By the end of the week, I’ll finish the final draft of a novel I’ve been writing. It will then go to a few people who’ve agreed to give it a first read for me, and unless one of them says something very surprising, The Bialy Pimps will be for sale on Kindle by the end of the month.

But there’s more to this story. See, I wrote the first word of that novel on October 15th of 1999. For the past twelve years, my previous “final” draft has been sitting in the back of my closet, forgotten.

So in case you’re keeping score, here’s what happened:

Man writes novel.
Man shops novel around to literary agents, to no avail.
Man puts novel away for over a decade.

Then, in the middle of his busiest time, with a shit-ton of “brand-aligned,” “profit-generating,” and “strategically sound” projects on his plate that have absolutely zilch to do with fiction, man pulls novel out of closet and begins spending thirty hours or more a week working on it instead of on his more important stuff.

Why? Because this project matters to me, and because it doesn’t make sense to dogmatically follow any rules about how things “should” be done — including your own.

Question your assumptions

Here’s something we believe: Making money is important.

I’m not going to argue with that. I love money. I want more of it. If you feel you have too much money, go ahead and send it my way. I’ll give it a good home.

But the assumption that follows the belief that making money is important is that we should spend a lot of our time on what we know will make us money, and fit things that seem less likely to make a buck into whatever spare time remains.

I don’t buy it. Not this time, anyway.

I have no idea if this book (which is humor, by the way… think Catch-22* and you’ll be in the ballpark) will make me any money. I don’t care. Several things happened recently that created a perfect storm of disobedience, compelling me to work on a long-forgotten and less-than-lucrative project instead of creating products and writing sales copy, regardless of what it meant for business as I know it.

For one, I’d always wanted to write fiction, but I’d given up on it. When I graduated college, I was trained to be a geneticist but my dream was to be a novelist. Unfortunately, everyone knows that you can’t actually make a living as a novelist. A few lucky people win the publishing lottery, and everyone else has to settle for doing it as a hobby.

But a new medium recently came into play. Kindle. The Kindle revolution meant that authors could publish in a meaningful way (and for no cost) without getting the approval of agents or publishers. You still had to write quality and it wasn’t a magic fountain of cash, but you didn’t have to jump through everyone else’s hoops, either. So long, gatekeepers.

It just so happened that I’d been investigating and talking about Kindle for a while now . You know, coincidentally.

I knew from talking to my friend Sean Platt that thanks to said Kindle revolution, it’s now entirely possible to actually make part (or all) of your living writing fiction, even if you’re not Stephen King. Unthinkable!

And there was one more thing. With a decade’s distance from the first drafts of my novel and a hell of a lot of practice writing, I finally knew how to rewrite my book in a way that pleased me (pleased me a LOT, as it turned out) and make it feel ready to ship.

A perfect storm.

But there was one problem, and you can guess what it was.

Ridiculous.

I’m a business guy. A marketing guy. If you’re really generous, maybe I’m a “thought leader.”

What I’m not is a fiction writer. Not in the eyes of the internet, anyway.

It makes no sense for me to release a novel. Once I finish this one, it makes no sense for me to begin another, which I’m going to do. And it sure as hell didn’t make sense for me to push back some very relevant, very current tasks and spend six or eight hours a day working on a project that I hadn’t touched in twelve years.

Or did it?

I’ve mentioned how I’m okay with being abnormal because the usual definition of “normal” sucks. In the same way, I’m okay with doing stuff that doesn’t make sense because “making sense” is just someone’s opinion.

Who says that if you’re a writer, you shouldn’t write whatever strikes you, even if it’s a departure from your norm?

Who says that you shouldn’t follow where inspiration compels you to go?

Who says that you can’t be a novelist and… and whatever I am currently?

