How Being Minimalist Can Make it Possible to Live Anywhere

Karol Gajda can teach you to be free.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Some people are content to live their lives in three places 95% of the time.

They valiantly wake up every morning, put on clothes, and walk the five steps to their car.

They fire it up and drive to work, where they spend twelve hours checking Facebook and doing what they’re told.

Then they go home, exhausted.

Once a year they hop aboard a flight to a cheap beach somewhere and spend a few days getting sunburned and sipping tequila.

Does that life sound familiar?

These people have convinced themselves that this is the only reality. There is no other option but to maintain the status-quo and deal.

Until they get to retire at some point impossibly far into the future, after they’ve wasted their youth. Then what?

Well you might be taking that path, but it’s not the only option.

There are people who’ve decided to opt out of this life sentence of working until you die.

These people want to teach you how to free yourself (if you want to.)

I want to introduce you to my friend Karol Gajda.

Karol went from having the house and an expensive car to living and working from anywhere in very little time.

Currently he’s teaching people how to attain his level of freedom over at Ridiculously Extraordinary. He just made a guitar with his bare hands in India! How awesome is that?

You can do this too, Karol can teach you how.

A few weeks ago Karol emailed me a Minimalist Quick Start Guide based off my work in The Art of Being Minimalist.

I’ve delayed too long in releasing it,  so I’m just going to put it up here now!

The Minimalist Quick Start Guide explains Karol’s own journey towards living a minimalist life free from the confines of society’s expectation. It’s awesome, it’s free.

Download Karol Gajda’s Minimalist Quick Start Guide for free.

Definitely check out Karol’s work at Ridiculously Extraordinary.

I interviewed Karol a few months ago.





The Power of Unautomating Your Finances: Interview with Adam Baker

How adopting a minimalist approach of unautomating your finances can get you out of debt.

Interview by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Adam Baker and his daughter Milligan

If anyone can teach you the skills to get yourself out of debt, it’s Adam Baker of the blog Man Vs. Debt.

Over the last year, Baker, his wife Courtney, and their daughter Milligan, paid off all of their consumer debt, sold all of their ‘crap’, and traveled to Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Now they’re back in Indiana, and Baker has written an amazing and simple e-book on taking control of your financial situation.

I don’t talk much about finances her on my blog, usually my advice is quite simple: stop buying stupid stuff, start living your life.

Luckily, Baker goes into a great deal more depth in his new e-book Unautomate Your Finances: A Simple, Passionate Approach to Money.

I’ve been a huge fan of Baker’s, before I even started writing Far Beyond The Stars. His writing on Man Vs. Debt and as a contributing writer on Get Rich Slowly helped inspire me during my own journey towards minimalism.

My favorite part of the Unautomate Your Finances is Baker’s signature 2-page minimalist budgeting system, which is the simplest method I’ve seen to force yourself to acknowledge the money you’re actually spending during every transaction.

Today, I’m honored to present this interview I did with Baker over the weekend. We discussed the benefits of Unautomation, the danger of subscriptions, and how Baker sold all his ‘crap’ and traveled the world with his family.

Everett Bogue: Your e-book is called Unautomate Your Finances, and your theory of Unautomation is heavily discussed throughout the e-book. How can Unautomation help get you out of debt?

Adam Baker: Unautomation is simply any time you are willing to trade convenience in for increased consciousness (basically the opposite of what we do when we automate). It can help people get out debt in many ways!

First, it raises awareness of our situations. This is often the first obstacles in coming to grips with just how destructive debt can be in our lives. Unautomation also encourages us to focus on one goal at a time. Often, we never pay off our debt, because we are juggling so many of our “expected” responsibilities. We may be expected to live a certain life, save a certain amount, or do a certain set of things.

By ramping up and honing in our focus, we can start to really chew away at our debt.

Everett: What is one powerful way to Unautomate your finances?

Baker: In the guide I cover at least 27 “core action steps”. However, one of my favorites is adopting a simple budget.

Courtney and I primarily budget by hand, using two sheets of paper and a very straight forward system. It’s worked wonders for us and budgeting this way is not only easy, but it raises our awareness more than any other method!

Everett: I love your approach to stuff (sell your crap) in UYS. How can a healthy relationship with stuff help you get out of debt?

