You’re sitting down at your PC or laptop.  You’ve finally caught up with the day’s tasks to the point that you actually have a chance to take a second or 10 to lean back and catch your breath for a bit.  But, around the 4th or 5th second, your mind inherently starts to scour the database for activities to stay productive and BOOM!!! It occurs to you that this would be an excellent time to write a new post for your blog – you know, the one that has been collecting e-dust since it was last updated seven weeks ago.

So you fire up your blogging account, impressed with yourself that you were able to guess your own password on the first attempt.  You click the ‘Add New Post’ link on the dashboard and a moment later a fresh canvas awaits – a blank white box and a blinking cursor just waiting to be filled with your wit and expertise.

You begin to rack your brain for a quick nugget of knowledge that you can share with your readers.  Five minutes go by – but no internal inspiration spills onto the page.

You start looking around the room, seeking a topic of interest to magically ascend from the cylinder of ink pens on your desk, or perhaps an interesting tidbit may leap gracefully from the pockets of your laptop bag and onto the screen.  But alas, there is no inspiration to be found from the random objects in your office.

So you start to read some of your old blog posts.  While this is often a great antidote to blogger’s block, this time it fails you.

Frustration begins to set in.  You begin scouring your bookmarks and sites in your RSS reader in order to find something – anything that might make for a halfway decent article.  At this point, discussing the pros and cons of the fold vs. wad technique is beginning to look like a viable topic of conversation.

Finally, after 45 minutes in front of your screen and only a working title and a sentence or two to show for it, you finally give up and move on to more pressing tasks, leaving the tumbleweeds to continue to occupy the online space that houses your blog.

Does any of that sound familiar to you?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.  There are easy ways to get past the usual blocks that typify the frustrations a blogger can frequently encounter.  A few simple mindset adjustments will greatly enhance the blogging experience for both you and your readers.

Blog topics are everywhere.  No matter what niche you happen to write for, there are always dozens of things to write about.  Here are five tips for avoiding the traps of blogger’s block:

1) Tap into your expertise. Identify common problems within your niche that people are looking to solve.  If you’ve answered a question about your topic in the past, expand on that in a blog post.

2) Practice ‘mind-mapping’. This is a technique used by many people that can be very helpful in identifying stuff to write about.

3) Stumble Upon. If you don’t have SU, sign up for an account and download the toolbar.  Not only is it highly entertaining, but it can also expose you to a lot of awesome information you’d otherwise have missed.  Set your preferences to items pertaining to your topic, and stumble your way to a million article ideas.

4) Change your mindset. The time that you’re sitting in front of your PC is NOT the only time you’re blogging.  Think of blogging as a 24/7 activity.  99% of the time that you’re hit with an idea for a great blog post, you won’t be sitting in front of your computer ready to bang it out.  You’ll be in a restaurant, or in Home Depot, or watching a movie, or having a conversation with a colleague.  Be prepared to copy the idea down before it escapes your melon and floats aimlessly toward the ionosphere.  If you’ve got a cell phone that was manufactured after 1999, it will have a note-taking or voice-recording feature which you should utilize to save ideas for a rainy day.  Like a great photographer, be ready to capture that moment that an awesome idea comes to you.

5) When you get the chance, start a new post with a few quick notes about the topic and save it as a draft. This is especially helpful when ideas are plentiful.  Then, when you’re short on stuff to say, you can go back to your stable of unfinished blog posts and go to town!

How about it?  What did I miss?  What’s your best method for defeating blogger’s block?

“Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.” -Henry Ford

In many ways the world is naturally segregated, both socially and ethnically.  And within each divide, there is a perceived class that everyone fits into in one capacity or another.  One of the sad byproducts of this phenomenon is the fact that it generally congregates all of the successful people into one class and leaves everyone else on the outside looking in, only to hopelessly ponder the seemingly uncrackable code of how to get a slice of the pie known as ‘The Good Life’ for themselves.

And, while this paradigm of society has held true since the beginning of civilized man, the imaginary barriers between the Haves and the Have-Nots is eroding at an mind-blowing rate.  And the fact is, as Gary Vaynerchuk once stated matter-of-factly, there’s plenty of room at the top.

The separation of the successful from the semi-successful and unsuccessful people is not an accident.  It is human nature for like-minded individuals to gravitate to one another.  There isn’t a concocted plan to squeeze out the little people – the reason successful people wind up in the same circles is simple: they purge negative influences and toxic people from their lives.

