You know the power of a deadline right?
On Friday night I was in my short term rental apartment in South Yarra Melbourne.
It’s a cosy modern little apartment, a little bit dark and small, but perfectly suitable for my month-long visit.
Normally on a Friday night I avoid work. Even though I don’t have a typical 9 to 5 schedule during the week, I still sync with the rest of society regarding Friday nights – I like to go out with friends or stay in and relax.
Not this Friday night though. I had a deadline.
My new e-guide on mindset and productivity was due to open for early-birds and I had a bunch of things that needed to get done.
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So there I was at 10PM on a Friday, standing up at my makeshift standup desk in the kitchen, typing away at my little laptop putting the finishing touches on things like welcome emails and testing the login process.
By the end of the night most of the work was done and the product was switched on, ready for live testing over the weekend.
This is the page I made active –
I sent an email on Saturday to my Early-Bird notice list. It’s not a large list, but I was hoping it would bring in at least one customer so I knew the system worked.
On Saturday afternoon an email popped into my inbox from Paypal.
Someone had bought a copy!
(Thank you first customer Barry!)
I breathed a sigh of relief and also felt that little ping of excitement knowing that a person values my help enough to purchase my work.
Over the rest of the weekend six more people purchased, and one has already given me great feedback.
Now I feel comfortable about telling everyone else about the guide, ready for a great opening week.
Why Do Deadlines Work?
Have you ever stopped to think why is it that deadlines are so effective?
Knowing you have to get something done by a certain time constraint is by far the most effective productivity tool I have ever used. I suspect you feel the same.
However if you look deeper, there’s more to it, especially if you are an entrepreneur who has decided to assign that deadline to yourself.
A deadline placed on you by someone else, like your boss or loved one, is very powerful because of the responsibility you feel to the other person.
If the deadline is created by you and thus the responsibility is to only yourself — and you still follow through — that takes a special kind of motivation.
Let’s face it, most people on the planet would like to live a flexible lifestyle and earn a living online on their own terms.
That’s a desirable goal, one that you can study and implement, but only a very small fraction of people go after it.
An even smaller fraction will go after it and keep working towards it for months and years, long enough to realise an outcome.
You have to want it and want it badly enough that you are willing to assign work to yourself, follow through on that work, all without guarantee you will earn anything in return.
That’s a special kind of passion, a special kind of motivation that comes from a special place.
You see a deadline is just a powerful tool a motivated person can use.
It works, but only if the entrepreneur who sets the deadline has the right mindset and productivity skills to make it happen.
If you don’t want it enough, or don’t believe you can make it happen, or struggle with too many roadblocks that you give up, no amount of deadlines can help.
My Top Three Productivity Techniques
Deadlines are a great productivity technique, one I recommend you use on a regular basis.
The Sprint, a technique I teach in my Master Your Mindset guide, is a good example of how to really leverage short regular deadlines.
If you combine Sprints with the Theory of Constraints and the 80/20 Rule, you have a very powerful combination of productivity tools. These are my secret weapons.
To learn more about these techniques and how you can apply them specifically to growing an online business that uses a blog and email newsletter to sell training products, go download my guide –
Master Your Mindset: Productivity And Mindset Training For Professional Bloggers
Oli, one of my early bird customers from the weekend, just left a comment about the guide –
I heard about this through Twitter, the price seemed fair and so I bought it. So far I’ve only listened to the audio and read the first few pages of the book, but I can definitely say it has already been worth it. Now I’m going through Yaro’s blog reading up on what I’ve missed.If you have an Internet business, then this stuff is crucial to understand and execute on a daily basis. I’m working in plenty of the tips into my own lifestyle.Great stuff Yaro, keep up the good work!!– Oli
Thank you Oli, I really appreciate the feedback, it makes all the work worthwhile.
Be like Oli, download the guide and learn some of my best productivity and mindset advice before the price rise at the end of the week (another kind of deadline!).
Master Your Mindset: Productivity And Mindset Training For Professional Bloggers
I’ll talk to you in the next newsletter,
Yaro Starak
Yaro.Blog
P.S. I’m taking a break this week from answering reader questions in order to focus on releasing my new guide. Unless you have a specific question about my mindset guide (hit reply to this email if you do), please hold your question for next week.
P.P.S My affiliate program for this guide is ready to go if you have an audience who are right for it.
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