I don’t care if this book makes me any money, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it just might do so anyway. I’ve got a track record. I’ve got a network. I’ve got a readership. I understand marketing and promotion. And, now that I’m remembering how much I love writing fiction, I’m going to keep writing books and keep putting them out, which gives me more chances to hit the big dartboard. I have a sneaking suspicion that given persistence and patience, there’s no reason that book sales couldn’t eventually be a significant portion of my business, just as it is for not only J.A. Konrath, but also a hell of a lot of the people who comment on his blog. I’ve never heard of most of these people, and yet they’re making hundreds or thousands of sales each month. That’s paltry in the old world of book publishing, but it’s entirely livable with Kindle’s 70% author royalties.

Twelve years ago, I wanted to make my living as a fiction writer. After a twelve-year detour, I might actually be able to do that. But this way, this time, it would be even better than I’d imagined in my twenties. Back then, I’d have simply been a novelist. Today, I’m a blogger/business guy. And going forward, I can be both.

Maybe it doesn’t “make sense” for someone like me to write and publish a novel.

But I’m the one defining the terms here, and I say that ignoring all of the above simply because some rule says I shouldn’t mix fiction with business is the thing that wouldn’t make sense.

Question the rules

You may remember my course Question the Rules. Well, I’ve been planning a 2.0 release — adding new modules and new interviews, spiffing it up for the new 2012 kids — for months now, but never quite got around to it. I even did a new interview with Julien Smith for it this summer that’s absolutely amazing, but I’ve been sitting on it. The QTR 2.0 project just never felt very urgent. But recently, while working on this novel that it doesn’t make sense for me to be working on, all of that stuff about how arbitrary rules hold us back started to resurface in my head.

It suddenly started to feel urgent.

As the world and work continues to evolve, we need to look harder than ever at the rules that we follow, and decide if we should be following them at all.

2011 was a tough year for a lot of people. The economy still sucks. Everything is made in China. Companies are still laying people off. Many people still hate their jobs. People are still spending more of their time doing stuff that they don’t like than they spend doing stuff that they do like. Depression rates are climbing.

That’s “normal.” That’s what you get if you follow all of the rules.

And while I was working on my novel that doesn’t make sense, setting aside my logical and profitable projects because 1) I believe that I can be both “a business guy” and “a successful novelist” and 2) because I fucking felt like it, I figured now was the time to start talking again about doing things in unconventional ways.

Question the Rules, which has the lengthy but rather descriptive tagline “The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have,” will launch in its 2.0 version next month.

Existing QTR members will simply get the new content for free. New folks will be able to get it all for a steep discount during the launch. And dude… the amount of content we have up there is just getting stupid. It’s going to be nearly 50 hours of assumption-challenging, life-changing information before I’m done, from a lot of the best minds in the business. (And in life, and in art, and in travel, etc.) PLUS a bunch of bonuses. It’s kind of ridiculous.

And you know what? Fuck it. Here’s a signup form, right in the middle of this post. I’m questioning the rule that says I should put it at the end. Go ahead and drop your email address in the box below if you want to know when QTR 2.0 launches, so that you can get it at launch-week prices:

Email:

Here’s what I think might be true.

I think that if you’re failing, it may be because you’re playing by rules that you don’t have to play by.

I think that if you think you can’t have what you want, there’s a decent chance that you’re not actually pursuing what you truly want. Once you do some introspection, you may find that your goals are closer than you think.

I think that even if you’ve never realized it before, the fact that you read this blog means that you are seriously punk rock. If you keep trying to follow the normal, non-punk way of doing things, you’re going to be frustrated and bored.

I think that if you’re unhappy with the hand that you’ve been dealt, you can reshuffle, or you can play it a different way. Are you holding a five and a two of different suits in the card game of life? Fuck it. Start playing a new game. Call a five/two off-suit a “Royal Awesome” and declare yourself the winner.

I think that even though there’s no reason for an internet marketing, business coach, thought leader kind of a guy to begin publishing novels, that I’m going to fucking do it anyway.

There are rules that it makes sense to follow, but only you can decide which ones they are.

* In case you’re actually paying enough attention to notice that I have described my book in the past as “zombies meet Fight Club,” that’s a different book. That’s the next one.