Think of it this way: Have you ever bounced an idea off of someone and had them give you a dozen reasons as to why it won’t work?  Who was this person?  Was this someone who’s achieved great things for themselves?  Probably not.  Chances are pretty good that this person was a failure at many things themselves.  And, if there’s one thing an unsuccessful person loathes, it’s the success of other people – because it serves as a reminder to them of what a loser they are (whether this is actually true or not is irrelevant).

If you have people like this in your life, you need to let them go.  They are holding you back.  Everyone who you allow into your circles must wish you nothing but the greatest success.  It doesn’t matter what they’ve achieved in their own lives.  Considerations for the way that people will react when you succeed is a symptom of the fear of success.  You have to proceed knowing that you need to leave those negative people behind.

The greatest myth is the fallacy that the upper echelon of high-achieving people are deliberately trying to wall the lower class people out.  Not only is this almost universally untrue, many of these perceived ‘successful people’ will actually be more than willing to help you achieve your dreams, and happy to do so*.

The wall between you and the success you want to achieve isn’t made out of 1″ bulletproof glass; nor is it made out of reinforced concrete.  And, there’s no barbed wire at the top and there are no angry man-eating Rottweilers on the other side, either.  The wall is in your head.  And the sooner you realize that the only thing holding you back from achieving the things you want to accomplish and living the lifestyle that success has to offer is you, you’ll see that the walls you’ve imagined into existence can be torn down as easily as they were built up in the first place.

*A nice resource for interviews with successful individuals from a variety of business mediums is David Siteman Garland’s site: The Rise to the Top.

“No one gives a shit about what you had for breakfast.”

That’s the first line of defense from all Twitter resisters.  They immediately disregard the medium as a whole and reduce it down to a bunch of people pretentiously sharing useless tidbits about their daily lives.  As a reformed Twitter resister myself, I know this mindset all too well.

It took me a long time to warm up to this 140 character phenomenon.  After all, I already had an account on Myspace (which I no longer have), and then I joined Facebook too – what the hell did I need another time-sucking social network to maintain for?

I am by nature a non-conformist.  Always have been.  I’ve never been one to participate in something just because everyone else was doing it.  Nor would I do things the way they’d always been done because that was the way they were done.  Furthermore, the whole Twitter premise seemed like another fad that’d invariably be gone as soon as the next big thing came to light. With all of this in mind, combined with the perceived pointlessness of the application as a whole, I decided that I’d sit this one out.

That was about 15 months ago.

I’ve obviously come around to it.  I eventually created an account and followed a handful of people I knew and made a few tweets here and there.  But it wasn’t until I saw a presentation by social media expert Laura Bergells (@maniactive) at the Mindshare Seminar that I decided that Twitter is more than a passing blip on the radar and that maybe I should take it seriously.

I am not going to post a ’10 ways to use Twitter’ type of article.  There’s enough of that already that a simple Google search will turn up.  Here’s how to use Twitter as a tool for your business, with an element of entertainment to boot.

(Right now a lot of you are probably thinking to yourself something along the lines of ‘this clown only has 200 followers… what the hell makes him think he can teach me anything?‘)

Here’s the answer to that quite legitimate bit of apprehension: This is not a post on how to get a bunch of followers on Twitter.  Again, there’s enough about that topic already posted on the web.  This post is about how to enjoyably use the tool without making it feel like a complete waste of time.

Every social endeavor on the web – from Twitter and Facebook to Youtube to your blog and even instant messaging has one thing that universally applies: You have concentrate on other people and take the focus off of yourself.

With Twitter, the best way to be successful is to offer way more by way of value than simply trying to get the word out about what you want your followers to know.  I personally look at the followers I have as people who’ve decided that they liked enough of what they know about me to care about what I have to say.  This is paralleled by the number of people I currently follow, which is about 300.  Are there more that I would like to follow?  yes of course, but I don’t know them yet.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t have 2,000 or 5,000 or more followers – and that I don’t follow that many people, either.  A lot of professional people on Twitter will follow you with hopes of reciprocity.  There are tools available to identify which of the people you follow are also following you.  I get alerts a couple of times every single day that someone who wouldn’t seem to have any interest to what I do is now following me on Twitter.  When I don’t follow them back, they ‘unfollow’ me within a day or so.  If you look around a little, you’ll see that a large number of the people with tons and tons of followers also are following a very similar amount.  This reflects a desire to simply build a massive amount of followers without regard to who they are or how they can connect with them.

Your follower count does not reflect the size of your audience, or how important you are in the Twitter community.  Of the 200 or so people that currently follow me, I can go through the list and identify who most of them are without even reading their bio.  Would I be able to do with 10,000 random people that I followed just to keep them following me?

