save money grocery shopping by finding the lowest prices on items based on a database of store prices, sales, and coupons. It's a subscription-based site ($10 for 8 weeks) with a $1 trial subscription. It sounds cool and all, but (1) it's for U.S. shoppers, (2) I ain't really into coupons, and (3) I already track that info myself.

And so do a lot of other people, as Cara mentions in a more recent post about creating your own Grocery Game by creating and using a price book.

What's a price book? It's a book (or spreadsheet, database, set of index cards, or whatever) where you write down the prices for items you shop for, so you can refer back to see which stores have the best prices for particular items, when and how often different items tend to be on sale, and whether that sale price is really a bargain.

My wife and I have been using one for several years now, and it's great. It can be a pain to get started, and we tried several times and quit before we finally got one going, but now that we have, I think we'll probably use it forever.

We record the prices of all our groceries and a lot of things we buy (including things like cellphone, ISP, haircuts, etc.) We go through all our "junkmail" and record any bargains we find there. We check out new stores when they open to see if their prices beat our 'regular' stores. We keep a 'wishlist' with best-price info. We keep a 'Sale Calendar' showing when different stores have regular sales. Put it all together and I reckon it saves us a TON of money.

If you're interested in learning more about how to create and use a price book, here are some great links:

The Dollar Stretcher -- Starting a Price Book
The Frugal Shopper -- Use a Price Book
OrganizedHome.com -- Make a Price Book: Save Money at the Supermarket!
About.com Frugal Living -- What is a Price List?
Waldo's World -- Mom's Price Book

I use a small sprial notebook, my wife uses her PDA. Then when we have time we put the info into a spreadsheet. We also make sure we include a note indicating whether it's a sale price or everyday price. By tracking sales we make sure we almost never pay full retail price. In fact, it drives us both nuts when we occasionally get caught out and do pay retail. Argh!