1. Begin.

2. Do the work.

3. Ship.

4. Repeat.

Almost nobody truly does all four. Those that do inevitably become great.

Last year, Adam Baker and Karol Gajda did their “Only 72″ sale for the first time, and I was blown away by how incredibly they’d managed the principle of WIN-WIN-WIN. Everyone pays lip service to the idea, but Baker and Karol had embraced it, dated it, married it, and had like fifteen kids with it.

They made an offer that was incredibly WIN for the buyers. (Over $1000 worth of stuff for $97 last year. This year’s is bigger… there was still a “over $1000 worth of stuff for $97″ offer, but they added a “$4344 worth of stuff for $497″ level.)

They made a big WIN for charity. In fact, they gave enough to Charity:Water to dig like 3-5 freshwater wells in Ethiopia. This year, the charity was WASI (a sustainable businesses women’s charity).

They managed a WIN for the people who contributed to the sale, who greatly increased their sales and profits during the sale.

They managed a WIN for affiliates who promoted the sale.

After all of that, I distinctly and honestly figured there was no way they would make money themselves, but they did, and a lot of it. Baker and Karol WON too.

This year, neither Baker nor Karol contributed anything to the sale itself, which means they did all of this without producing any content. That’s not just win-win-win. It’s incredibly outside-the-box.

If you want to be successful in business, you need to learn how to do this. You need to learn how to let others WIN first and trust that you will get your WIN later. This takes a leap of faith, but it’s vital.

I talked with the guys and picked their brains on how other people could do the same… not how they could create a super-sale, but how they could have the trust to GIVE before GETTING. It takes guts. It takes flipping “looking out for number one” on its head.

And it works. I’d daresay it’s the secret to success… for everyone.

Have a listen:

Download MP3

.

This post contains a lesson about life, about your job, and about being human. Hang in there with me with through the intro, because whether or not you’re an athlete, this applies to you.

—

This summer, over a two-month span of time, I did an Olympic triathlon, a bike century, a half Ironman, and a marathon.

That’s not bragging. Bragging carries the assumption that I did it with a purpose, to prove something to others. I did neither. Only after completing the second event did I ask myself what the hell I was doing it for. I’m not fast. I’m not going to finish in the top third of any event I enter. I’m not trying to impress anyone. Yet it took a huge amount of effort, required me to repeatedly get up around 3am, and had me going for up to seven hours at a time. So why was I doing it?

At first I thought it was to see if I could do it, but then I realized that the intent was subtly different. “Seeing if you can do it” comes with a positive expectation. It’s a carrot. You train, and hopefully you accomplish.

What I was doing was a bit more masochistic. I was trying to see how much I could take.

My empire of dirt

There’s a song by Nine Inch Nails, called “Hurt.” The lyrics go like this:

I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.
I focus on the pain… the only thing that’s real.

It’d be really easy to dismiss this as the ramblings of a morose kid who grew up to become an idol for depressed teenagers, and that’s what most adults do. Kids do dumb shit, and as adults, it’s our job to explain away said dumb shit so that we don’t have to try to understand it. Dumb shit doesn’t require an explanation. It can simply be dismissed, because it’s dumb.

Why would pain have any value? Pain is real, sure, but so is the budget deficit, and we don’t want either of them in our lives. Pain isn’t “the only thing that’s real.” You know what’s real? This deadline. These bills. The fact that we haven’t done our Christmas shopping yet. Oh, and the Patriots game.

This is what we tell those whiny teenagers. But interestingly, it’s what we tell ourselves, too.

So what if you hate your job? It gives you genuine security. You can keep a roof over your head. You can even buy that new plasma TV you’ve been wanting. So turn in your work on time. Listen. Advance. These things are real, and important.

But if you think your deadline is real, go out in the woods and get a grizzly bear to chase you. Which of your pressing concerns seems more real now?

If you think your job is real, get cancer and be given six months to live. Then see if you give a fuck about your job.