Baker: Excess stuff creates all sorts of burdens. Clutter begets more clutter. And excess stuff takes space to store and money to maintain. It trains us to want more and more. Look, there’s nothing wrong with having possessions, but like you pointed out we’ve crossed the healthy point as a society.

As a bonus, most of us can generate up several hundred dollars (or even more) when we go to actually purge our possessions. This can be used to aggressively attack our other goals!

Everett: What are some of the things that you got rid of when you were downsizing?

Baker: Oh gosh… Well, we really got rid of everything! We started with big obvious things… excess furniture, electronics, a television, and even one of our cars. But we kept going! Eventually we took what was an apartment full of crap and turned it into two backpacks to start our travels.

We’ve accumulated some more stuff since coming back home, but we’re desperately trying to fend off our urges to consume. :-)

Everett: You talk in your e-book about how subscriptions can take an unnoticed toll on our finances. What are some of the unnecessary subscriptions that we sign up for?

Baker: Cell phone contracts, cable services, rental leases, magazines, newspapers, online apps, widgets, bells, whistles, monitoring services, etc…

Let me be very clear, though. There are plenty of cases where subscriptions are necessary and/or desirable! My suggestion is to mentally purge your subscriptions and start from scratch. Examine them all and figure out which ones you really want/need.

Also, be sure to look for creative solutions and/or alternatives to avoid them (this is sometimes not hard at all). Be careful of signing long-term contracts on anything. 2-3 months from now your “necessary” expense could quickly become not so important!

Everett: Leo Babauta discusses in the forward of Unautomate Your Finances about how he used many Unautomation techniques to get himself out of debt, but now he’s back to automation. At what point do you think it’s acceptable, or even advantageous, to go back to automating your finances?

Baker: I think automation is extremely powerful when applied to healthy, sustainable finances habits and when it is reevaluated on a regular basis. But we have to be careful of looking at automation as a solution to our problems or financial issues. It’s not a solution. It can be a powerful tool, but it only magnifies the existing habits we have!

Installing the empowering habits in the first place often takes the opposite of automation!

Everett: Thanks so much for this opportunity Baker. Good luck with your e-book launch!

Adam Baker’s new e-book Unautomate Your Finances: A Simple, Passionate Approach to Money is available now for only $17.

Because I’m a huge supporter of Adam Baker’s work, I’ve decided to become an affiliate for his work. 50% of the sale price goes to support my work here at Far Beyond The Stars.

If this interview helped you, I’d love if you could share it with anyone you know who’s having trouble with their finances.

Thank you.

Special Launch-day Bonus (March 9th ONLY!): I’ve just been informed that the first 100 people to purchase the e-book get access to UStream with Baker himself, where he will discuss any questions you have about the e-book and finances in general. Don’t miss out!





How to Create a Movement: Free e-book

We need you to change the world

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Over the last week the popularity of Far Beyond The Stars has skyrocketed (again). I don’t pay attention to stats often, but needless to say, they’ve gone way up. My traffic and subscriber count continues to double every month.

This ongoing success all because of you, the people who support these ideas.

Today I’m releasing a brief free e-book that I wrote over the last week. It’s a short 20 pages, and it covers what I believe are the basics of how to create a movement online.

Disclaimer: This e-book is completely free, and released under a creative commons license. You will not be asked to give me your email, or subscribe to a newsletter when you download it. It contains no affiliate links, and is not intended for any purpose other than to help you learn to create a movement.

How to Create a Movement by Everett Bogue

Download the free e-book, How to Create a Movement.

This e-book isn’t for everyone. If you’re content to sit at home, watch TV, and embrace the status-quo… well, you won’t find much information that helps you here.

How to Create a Movement is for people who want to help people, support themselves through their art, and change the world.

Why I wrote How to Create a Movement.

I continue to get emails from smart people who are seeking change, who want to learn my ‘secrets’ to making money online. There are no secrets, but I hope this can help.

I believe that the easiest way to find success online is through creating or joining a movement. A movement is anything that seeks to change the world in a small way. There are a number of mediums you can use to create one. Some create a movement through art, others through music, speaking.

I choose to create a movement through words and ideas.

I hope this e-book can help you start your own movements. I hope that it helps you find greater success in your life. Most of all, I hope it helps you change the lives of others.

