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Everyone is a procrastinator on some level. Some of us are terrible offenders, spending hours doing useless things like browsing facebook or blogs or walking up to see what is in the fridge multiple times a day, all in an effort to avoid the work we know we should be doing.

Over the past few weeks I implemented a method to help get the most from procrastination. This technique means you still procrastinate, in that you do something that is not exactly what you know you should be doing, but you still get results from your activities rather than waste time on idle tasks.

I call this efficient procrastination and here’s how it works.

Your focus needs to be on action. The whole reason I started thinking about this technique in the first place was after writing my article - Are You Drowning, Treading Water or Swimming? - which made me realize as long as the majority of daily activities moved me forward in some way, I could count that day a good one.

Once you realize that action is key, the next step is to isolate actions that lead to results of some kind for you and your business. Generally some tasks require more work than others and some you enjoy more. It’s precisely because of the tasks that you don’t enjoy, yet are critical for your business to move forward (or for you to move forward personally - like say studying for an exam), that you look for ways to procrastinate.

When you are sitting down, working on something you don’t really enjoy or you are tired of and that procrastination urge hits, it’s time to go and do something else, however that something else is still an activity that helps your big picture. You must choose a swimming forward task, not a time waster.

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Those who know me well, my friends, family and colleagues, read the claims I make about my blogging and laugh.

As per the Blog Mastermind sales page and throughout the Blog Profits Blueprint, I claim that I only work two hours a day to generate the around $5000 a month income from my blogs and related projects (forums I purchased with profits from my blogging).

The people who see me on a regular basis would tell you that I work a lot harder than just two hours per day.

So is my claim a marketing gimmick? Is it something I state just to lure people in with dreams of an easy working life for a high financial return? Am I using some kind of trigger to convince you that my program is the answer you have been looking for?

Well yes and no.

Yes in the sense that having a claim that is desirable and something compelling enough that people would hand over money to learn what it is all about, is a requirement for my offer to be successful.

If I used something like - Work 40 hours a week and if you are lucky you might just make a full time income from blogging - not many people are going to join. Heck, I wouldn’t join either, who wants to work 40 hours a week for $35K a year!?!

The reality is that my program is designed to teach what I really do - I really work about two hours aggregate per day on my blogs to produce about $5000 a month in income. However I spend a lot of the rest of my time doing other work, which tends to add up to 4-10 hour “working” days on average, including weekends sometimes too.

How Many Blog Posts Are Enough?

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The most common and powerful advice dished out by every expert on this planet is one word: Action.

At the heart of almost all business and personal development education is the concept that in order to realize a goal you have to do something - sometimes anything will do - to get a result.

It may seem obvious, and intuitively you understand why action works, yet it’s common advice because most people fail to do it.

I regularly refer to taking action in the articles here on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and also in the blog training materials I produce for my newsletter and mentoring program. I read similar advice on other blogs and in books I read on business and self improvement.

There is one tip you hear more often than any other at the end of podcast interviews or speaking presentations from experts. It goes along the lines of “do something if you want results” - yes, more take action advice.

In many ways if you really want the true “Secret” to success in life, it is taking action.

Why People Fail

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In highschool and the first few years of university I played a strategy card game called Magic: The Gathering, or just “Magic” for short. Magic is a serious game and much like professional poker, there is also a professional tournament series that sees players compete for over six million dollars in cash prizes each year. The pro tour of Magic travels around the world and culminates in the once-a-year World Championships, where the winners walk away with over $50,000 in prize money.

Needless to say the competition is quite fierce and I took the game very seriously for a while, studying deck construction strategy and competing in tournaments around Australia and even overseas in Singapore, Japan, Toronto and once to the World Championships in Seattle.

With such a strong tournament scene a huge support network grew online with many websites available to help Magic players improve their game.

One of the interesting concepts that grew out of the tournament environment is what is known as the “meta-game“. The meta-game is the study of the game environment, what decks and cards should work given what decks and cards you expect others to play. It’s a unique way of strategizing, where you attempt to predict what an environment will be like and use certain cards that specifically counteract other cards.

If your strategy is wrong you will crash and burn since you won’t have the right cards to beat the other decks, but if you study the meta-game well you will come prepared with the specific foils necessary to beat other players.

I like the concept of the meta-game because it gives you a distinct advantage over people who do things blindly, without asking themselves why they are doing something. It’s the study of what motivates others to do something to give yourself an advantage.

What Is Meta-Thinking?

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Something about the blogosphere lately has been bugging me. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is because it’s not a black and white problem and I’m an active participant and proponent of at least part of what I see as the issue.

Blogging as we know it today evolved from online journal writing, a very reflective and personal thing to do centered around one individual’s life. Back then it was expected that a “weblog” would focus mostly on the person writing it and consequently, unless the person led a very interesting life or had a gift for writing, only a small handful of people would read it - perhaps friends, family and coworkers.

Today blogs have become much more than journals, yet many of the blogs we idolize are very ego-centric. Often popular blogs are driven by the personality of the author. While most blogs are not necessarily talking about a person’s personal life, often “life” is the muse for topics, even if they are skewed for relevancy to a certain group of people, a target market.

For example, my blog here is about Internet business and blogging and many of the posts I publish draw on my own experience in these areas. This article you are reading right now is exactly that - I’m writing this as a result of my recent experience reading other blogs.

The blogosphere is personality driven, so it’s natural to expect that the people with the biggest personalities, the most interesting stories, unique talents and/or some form of celebrity, are at the top of the A-List of blogs. There’s nothing wrong with that on the surface, but what I do see as a potential problem is what we value and what concepts we raise to ideals to emulate.

Money As Motivation

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