The fears that come with your job, your finances, or your social standing are fears of things that aren’t real. If you lose your job, life will go on. This isn’t the way it used to be with the objects of our fears. Used to be, we were afraid of being eaten by tigers. That was a legit fear. You get eaten by a tiger just one time, and things change dramatically for you.

In first world societies, we’re not really in danger anymore. Sure, you can still get hit by a car. You can get a disease. You can get shot. You can get home-invaded or robbed or raped. But comparatively, today, true threats are almost nonexistent. Cave people got a cut and it got infected and they died. They twisted their ankle and lost some of their speed and died. They drank bad water and died. Food became scarce, so they slowly starved and died.

Those things don’t really happen much nowadays, but we’re wired to fear pain. So to compensate, we promoted the things we found moderately unpleasant to “pain” status and began fearing those things instead.

Stress. Discomfort. Awkwardness.

We used to make the choice not to cross a plain based on fear of the pain of being eviscerated. Today we make the choice to not start a new venture based on fear of the pain of failing.

We started saying things like, “This stress is killing me” and “Those people are exercising themselves to death!” and “I was so embarrassed, I could have died.”

That’s not pain. That’s not true discomfort. That’s not the peril to life and limb we evolved to avoid.

We’re not the fragile beings we’ve been trained to think we are. We’re not as weak (of body, of mind, of will) as we’ve hypnotized ourselves into thinking. But the only way to truly learn that — and to open the entire spectrum of human experience we’ve buried beneath the shiny veneer of modern existence — is to meet our own personal limitations and boundaries head-on.

It’s ironic. Letting yourself experience what you most don’t want to experience is the only way to truly be human.

What’s real?

Think about how we live today.

We live in television and on the internet. (I’m scorning neither and I love both, so there’s no finger-pointing here.) Sometimes our friends are people we only see once or twice a year, who we might have physical contact with only half a dozen times.

We go from place to place very quickly without having to wear down our shoes or the soles of our feet, thanks to fast cars and fast trains and fast planes.

We spend a lot of time accomplishing very little. The work of a human life might be the movement of one set of papers or one group of numbers from one location to another.

We have kids, but then we go to work and they go to school (so that they can later go to work, thus closing the circle). Often, our lives cross only briefly, like ships in the night.

We’re shaped by fashion and consumerism. Instead of desiring and chasing food, we desire and chase iPads and iPhones… present company included.

We check email and social networks compulsively. Are we lonely? Or are we just looking for some urgency that we can pretend matters — a surrogate for the survival requirements we used to spend our lives pursuing, but which are now handed to us?

We have fast food. We have video games so real you could step into them. We have reality TV that isn’t very realistic, so that we can vicariously live the lives of Jersey kids and celebrities. And even though we may never visit Australia if we live in New York, we can video chat with Australia, live, for free, whenever we want.

Old-fashioned, unfiltered reality worked for a while, but it was untidy. It was really time-consuming. It had some great positives, but it also came with some shitty negatives.

Move over, reality. Now there’s Reality 2.0.

The good old days

Used to be, things were different.

Used to be, you had to be strong, fast, and smart to survive. That was how evolution proceeded. Those with an advantage leading up to reproductive age passed on their genes, so humans got stronger and faster and smarter.

Then we started getting so smart that our bodies didn’t have to evolve quite as quickly to keep up.

We stopped needing to be strong when machines were invented.

We stopped needing to be fast when chariots, buggies, bicycles, and cars were built.

We no longer had to hunt for food. Others created food in such surplus that certain populations would never want for it. We even manufactured cheap superfoods that were so calorically dense, the poorest among us ended up being the fattest.

Even battling your enemies can now be done largely with the push of a button.

We found a cure for pain. A cure for sleeplessness. A cure for emotional upset. Some cures were medical, and some were behavioral. A cigarette could cure nervousness. A trip to the mall could cure sadness. Eating could cure fear. Drinking could cure shyness.

And that’s all fine and dandy until you realize that we’re hard-wired to experience all of those so-called “negative” things.

