Finding your groove

I think I have found a system which works for me. By system I mean a way of deploying my own efforts towards achieving a goal or series of goals. I am in the end an eight week person.

I've worked very hard at uncovering this about myself. I've always had ambition and a desire to go at it alone - as a leader - but found that when having to go out and nip away at creating the steps to success I would find that I held a short attention span towards the tasks I was pursuing. I am an ideas guy. Maintenance and administration of a task or goal are what I was challenged with. Until I found out I was an eight week person.

As an eight week person, I now carry a journal which houses only eight weeks within it. Once the eight weeks are done I begin a new book. This has allowed me to see the end in site, so to speak, and with that I can maintain a consistent workflow and inspiration. Even if the idea or concept is not completed within eight weeks, let's say its an ongoing project, chopping into eight week segments gives it a measurable quality which I can analyze and measure my success within. I can see eight weeks with quite a clarity. Its my graduated cylinder of time.

I am now about to begin my third round of my eight weeker. This is the last week of my second then - or as I denote it - 8.2. Next week will be 1.3.... and so it goes.

The fun part to the eight weeker is that I also have a reward built into the end of the series. So for instance in this second series I have managed to make some very good strides forward to the business due to the program and my dedication to it, so I gave myself a year long gym membership at my dream gym. So at the end of the eight weeks there is a reward scheme. It makes life and running your own business much more fun.

I have also discovered that I am a 60 hour per week person. As I chart my hours that I log into the business I find that I am most comfortable working 56 to 60 hours of work. This is true time... meaning if I take an hour out for lunch, or go do some domestic errands in the middle of the day, that these times are not logged into the work day. So the discipline is to log in ONLY anything related to the efforts made at building a business. Each week I calculate the hours per day I am building the business and i find that there is an average of 60 hours per week.

I also enjoy working from 7 - 12. So all the tasks that require focused attention are scheduled there. Things that are more mundane or not requiring a focused mind are scheduled for 1 until about 5 and then after a supper break I can find myself happy to be in research mode and admin mode from 7 onwards. So a lot of research happens at home after 7. Reading art books, sourcing the internet, attending lectures --- after 7.


Its been a thrilling exercise discovering how and where one is most efficient with their time. Finding the groove has been a very very successful experiment and if you have the opportunity and willingness to do some interpretation and exploration in this field I highly recommend it.