Thank you for all of your support over the last few months, it’s been a wonderful experience so far. I have a feeling the next few months we’re going to see even more powerful changes.

Download the free e-book, How to Create a Movement.

If this e-book helps you, I have two simple requests:

  1. Help spread the word. You can do this using the retweet button, or any way you should choose.
  2. Let me know what you think. Please leave a comment below, find me on twitter or contact me. I’d love to hear what you think.

-Everett Bogue

Special thanks to Chris O’Byrne for his editing expertise.





How to Succeed by Being Completely Unrealistic

Many people don’t succeed for a simple reason: they set their sights too low.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

If you caught me a year ago and asked me whether I could have left my job, started a very small business, and would be earning enough passive income to live in New York City in only one year’s time, I would have told you that you were crazy.

And yet, here I am, doing all of those things.

In July of 2009, I set a series of seemingly unrealistic expectations, (to myself at the time), all of which have come true in a remarkably short period of time.

The reason is simple: it’s lonely at the top.

99% of the people in the world are content to exist within the confines of their own settled mediocrity. The boredom of sitting under florescent lights all day begins to set in over time. Their current situation burns into their psyche, and they stagnate.

The thought of rejecting the status-quo scares the crap out of them.

It starts with the idea that you have to be realistic. Everyone knows a horde of people who either are being realistic or will tell you to be realistic. Well, these people are wrong. They’re blinded by their own passivity.

They’ve given up. They’re walking zombies. You don’t want to be one of these people.

And more importantly, don’t listen to these people.

They call them worker drones for a reason. These people are not being compared to busy bees, they’re being compared to The Borg.

Does this sound familiar? When you look at yourself in the mirror are you beginning to see the last remnants of life seeping out of your soul?

It’s never too late to start having unreasonable expectations for yourself.

You can make a change, you can make a difference in your own life and the lives of others.

Since I’ve already achieved my “unrealistic” goal of living and working from anywhere and earning at least $30,000 a year (by current approximations) it’s time to up the ante.

Here’s my new unreasonable goal: By this time next year I want to earn $100,000 a year, in addition to all of the other accomplishments I’ve unrealistically achieved over the last four months.

I don’t want to do this so I can spend it all on hookers and plasma TV’s. Because of my minimalist lifestyle, I’ve estimated that I can live comfortably making around $25,000. When I make this unrealistic amount of money, I will use it to help as many people as I can achieve exactly what I did. This blog will teach how to achieve everything that I’ve accomplished.

But enough about my unrealistic goals, and more about yours.

Here are 13 ways to start thinking about achieving unrealistic success.

1. Set at least one unrealistic goal to achieve in the next year. I’ve become a firm believer that everyone should set unrealistic goals for themselves. Take a moment and think, draw, write down your unrealistic goals. For reference: last year my unrealistic goal was to work from anywhere, quit my job, and move to another city. Done. Done. Done.

2. Map out your ideal life. So you’ve set your unrealistic goals, now you need to visualize them. Tim Ferriss calls this practice Dreamlining. It’s the idea of mapping out your unrealistic ideal life. On that piece of paper, start adding more details to the unrealistic world you’re creating. Do you want to be sipping margaritas on the beach? Swigging wine with Colin Wright in New Zealand? Training to run marathon? Ask the girl of your dreams out on a date? Write it all down: but please, do NOT be realistic.

3. Change your career. Have you always wanted to be a writer? A photographer? A chef? Now is the time to make that change in your life. Now, I don’t want you to be an ordinary member of these careerists. I want you to think unrealistically: contemplate how you can rise to become the best in your field in just one year, using very few resources. It’s hard, but possible.

4. Remove the floor. Many people exist with a constant safety net to catch them if they fall. What if you remove that net? Take it away, and then start to have unreasonable expectations for yourself. The Bahamas or the gutter, which will it be? You’ll have no choice to fly to the top, because there are no other options.

5. Be unrealistic about what you don’t need. Just like thinking about what you unrealistically want, but the opposite. What can you survive without? Basically, everything. You can live in a room, eat Brussels sprouts and be happy. It’s very hard to hit the bottom when you have big ambitions. Trust me, I’ve tried to hit the bottom.