A lot of people today, they like to ride roller coasters. As time goes on, roller coasters get bigger and faster. The logical explanation for this is that progress must march on, and a bigger and faster roller coaster is the next logical step, but I think it’s because as our lives become less and less genuine, we require bigger and bigger thrills to scare us, for just a moment, into feeling human again.

Horror films get more and more frightening for the same reason. Those stop-motion sequences of Japanese kids in movies like The Ring? Holy fuck. I don’t need an iPad anymore; all that matters is that you keep those things away from me. Or the breed of intensely grotesque movies that started with the likes of Hostel and Saw — nothing supernatural about those at all, just stuff that could actually happen via ordinary everyday evil. Those movies were huge hits because the more you can feel yourself as being there, being in it, the more you realize, for just a little while, that what your neighbor thinks of your car is irrelevant.

This is the society that embraced Fight Club.

This is a society that spawned real-life fight clubs.

We all go about it in different ways and succeed to different degrees, but every one of us has a part inside us that wants to feel discomfort, because it’s visceral. It’s human.

Remember what Agent Smith said in The Matrix?

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program; entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. That perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrums kept trying to wake up from.

We’ll never create a utopia, because it’s impossible to define good without having bad to compare it to. There is no pleasure without pain. There is no Heaven without Hell.

The more we try to eliminate the negatives in life, the more we consequently eliminate the positives.

Modern society has tried very hard to be safe and secure, to keep us in the soft and protected center of our experience spectrum, and away from the perilous edges.

The problem is that the edges are where all of the really good stuff is.

Edgework

The way to expand your joy is by expanding your capacity for discomfort and failure.

We spend all our time trying to insulate ourselves from negative sensations and emotions, and we end up stunted on both ends. If the experience of modern life feels dim and muted to you, you’re not alone. We’re seeing the world through a protective wrapping. The reason people seek out extremes is so that they can, for once, truly experience something that they know is unblunted and real.

This is a legit sociological concept. It’s called “edgework.” (And thanks again to Julien Smith for introducing me to the concept.)

There are two sides to every coin. If you want to experience real emotion, you get the gamut. If you experience a level 8 emotion in one area, you get access to all emotions at level 8. And if you seek out a negative experience at level 8, you master it. Fear doesn’t blindside you because you went after it. Pain doesn’t overwhelm you because you went into it willingly, step by step. If you wanted to back off, you could have.

Whatever level of discomfort you reach, you reach deliberately. You’ve met the negative head-on, on your own terms. You own it, and you’ll own it forever.

And your world gets bigger. Your spectrum of experiences broadens in all directions — positive and negative. We don’t grow in a line. We grow in a sphere. If you master X, you get access to Y. That’s how it works.

We seek out edges so that we can reconnect with who we really are.

We are not averages and statistics.

We are not the upper, middle, or lower class.

We are not citizens, or constituents, or the governed.

We are not megaplex Christmas shoppers.

We are human.

Tick… tick… tick…

A few months ago, I wrote a post that part of me wishes I hadn’t written.

It was called “The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You,” and it was exceedingly popular. It went viral and got me a lot of attention, and it might just be the best thing I’ve ever written. But it came with a price.

The price is that I didn’t just write it. I read every word of it, over and over and over and over. I lived it. And so now, every day, almost without exception, I’m hideously aware that the clock is ticking. We all get older. We never get younger. And we all know this, but think about it. If you’re 30, do you look back longingly on your 20s? Good. Because they’re over. They’re fucking OVER. You’ll never be there again. Never. This is also true of the age you are now. You have exactly one chance to enjoy it… and then it’s gone.

I guess my new intense awareness of time is a gift. I guess it means that I know not to sweat petty details or to waste time. A lot of people haven’t figured that out yet and continue to squander what few days, weeks, months, and years we’ve been given.

I just watched the movie In Time which, in spite of being a ripoff of Logan’s Run, was still pretty entertaining. In it, the currency is time. The more time you have, the longer you live. When you go broke, you don’t move into a box in an alley. You just die. And that’s a great premise for a sci-fi movie, where you could live each day in a terrifying struggle to earn a few more minutes or hours, but that’s how we live too. You could punch out tomorrow. Nobody knows.

