Gabe Padva

"In order to find myself I need to lose myself in service to others."

— Gandhi

Digital Freedom

How much time do you spend on e-mail, facebook, or twitter?  Most surveys suggest an internet-savvy person spends between 2-4 hours online every day. On the higher end, that is 25% of our conscious lives. That’s a lot of time spent on one activity!

Email and social media can be a great tool if used the right way. Email in particular keeps a digital “paper” trail, sends and receives vast amounts of information, are easily referenced, allow you to contact multiple people at once, and are fast and convenient.

However, more often than not, we spend excessive amounts of time online. It makes us feel busy and productive. In actuality, we waste a lot of time sitting at a computer staring at information that just scrambles our mind and distracts from our true ambitions and goals. We feel like we are really busy, but by reacting to information like email we are not making any forward momentum.  Like addicts we sit there and wait for the next message to come in to give us that emotional high that then gives us something to do by responding, reading or forwarding.  

What are we actually creating though?  How are we moving closer to the life of our dreams?  

Here are some tools and ideas to consider that will enhance your digital freedom:

1.       Understand what you want.

When you know what your goals are in life or business, it’s easier to stay focused online.  What are your goals for the next 30, 60, 90 days.  What are you doing this week and this day to support them?  Fill your life with activities and ambitions that give you energy, maximize your strengths, and allow you to contribute in the greatest way to this planet.  

2.       Treat the computer as a tool with very specific purposes.  

Think of your computer time as time in a meeting.  Before you sit down in front of a computer, know what you want to achieve, stay on task, close your eyes and visualize your intended outcome.  With this technique, you can accomplish a day’s worth of work in a single one - hour session.  If you are an internet junkie with e-mail and facebook, try checking your email while standing up or go to a coffee shop with internet and use that as your internet time.  Rescue time is a great free software that will monitor your online activity and create customized productivity reports. 

3.       Reduce, reuse, and recycle email. 

Reduce incoming e-mails by not signing up for RSS feeds or special offer programs.  Set up filters to block junk and irrelevant mail. Reply to e-mails only when it is needed.  

Reuse e-mails by saving past responses to common inquiries.  Gmail and other platforms will allow you to save template emails. If an e-mail is vague, send it back and ask for clarification, don’t waste time deciphering it.  

Recycle - Sort old e-mails into folders for quick reference. A sparse inbox also helps you focus on current messages. If junk mail gets out of hand, switch to a new e-mail account. Set up an auto-responder advising people that a new account is being set up and provide your new address (replacing @ with “at” to prevent bots from copying the new address).  Anything important enough will find its way to your new e-mail account.

Timothy Ferriss has written a great blog post on how to outsource email from your life 6 days a week.  Check out his blog post entitled the holy grail. 

4.       Go online at specific times.

 Never check your e-mail or social media accounts first thing in the morning; it will only train your mind to focus on what other people want.  Reserve 30 minute periods at 11am and 4pm to participate in online activity such as incoming email and social media.  Use the time pressure that lunch and dinner can create for you as motivators.  

5.       Know when digital communication is appropriate. 

E-mail is a great tool for conveying facts and information, but it’s not well-suited for everything. Try using the phone for personal discussions and urgent matters, or meeting in person to build real connections with sincerity and rapport. A hand written thank you note can leave a lasting impression for someone, and will sit on their desk or book case for months and years to come.  Make a habit of writing 1-2 to hand written notes per week and watch the quality of your relationships soar. 

In summary, digital freedom is something that we can all have.  The internet can enhance the quality of our lives if used approriately, but to create a meaningful difference in our lives we must have the discipline to let go and focus on the more important activities that are found offline. 

To your success,

Gabe Padva

Outsourcing Happiness

This sounds funny right?  I can’t outsource happinesss, because happiness is truly an internal state, but the activities that we outsource can definitely produce an enhanced state of happiness.  This was more evident today than it has been in a long time.

How often do you see the executive mowing the lawn, or the double income family spending their free time cleaning the house?  When living in Victoria I had a beautiful system for outsourcing the energy draining activities of my life.  This included things like cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, administration, etc.  Now you might look at this list and think, Gabe is a baller.  He must make a lot of money to afford all these luxuries.  The opposite was true, how could I not afford these things.  At the time I know I was earning more than $20 per hour at a bare minimum, therefore does it make sense for me to spend my hard earned free time on these activities that suck my energy away?  No, not really.  The result is I had more time to have fun, participate in those activities that I enjoy, and in turn, that gave me an immense amount of energy and allowed me to focus on my income producing activities.

The truth is, I paid a housekeeper to come in once every two weeks to clean, do laundry, take in dry cleaning, and organize (investment $100/ month) For the grocery shopping I used a paid delivery service through Thrifty foods.  I ordered all my food online, and they would have someone shop for me and deliver it straight to my door for $5.  We hired a cook for $12 hour to prepare healthy food and snacks once a week.   For administration we hired an executive assistant p/t for $10 hour to file paperwork, run arronds, etc.  All in all, my total cost to outsource these less desirable activities was $250 - $500. 

Now, what did I do with all that spare time you might ask?  We’ll, I had a heck of alot of fun!  Played sports, threw parties, connected with friends, read books, went dancing, learned how to play guitar, speak a new language, searched for new real estate investment opportunities, travelled, spent time with family, volunteered as a big brother.  The cumulation of this free time and fun gave me the energy I needed to perform better at work and make much more than the $250 - $500 outsourcing costs per month.  I was truly happy.

Here I am now, almost two years later and I forgot this simple truth.  I moved to Vancouver with my girlfriend Karla.  We spent the last year + living with each other and a constant source of stress and discussions were around this topic of cleaning and organization.  We, both disliked the idea of cleaning on Saturday/Sundays, but did it reluctantly, because we wanted to be smart with our time and money.  Yet, when the house wasn’t clean I didn’t want to be here because it was a mess and disorganized and would often go somewhere to eat or drink coffee.  Because cleaning absorbed so much of our time and energy, we didn’t make healthy foods and would resent one another for not cleaning.  Not only that, but to do a simple 4 hours of cleaning and laundry, would probably take us close to 8-10 hours of production time, because we would both procrastinate and delay the activity.  On top of that we would be negative and transfer that emotion to our fun time and couldn’t truly recharge and relax.

Karla, Romeo (our wonderful dog), and I needed to escape.  We decided, last minute, that a trip to Kelowna would be a great idea.  The house was a mess, we had no real itenerary in mind, but we knew we needed to get out the house and out of the city to reconnect and have some fun. As we were about to leave on Friday I heard a friend of mine raving about this housekeeper he hired. Apparently she works hard, folds laundry, and is very pleasant and trustworthy.  So I figured, Ok, this is not going to seem like much of a vacation if Karla and I come back to a house that is a complete disaster, so I decided to hire this recommended person to come in and take care of business.

We’ll we just arrived and our home is immaculate, beautiful, organized and clean.   We are so happy, because our place hasn’t looked this clean and organized for months!  We paid one wonderful person to come in for 4 hours ($60) and get this place in ship shape condition.  Now we are relaxed, focused, excited for the week ahead.  We knew that we wouldn’t have to clean so we took the time to prepare some very healthy food.  And we had an amazing weekend away.  I’m feeling energized, balanced, and excited!  Why didn’t we do this sooner!

Sometimes the writing is on the wall.  We just have to read it :)

Cheers,

Gabe