6. Learn a new skill that you never thought you could master. When I was 16, I decided that I had to go to New York. The only way I could see to do that, at the time, was to become a professional ballet dancer. So, I took 14-17 dance classes a week for months on end. I lost 40lbs and became a vegetarian. Eventually I auditioned for NYU’s Tisch dance department and was one of 24 dancers accepted into their program. I did the same routine with this blog. What can you train to do that’s theoretically impossible?

7. Gatejump your way to unrealistic success. The last 150 years were defined by Gatekeepers. These were the head honchos in charge. A few television networks, newspapers, and publishing houses had all of the power. But no longer: everything has changed. If you’re still waiting for a Gatekeeper to come along and let you in, you’re going to be waiting a long time. We now live in a bottom-up media society, and everyone has the power to develop a following on the Internet. These Tribes are the basis for our existence. These people who support you are your power. How can you harness your tribe to Gatejump your way to success?

9. Leave your old life behind. Over time we humans get sedentary. We have our old friends, our old habits, and we keep returning to them. Where do you want to go? Who do you be? I’m going to live in Oakland California, and I’m going to be a blogger who earns $100,000 a year.

10. Ignore everybody. People will nay-say you into oblivion, and they are not to be trusted. Do not listen to negative opinions or influences. You are able to accomplish anything if you put your mind to it. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter anyway, because nothing you do matters. Man has gone to the moon, you can leave your day job, trust me.

11. Concentrate on existing systems to amplify your unrealistic success. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re being unrealistic is to try and build everything from the ground up. Don’t! There are tools available to amplify your success. Use social media to have a 1:100 connection with your Tribe. Use a blog to publish big ideas. Use automated services to make your income come without effort. Nothing can stop you if you use tools that already exist.

12. Quit early and often. If you’re unrealistic and it’s not working, don’t be afraid to change course. There’s a huge difference between being unrealistic and being a stubborn numb-nut. Set your sights above 99% of the population, but don’t be stupid. If you’re in The Dip, push on, if you’re just failing constantly, learn to abandon your projects and focus on ones that have a chance of success.

13. Read books about achieving unrealistic success. I owe a great deal of my success to the work of a couple of authors. I’d suggest reading these books, as they will help you start to think bigger about what you can actually accomplish. There are no doubt many more books that will encourage you to think unrealistically, these are just a few of my inspirations. Linchpin by Seth Godin. The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

It’s my birthday today. I’m 25. The best gift you could give me is to purchase a copy of The Art of Being Minimalist. It’s only $9.95.

If you’ve already purchased the book, thank you so much. I’d love it if you could email your copy to five friends.

Thank you.





The Indispensable Guide to Timejacking Your Way to Success

How to manipulate your use of time to focus on the important.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

The idea that time is your most valuable commodity is not new, but it is often overlooked. I’ve done a lot of research on the importance of focusing your attention in the last year.

There are a number of very successful people, such as Timothy Ferriss, Seth Godin, and Leo Babauta who use their time very effectively in order to accomplish greatness.

I call this emerging science Timejacking.

The idea is that you don’t exist within the accepted constraints of time as other people in the world do. These people don’t let the unimportant eat up their time.

When compiled, designed, and published The Art of Being Minimalist in under 2 weeks, I also employed a number of Timejacking techniques for greater effectiveness. I plan on writing at least one more ebook in the next two months, so Timejacking is on the forefront of my mind.

Many people choose to spend their time in ineffective ways:

  • Watching TV
  • Paying off bills they shouldn’t have acquired
  • Working at low-paying jobs
  • Multitasking
  • Checking email every 35.5 seconds
  • Reading information that doesn’t matter out of obligation

I could go on forever about the ways you can spend ineffectively spend time, but that wouldn’t be an effective use of my time.

The Timejacking manifesto is simple:

  • I will value my time to the highest potential.
  • I will not engage in activities that do not contribute value to my life.
  • I will focus my attention on creating great work which changes the world.

Here’s one Timejacking case-study:

When I was living in Portland, there came a moment in time when I didn’t have any money at all. I had moved there with $3000, and around November 1st I realized that I had reached bottom. I had very little income coming in at that time, and none of it automatically, like it does now.

Then I walked by a Starbucks, and they had a help-wanted sign up in the window.

For a brief moment, perhaps 17.7 seconds, I considered taking that job. (I’m confident they would have hired me, because I’m badass.) It probably could have been paid fairly well for what those jobs pay, around $11 an hour I imagine. I could have made just enough money working part time to pay rent and buy food in Portland. I would have been ‘set.’