Furthermore, just because someone has 35,000 Twitter followers does not mean that they have access to 70,000 eyeballs.  An estimated 80% of all Twitter accounts are dormant.  Anyone with that many superficial followers is reaching a helluva lot less people than they think they are or claim to be.

Rather than viewing Twitter as an advertising tool, try to think of it as a means to make connections.  If someone follows you out of the blue, and it seems that it was appropriate for them to do so and not just some self-serving hack trying to inflate his follower count, make contact.  Send them a quick thank you and learn a bit about them by reading their bio.  Ask them how they found you and how you can help them.Another skewing factor in the numbers game that has become the Twitter follower race is the fact that when a Tweet is posted, it is only on your follower’s screen until enough of the other people they follow have tweeted afterward to push it off the page.  This can be anywhere from one minute or less to an hour.  In other words, you have to hope your tweet coincides with the time they happen to be on the page.  While there are tools like Tweetdeck that are developed to help people not miss as many tweets, even with a high follower count, it’s likely that one specific message tweeted a single time isn’t actually going to reach very many people.

Coming next week: Part 2:  How to Engage Your Twitter Followers.

Eight days ago I got one of those new DROID phones – the latest do-all gadget from Motorola and Google.  I finally put it down for the first time a few minutes ago.

You’ll notice that there has only been one new post in the past eight days as well.  This is not a coincidence.  It’s hard to type one handed.

During the course of the  last week, I have downloaded and set-as-default numerous new ringtones (currently I am on the ‘Magnum P.I.’ theme song), needlessly activated the turn-by-turn voice directions to locations I’ve driven to a thousand times, checked email incessantly, Tweeted, Facebooked, texted random observations to people that were sitting three feet away from me (I hope they made the L, O, : and ) keys especially sturdy), and pulled the phone from my pocket repeatedly to check my messages because I could swear I’d just felt it vibrate.  Throughout the course of engaging in these compulsively juvenile behaviors, something important occurred to me: this has been one of the most unproductive weeks I’ve had in a long time – which is why I had to work all day on Sunday.

During my days working in retail for a nationwide chain, I had a district manager who was really big on buzzwords and used to hammer them home any time the opportunity presented itself.  While many of them were superficial corporate-speak, one of the things he used to say really stuck in my mind: Avoid productivity busters like the plague.

While on the surface that phrase may seem to be little more than a fancy way of telling you to avoid distractions, there is one distinct difference that sets it apart.  Distractions are a hell of a lot easier to identify and avoid than productivity busters are.

When consciously attempting to avoid distractions, one typically associates such distractions with unexpected interruptions that require immediate action on your part.  In other words – external unanticipated demands for your attention.  While this is fundamentally accurate, a productivity buster is a more subtle, under-the-radar type of influence on the successful use of your time.

It’s easy to close the door to your office, take the battery out of your smart phone,  throw your earbuds in and go to town on the tasks at hand.  I know many business people who employ such isolationist tactics – to varying degrees of success.  But, I also know others who sabotage their own efforts to free themselves.

<rant> If you don’t want to be found, don’t tweet via foursquare where you’re at – no matter how badly you want to be the mayor of your side of the street’s Starbucks.</rant>

But productivity busters are sneakier than that – and it’s harder to realize that they’re hampering your progress until you look at the clock and it’s 3:30 and you can’t figure out where the day went and why you have nothing to show for it.

Most productivity busters lie in our own processes, and it’s up to the individual to identify inefficiencies in your routine.  For some people, the five minutes they intended to take to check Facebook & Twitter quickly balloons into 50 very unproductive and very gone minutes.  For others, it’s the fact that they allow certain tasks to expand beyond their initial purpose.  While the hindrances vary, there is a solution that universally applies.

When I set out to get something done, I’ve learned to employ a policy called JGID – coined by Paul Ferrier, co-founder of Mindscape at Hanon McKendry.  JGID stand for Just Get it Done.  It sounds simpler than it is in practice.

In order to JGID, you have to establish a few things.  The most important thing to do though is to impose deadlines.  The reason this is so critical is the fact that accountability is a huge motivator to get things accomplished.  Set deadlines, and tell someone you respect.  Tell anyone.  Post it to Facebook, Twitter – whatever you need to do to make your intentions known.  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, if you’re having trouble holding yourself accountable, find someone who will.

Setting deadlines requires establishing milestones for what you want to accomplish.  If you estimate that a multi-phase project is going to take you eight hours to complete, break it down into individual tasks, each with their own deadline.