Every day now, I wonder if I’m spending enough time with my family. If I’m having enough fun. If I’m enjoying my work, and if I’m making a difference. I feel like a man who’s been given a death sentence. I’m not kidding. Someone asks me to spend an hour doing something stupid and I resent it. That’s an hour I won’t get back.

What are you doing with the time you have?

Are you watching life through a protective bubble? Are you afraid to leave that bubble, to feel the true pain of effort, of exertion, of something that you’ve never dared to try before? And as you succumb to your fear of the unreal, do you have to settle for experiencing fake joy, fake excitement, fake victory?

Life isn’t meant to be lived through a filter. When you walk into pain and discomfort willingly, and you feel it, unblunted, you know you’re beyond the filter. You know you’re finally experiencing the real.

I don’t know about you, but if I only have so many years here (we’re all born with a terminal disease, after all), then I want to experience the real.

Don’t be stupid, but test your boundaries. Do what bothers you. Do some things that hurt. Let yourself be afraid, and uncomfortable, and at your limit. If you’re scared of something, dive in the next time you experience that fear and revel in it, sampling it like a rare delicacy. Look at everything you’ve been trying not to feel and say, “Let’s try this on for size.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to see what’s out there in the world. And within limits, within reason, I don’t mind if it hurts.

Sometimes I run into people I haven’t seen since high school, or I meet someone new, and they ask me what it is that I do for a living. And so I tell them: I’m a blogger.

I used to pussy-foot around. I’d try to explain the substance of what it is I do (“I’m a writer.” “I’m a coach.” “I create online courses.”), but all of those things invite further inquiry, and eventually we end up getting into more questions — Who do you write for? What kind of people do you coach? What kind of courses? — and so I sigh and say what I start with today: “I’m a blogger.”

And that’s a shit answer, because it frustrates people.

You tell people that you’re a lawyer, and they get it. A little drawer opens in their mind and you go into it. Or you say you’re a paper salesman. Or a drill press operator. Or a social worker. People understand these things. They may not know the details, but they have a basic understanding of where a drill press operator fits and what he or she does. You operate a drill press. Probably in a big factory. You come home from work dirty, you probably earn X, and you’re likely in a union.

You tell people you’re a normal, predictable thing, and their brain gets all happy because it doesn’t have to do any more work. It’s like there’s a form in their mind that contains the essential information about all of your stats, and knowing your occupation populates that form from start to end in one fell swoop. They may not be right about the car you drive, but they can be confident that they’re close. If you’re a drill press operator and drive a new Mercedes and like opera, they’re going to be shocked, for instance. Or if you’re a banker and spend your weekends BMX racing.

You give people a convenient handle and they know what to do with you. But “blogger”? What the fuck is that?

When you tell people you’re a blogger, they don’t know how to populate the form. They don’t know where you go, so they can’t slot you into the mental box they have for you. You’re not neat and tidy. You become an open loop, a loose end in their mind. And people hate loose ends. Loose ends require mental energy. The brain likes to tag things with sweeping judgments — good, bad, happy, sad, fun, boring, tedious, difficult, easy — and to not worry about shades of gray.

(Imagine having a huge pile of receipts at tax time, and having a corresponding set of file folders that match up with where those expenses go on the tax forms. You sort through the entire pile of receipts, putting each one in place… but then there’s one big receipt left that doesn’t fit on any line. You’re going to need to call your accountant or maybe the IRS about this receipt. You aren’t even sure how to explain the receipt to them. Maybe you’ll have to drive down and show it to them, or contact the merchant on a 3-way call. Now: How much do you hate that receipt?)

If you tell people you’re a blogger, you become that receipt. Nobody knows where to put you, and how to profile you. What are your political views? How do you spend your free time? Are you fun and outrageous or boring? What are your kids probably like? What kind of house do you live in, and what kind of car do you drive? Do you even have a car, or are you one of those hippies who bikes everywhere?