If I had taken this action, it would have ended my writing career before it began.

By putting that safety net in place, I would not have had the incentive to start growing my small business online. I would not have hunkered down and spent a number of months banging out valuable content for my e-book.

Anyway, I don’t mean to say this to put down people who are working for 11 dollars an hour. For me, it just doesn’t make sense. It is a very safe way to live, you can pay the electric bill. However, it isn’t a way to be find artistic success.

The rationalization for me was simple:

If I spent the next two months working on creating what is essentially, a digital work of art, it will pay me indefinitely. The truth is that my e-book made far more money in the first month of launching, than I ever would have made working at Starbucks for the last four months.

I had timejacked my way to success, and I want to help you find the skills to do that as well.

I’ve written more about my success through minimalism in my e-book The Art of Being Minimalist. I highly recommend reading it, if you haven’t already.

The nearly complete Timejacker manual for success.

1. Reduce your email usage.

Internet communication is one of the biggest problems manifested in our era. Everyone feels they need to be on the internet all day long answering stupid requests and keeping in touch. The problem is, when you’re on email all day, you never get anything done. If you sit at your computer all day, hitting the refresh button your gmail, you will never get anything important done.

Stop checking your email please. I know, this is one of the biggest crimes that I commit as well. I’ve wasted countless years of my life checking email, and I’ve made the resolution recently to make it stop. I value my time too much to waste it the endless time-vortex that is email.

This should be a separate article, and I’ve written about a healthy approach to email before. But, here are a few basics:

Do not check email first thing in the morning.

This can ruin your whole day, because you might get an email criticizing you, or requesting a massive amount of information. Suddenly, it’s all you can think about.

You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s so easy for email to take control of your life.

Start by checking email twice a day.

Set two times per day that you check email. The 1st time should be around noon. I’m doing 2pm today, because I woke up at 10am, and I need at least 4 hours to write at least 4000 words of content. The second time is around an hour before the end of your work day. Anywhere from 4pm-6pm, depending on how long you work.

If you have a boss, which I know many of you still do. (You won’t for long if you start to apply these techniques.) Explain to your boss that you will see a huge productivity bump if you start to adopt these techniques.

Offer to do a trial period, where you check email twice a day for one week. Present evidence to your boss that your productivity has skyrocketed. If it hasn’t actually boosted your productivity, be sure to prepare enough material in advance so that you can successfully demonstrate that it has.

A Timejacker isn’t afraid to fake the evidence. It might take up to 4 weeks for you to see the results of this experiment, so it’s important to have enough time to see actual results.

Compose an auto-response to train the people who email you.

Write a very nice formal message explaining to the people who email you that you’ve started a Timejacking experiment. You’re free to copy and paste this one, if you need.

Dear friend,

In order to produce the best possible results in my work, I’ve adopted a policy of only checking email once per day at 12pm EST. Email is a huge time-suck and I’ve discovered that by not spending all day checking it, I become a much more effective individual. If this is an emergency, please contact me at my phone number 555-555-1212. I hope you understand.

Thank you for your time,
Insert your name here

Quickly move to checking email once a day.

Once you’ve established the barrier of only checking email twice a day, move as quickly as possible to a schedule of checking email only once per day. This will double your productivity instantly. Choose the middle of the day option, because it will give you time to respond to email that require action without spreading over into your off-time.

2. Automate social media.

I do NOT use Facebook or LinkedIn, but I have a presence there. Because of my work, it is absolutely essential that I have as many outlets as possible for people to find the work that I’m doing. However, this doesn’t mean that I spend endless hours poking around on Facebook.

How to automate social media:

  1. Turn off all notifications except incoming personal messages from real people.
  2. Make the Wall on Facebook 1-way. People often leave messages on your wall, and you don’t want to have to spend time policing that location. My wall is one way, and only displays my blog posts. This way, anyone who visits my Facebook page is almost guaranteed to read my blog, instead of interacting with me on Facebook.
  3. Program LinkedIn to pull in your Twitter feed and your blog feed. This will funnel people into interacting with you at your blog (your home base) and your Twitter, which limits their ability to write you five paragraph long emails that don’t say anything.
  4. Delete any profiles that you have to work very hard to find value from. There are a million social networking sites out there, if you’re not seeing significant returns from them, you need to delete your profile. For instance, I used to be on a photographer forum/social network called Lightstalkers. I recently deleted my profile because it wasn’t contributing any value to my life. Stick to the powerful social networking sites that give you results.