What this allows you do to is group all of your unproductive time into one chunk.  The fact is, your productivity busters are aren’t necessarily a bad thing.  Your Facebooking, Tweeting, bathroom

Take me for example.  I take a break every single hour and I often take a couple hours for lunch to get some exercise.  That said, it isn’t uncommon for me to be up until 11:00 pm or later wrapping up the day’s tasks.  This routine probably wouldn’t work for most people, but I am not most people.breaks, lunchtime, coffee refills, etc. are all necessary parts of who we are as people.  To cut them out would be to deprive ourselves.  The key is to schedule your productivity busters to where they’re simply healthy breaks in the action.

Between client meetings, meetings at Mindscape, varying kid responsibilities, travel time, etc. my routine on a daily basis is usually different each day.  I, for example don’t exercise daily (although I wish I would).  And, it usually takes a great deal of willpower to peel myself away from the computer at 11:00 pm to go to bed.  But again, back to accountability – I am trying – and I am writing it down so I am more likely to stick to it ?

When I first got my Droid, I hunted for a ringtone to replace the generic ‘DROID’ robotic voice that was set at the default ringtone.  I ran across a free one that was derived from the character ‘Scorpion’ from original ‘Mortal Kombat’ arcade game.  Scorpion’s signature was the spear move, where he would simultaneous growl ‘Get Over Here!!’ while shooting a spear at his opponent.  As homage to my favorite arcade game from my early teen years, I set my alert ring tone to command ‘Get Over Here!!’ anytime I received a text message, email, voice mail or mention on Twitter.

For the next day and a half, I obediently responded to the aggressive demands for my attention anytime I received an electronic message of any kind.  Then it occurred to me the irony of the whole thing:  I was allowing my phone to dictate my life!  It was literally telling me what to do, and when to do it.  I quickly downloaded a new ringtone for my alerts.

Everybody has different perspectives and ideas for how to better use our time.  How have productivity busters made your day less efficient?  How did you recognize them and what did you do about it?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I just finished listening to an hour long podcast on The Third Tribe between Johnny Truant and Sonia Simone about what it’s like to get started in business and more specifically, how to make money online with little to no knowledge or resources.

About a third of the way through the session, something occurred to me:  with almost everything new, the hardest part is getting started.

I routinely give advice about blogging.  I’ve encountered numerous people who want to start a blog, or a business, or take up a new activity, or any number of challenging courses of action about which they know next to nothing about.

But the path to taking action is filled with self imposed roadblocks.  In an attempt to educate themselves about whatever it is they’re considering, too much information can be a destroyer of dreams.  With Information Overload, there’s a cycle that occurs.  Enthusiasm becomes overpowered by intimidation, which in turn causes petrification, leading to apprehension and ultimately ends with inaction.  In other words, the task seems so daunting that the first step is never taken.

How many times have you thought about starting a blog, or learning to roller-blade, or taking a cooking class?  Why haven’t you done it yet?

The reality of the whole situation is this:  you absolutely know one thing, and that one thing is enough to get you started in literally any challenge you wish to undertake.  And, it isn’t nearly as mysterious as it may seem.  That one thing is the fact that you know that you want to do it.

The problem is, society as a whole discourages risk-taking inherently.  We’re acutely aware of the direst consequences before we do anything that is off the beaten path.  Tell 10 people about your unique idea that is radical and daring, and six of them will tell you you’re nuts, three more won’t say anything out loud but they’ll secretly believe that you’re nuts, and only one out of those 10 people might offer encouragement.  We’ve become conditioned to choose the path of least resistance.  Play if safe and you’ll never have to worry.  We’re taught that the path to security lies in working hard through the best years of our lives; living within the means we’re able to secure while we try to save in order to survive after we’ve no more good years left to sell.

There’s something you have the desire to do, but you’re not doing it.  Why?  Don’t have the time?  The money?  Are you afraid of what will happen if you break from the status quo?  Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek fame advises us to ask the simple question: “What’s the WORST thing that can happen?”

I once heard a motivational speaker hypothesize that the worst case scenario, as you’ve defined it in your mind, never has more than a 3-5% chance of actually coming to fruition.  Why is this?  Because things are usually not as bad as they seem.  While the risk of losing money or resources is legitimate, there’s a greater element at play.  Time is the only finite resource you have.  Money, influence and people are ALL renewable resources.  But the amount of time you have is limited, and you never know how much more of it you have remaining.  So the question is this:  Consider the time you spend doing something safe in return for whatever compensation you receive for doing so.  Is it possible that the risk of wasting your time is a much greater threat to your happiness than what you gain for do so justifies?

“It’s better to regret something you did, than something you didn’t do.”