Personally, I kind of enjoy confusing people, but if you spend enough time around people with orderly life descriptions and don’t know enough about your own field, you can start to feel that way to yourself. Where do you fit? What’s to be expected in “the blogging life” and what’s not? What’s working? What’s not working as well as it used to? Who are the others like you… and what are they like?

If you’d even consider telling people “I’m a blogger,” you’re probably used to being weird and you’re probably comfortable outside of the normal nine dots, but there’s a limit. If you’re totally out there on your own — and are out there on your own all the time — then things just gets harder and harder.

So how to do you deal?

Well, you meet others. You learn your craft. You treat blogging like a business instead of a hobby. Even if you never answer other people’s nagging questions (“How do you know what to write about?” “How do you make money?” “How do you build your traffic and keep people coming back?” “Are others like you making a living at this, and how are they doing it if so?”), you’ll at least know the answers for yourself.

You can learn those things by poking around online, but because I’m in charge of BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket this year, I’m shamelessly going to suggest you register for a conference instead.

Yeah. I went there. But keep reading.

Ahem. You might have missed an important bulletin.

I suspect you might have missed my big announcement about becoming the head and the face (basically everything above the neck) of BlogWorld’s online program. And if you did miss it, it’s probably because I haven’t made a big deal about it, but that was dumb, because this is something that I’m really proud of and really excited about. Go ahead and give that announcement a read. I’ll wait.

See, if you tell people you’re a blogger, most people will ask what that means. You might not have figured out yet how to answer that question, and when it actually comes up for me, I do a lot of hemming and hawing too.

But if I were honest with these people, my answer would always be, “It means I do cool shit with cool people.”

That’s why I love my job: I’ve met a lot of cool people, and I do almost nothing that isn’t totally fucking awesome.

And how did I meet these cool people?

By going to conferences and learning my craft.

And what’s totally fucking awesome?

The BlogWorld Virtual Ticket.

You see where this is going.

Totally fucking awesome.

So how did all this awesomeness happen, you ask?

Well, as with any success, it started with irritating the right people.

About a year ago, I did something that pissed off BlogWorld Dave, BlogWorld Rick, and I’d guess also BlogWorld Deb. I didn’t mean to piss them off, but I was totally naive (that was my old slogan: TOTALLY FUCKING NAIVE) and made a faux pas that resulted in a few phone calls.

Ultimately, we came to an agreement wherein I wasn’t a total asshole and then nine months later, Rick says, “Hey, you’re doing some cool stuff and we’ve already spent time determining that you’re not a total asshole, so how about you kick the Virtual Ticket up a notch?” And I was like Bam! and Rick was like Awesome! and then we high-fived and rode sharks through hoops of fire.

This is how I met BlogWorld.

And my task about kicking it up a notch? That’s the fun part.

I’m not going to go through the entire Virtual Ticket sales pitch here because I did it so well here, but suffice to say that this isn’t your father’s virtual event. When we started working on the VT project (we = Jess and I; you know Jess from The Badass Project?), we basically went through this thought process:

Most online versions of live events end up being “the event on tape.”

If the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket was simply “BlogWorld on tape,” that would be TOTALLY FUCKING LAME… and remember, what we’re shooting for is TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. So there was a gap. I don’t want to work on lame shit, no matter how well it pays.

So we said, “How do we make it awesome?”

And we said, “We make it as much like ‘being there’ as possible.”

(In other words, providing the content of a live event is not enough. We had to provide the experience as well.)

And so we got all excited and said, “We can make it just like attending live!”

And then we corrected ourselves and said, “What are you, an idiot? No virtual event is like being there live, no matter how awesome it is.”

And then we got all mad about that and were like, “Don’t call us an idiot, idiot. We just meant that we can replicate a lot of the experience and that’ll be way cool.”

And then a fight ensued. Luckily, we won.

But the end result? I hope you’ll agree it’s totally fucking awesome.

Check this out, yo.