3. Value your time properly.

A Timejacker doesn’t do work unless they’re being paid at the absolute highest rate. This might sound like laziness, but it’s not. A Timejacker isn’t using their off time to watch TV or eat chips, instead they use the time when they’re not working to train, learn, and grow their strengths.

For instance: I value my time around $100 an hour. This means I can do ‘work’ around 10 hours a week an make at least $1000. This is more than enough to cover all of my expenses for that week. I plan to grow this amount until my time is worth at least $500 an hour. This way I can earn around $5000 a week for 10 hours of work.

In the above mentioned Starbucks story. No matter how hard you work, you can never reach the potential of earning $5000 a week. Pushing the Frappachino button just doesn’t scale into high-impact income.

4. Don’t do meetings.

Once you interact with more people than yourself, you introduce the concept of bureaucracy. This is why many bigger organizations have a hard time maneuvering and growing, because you need to sit a committee down on a Friday night for four hours in order to endlessly debate whether or not to order a new snickers bar.

Simply avoid interacting with other people when decisions are being made. The section details how to solve this problem:

5. Make decisions on your own.

Take initiative and make important decisions for yourself.

The reason for this is one of a Timejacker’s biggest strengths. If you introduce an idea to another person, they will almost always have some reason to argue about how it can be done better, or how they think it will fail.

For most average decisions, you can reasonably assume that you can make the logical decision yourself, and get the minor decision done and out of the way. This way you can move on to the next decision. For important decisions, or ones that might potentially lose a lot of money, you may need to interact with other individuals if you’re working in an organization.

Knowing the difference between important decisions and squabbling over stupid decisions is one of the most important elements of any successful Timejacker. Act on decisions that have simple answers without asking for an opinion.

6. Eliminate as many unnecessary tasks as possible.

Many people simply do things because someone told them to. Don’t accept the status-quo; if you can eliminate or automate a task you must make the decision to do so.

For instance: if you’re still updating a spreadsheet that lists all of your business expenses manually, you must stop doing this and outsource it to an automated financial program.

I don’t care if you really enjoy the task of reading all of your receipts for coffee last week and typing them into Excel, doing this is effectively killing hours of your time. Use an account at Mint.com for your personal finances, and Outright.com for your business expenses. These services automatically keep track of cash flow and budgets for you, and you can see your exact net worth in a matter of seconds.

This can apply to any number of tasks though. Do an audit of your time and see where you’re wasting it, then destroy those time wasting elements. I did this with email, and it’s helping my ability to focus on the important immensely.

7. Focus on your strengths.

A Timejacker acknowledges that they cannot be good at everything.

Many people spend their entire lives trying to be as balanced as possible. We’re encouraged in schools to get high math scores, even though 80% of us will never have to do algebra again after high school. Why are we wasting all of this time learning math, when our cellphones can do it for us?

Focus on becoming the absolute best at your good abilities, and stop focusing on fixing your problems.

We all have problems, and I know we can be very insecure about them, but it’s okay. There are other people who are better at these things.

If you’re bad at giving haircuts, don’t try to fix your hair-cutting ability, instead find someone who can cut your hair for you. There are a million other ways that people focus on fixing problems instead of focusing on becoming the best at their strengths.

All of this is wasted time. You could pay someone to do the little things, or not do them at all.

8. Use existing infrastructure.

I went over this in depth in my article on simplifying your start-up. It got a huge positive reaction, and I can understand why. Everyone thinks they need to reinvent the wheel, but the truth is that making that decision can keep you in Starbucks-land for a very long time.

Be aware of the applications and services that are available to you, and use them to Timejack effectively. One way that I do this in my business is by using e-junkie to handle all of my transactions. My digital goods are transmitted, and payments are received instantaneously with no interacting from me. I can simply check my cash flow every night and adjust my strategies properly if I need to.

The old way to do this would be to rent a space in the real world, hire someone to run your cash register, and have them manually handle all transactions. This is costly, and ineffective in the modern world. A Timejacker doesn’t do brick and mortar unless absolutely necessary.

