Let’s face it. In today’s digital world, there’s no shortage of “shiny objects” and distractions that keep you from creating real results towards creating your first or next online course.
Social media, cat videos, pop-up notifications on your mobile phone…you get the point.
All of these are major roadblocks to your success and contribute to killing any chances of productivity before you even start your day.
Picture this.
You’re alarm goes off. The first thing you do is grab your mobile phone and check emails, social media, and somehow get sucked into the rabbit hole of clicking link after link until you realize you’ve just wasted 30 minutes or more before taking one step out of your cozy bed…sound familiar?
The one thing everyone can’t get back is time spent, and when you’re already a busy working professional the odds are not in your favor that you’re likely burnt out on more than one occasion. Add to that any family, children and forget about it…any available free time to create content becomes just a distant dream.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Disabling notifications and going on a mobile phone usage diet is an absolute requirement if you want to maximize your focus and build a profitable online course, no doubt.
Just think about it…if you spent 30 minutes checking your phone every morning, you’ve wasted:
- In just 7 days it adds up to 3.5 hrs
- In a month, about 15 hours and…
- In 1 year, about 183 hours (almost 1 full week GONE!)
And that doesn’t include the hours of mindless TV shows that most people watch on a daily basis…with that in mind, the amount of wasted time dramatically increases.
Now, I’m not saying that you should cut out all TV and social media from your life…what I am trying to highlight is that every little decision you make has a direct impact on how your life unfolds and whether your goals get achieved sooner, later or never. So moderation becomes critical.
Creating an online course takes time. It doesn’t need to take 3 months to plan, outline, record, edit and publish your course, but that depends on how you cut things out that don’t directly contribute to your creation habit.
One approach I like to use is to follow the 80/20 rule.
80% of my available time I spend creating and taking action. The other 20% is spend on learning.
This is crucial as it contributes to applied learning, since you will learn more by doing than just by consuming content.
Even better, if you can embrace a “Just-in-Time” learning approach towards choosing when to consume videos that teach you how to implement something in your business, you’ll decrease any amount of time wasted watching lesson videos that are for someone at a later stage in building their business.