9. Make it hard to contact you.

With my new-found minor fame over the last month, I started to receive a huge amount of email every day with questions from readers. I love interacting with readers, but many of these questions could have been resolved by the person if they had just sat down and thought for 30 seconds.

In order to cut down on the amount of email I received, I installed a ‘contact me’ form that lists a couple of expectation that I have for incoming messages. For instance: keep it short. Don’t email me asking me to promote stuff. Contact me on Twitter first.

I plan on writing a brief Q&A for some of the most frequent questions that I receive.

If you make it more difficult to reach you, it will make sure that only the people who really need to contact you will. This way you can get more important work done, and spend less time answering mundane questions.

10. Avoid consuming information for information’s sake.

The majority of the information on available, especially on the internet, is valueless. Do not consume it for the sake of feeling like you’re reading something.

You are not reading anything of value.

Chances are you won’t remember what you just read. I only subscribe to 15 blogs, and these are the blogs that contain information that is incredibly valuable to me.

I suggest, as I did in my article on focusing your digital attention, unsubscribe to as much information as possible. Do not follow people on social networks just because they follow you. Focus your digital attention on only the sources that create worth for you.

How to stop reading newspapers (they’ll be dead in two years anyway.)

I recently stopped reading newspapers entirely. I used to have a sizable New York Times addiction, because I felt like I needed to read that information.

I did a month-long experiment in order to see if the information in the New York Times was really contributing to my life. I simply stopped reading it. After a week, I no longer missed reading the endless flow of useless information that comes out of the Times.

Instead I dedicate this time to reading books, because the level of information contributed is significantly higher in value quality.

I found that when important things happened, like the quakes in Haiti and Chile, my Twitter friends did their best to notify me. If something happens that actually effects me personally, I imagine I’ll be able to walk out my front door and ask a bystander what’s going on, and they will tell me.

I think when the New York Times puts up their pay wall, they will see just little society values the information that they contribute. Which is to say, not very much at all.

What information are you consuming that doesn’t contribute value to your life? Turn it off.

11. Only work when you want to.

A Timejacker doesn’t work for the sake of working. They focus their attention on activities that are incredibly important. If you find yourself sitting at your computer, and no ideas are coming to you, stop sitting at your computer! Go read a book. Go outside and sit in the park. Go to a yoga class or to the gym and exercise your body. Cook yourself a healthy lunch.

There are a million things you could be doing besides sitting in front of your computer with a glazed over look on your face waiting for ideas to come. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that the ideas won’t come in when you’re in front of the computer.

I wrote this entire article in my brain yesterday as I walked down west side of Prospect Park. I stopped at the bookstore and pursued the stacks. I got a cup of coffee and watched people do what people do.

I decided that Timejacking was the most important element of success as I was NOT sitting in front of a computer. The next day, I simply sat down and wrote a nearly 3500 word article in an hour. Because this article is so valuable, it will no doubt return an incredibly high value to my business.

If I had spent yesterday staring blankly at a computer screen, I never would have written this article. Take this to your own life though; how often do you sit at a computer screen just waiting for ideas to come?

Go out into the world and experience what it is to be alive.

12. Don’t do things you hate doing.

A timejacker doesn’t do things out of obligation. If you’re sitting at your desk right now, just waiting for the clock to strike 5pm. Stop, get up, go outside. The best decision you could ever make is to stop doing anything that you hate doing. Especially for a pay check as small as $11 an hour. If you hate your job, you should be working towards finding a way to leave your job, instead of just being a zombie.

13. Focus only on what is truly important to you.

A timejacker recognizes exactly what activities are important. Almost all of my income comes from writing professionally at this moment, so that is one of the most important activities to me.

Take a moment and determine exactly what is important to you. I like to pick four areas of my life which are most important. Right now I’m focused on writing, cooking, yoga, and reading.

Make a resolution to only focus on your areas of interest on any given day. Many people choose to spend their days focusing on many different things. Like they spend five minutes tinkering with an art project, and then they spend five minutes shopping for shoes, and then they spend five minutes thinking about philosophy. This leads to a day worth of little useless activities.

A timejacker focuses only on the important, and harnesses their strengths in order to become incredibly successful.


If this helped you, the most important thing you can do is to hit that retweet button, so more people can be helped by this information. Thank you.