The Virtual Ticket already had content in spades. You get over 100 hours of recorded session content, and you have access to it for a full year. That’s the “BlogWorld on tape” part, and even though it wouldn’t be enough by itself in my opinion, it’s still an insane amount of material. What other info product has 100+ hours of professional sessions presented by the best minds in the business?

But then, on top of that, we added a ton of extras that will give you as much of the experience of BlogWorld as possible.

We’ve got:

• Live video from the conference hall floor (or quasi-live if the internet underperforms on us).
• Exclusive interviews with the bigwigs.
• Random behind-the-scenes footage, wherein I attempt to catch Sonia Simone in line at a Starbucks in an US Weekly style “Blogging stars: They’re just like us!” moment.
• Q&A with presenters via social media.
• Quasi-networking opportunities with other VT attendees through social media.
• Brief, on-the-spot interviews with every single presenter who isn’t able to outrun me.
• A host and MC for the whole event. (I propose myself as that host and MC, I accept, I congratulate myself.)

So yeah, I want you to sign up… but the reason you should is because it’s totally fucking awesome.

So, okay… brass tacks.

The price is $247. For 100+ hours of content and all that experience stuff I mentioned.

But in true internet marketing fashion, the price goes up $100 on Friday. Don’t ask me why we torture you like this. It’s just something we do, like playing checkers or setting fire to buildings. It’s a personality flaw or something.

So if you want in, best do it before Friday’s price hike.

Here’s the link. Click it.

If you went to BlogWorld live, it’d cost you thousands of dollars between travel and hotel and a pass. This is like 1/10th of what you might pay.

If you’ve thought, “I wish I could go to BlogWorld but I just can’t make it,” the Virtual Ticket your answer.

(“Answer to what?” you ask? Why, to the question, “What is totally fucking awesome and doesn’t smell like fish?” of course.)

Here’s the link again, because another thing we do on the internet is repeat links because we suspect you missed the one above or somehow feel that repeated exposure will weaken your resolve, like if we said, “C’mon, do it!” and you were like “Nah,” and so we said “C’mon” and this time you were like, “You make a good point” and then did what we wanted.

But if you want to sign up, I’d do it now, before the price goes up on Friday.

So… I hope to “see” you there.

(Oh, and if you’re going live, you’ll get an email in a week or two giving you the opportunity to add the Virtual Ticket to your registration for a stupidly cheap price. So you’re not out in the cold. Unless you live at the North Pole. And if you do, say, “Wassup?” to Santa for me.)

P.S: If you’re wondering why this post started with ruminations on being in an unclassifiable profession and ended with a pitch for a conference, I’m wondering the same thing. So I can’t answer your question. I started writing and this is how it came out. What… do you think I have a plan or something?

Yesterday, I did this amazing call with Sean Platt about how to self-publish your writing for Amazon’s Kindle Store. It was awesome. I’m honestly all on fire about the possibilities.

Because there was so much excitement surrounding the call and the topic, I figured I’d just put the call up as an audio post, so that everyone can see and love it.

The short version? This is a very, very exciting time for writers of both fiction and nonfiction — but in particular for writers who understand (or are willing to learn) something about marketing. If you can write, if you can market, and if you’re willing to put in the work, you’ve got a fair shot at success in e-publishing. Used to be, it wasn’t enough to write a great novel or nonfiction book, because you also had to be lucky enough to slip past the publishing industry’s gatekeepers, and through gauntlet put up by agents and editors.

That’s not true anymore. There’s you, the author… and there’s the readers. That’s it; nobody else needs to be involved, and you don’t need anybody else’s approval or help to get in. Convince enough of the right readers, and your career takes off.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Here’s the call:

Right-click to download MP3

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NOTE: If you liked this call, I strongly suggest heading over and picking up Sean and David Wright’s Kindle book Yesterday’s Gone (which I bought myself and think is very cool) so that you can see what they’ve done that’s working. It costs all of five bucks.

Once you do that, you should also leave the book a review. Want to thank Sean for the fantastic free content he shared in this call? A review is how you can thank him. As you’ll hear, reviews really matter, so be a champ and give him one.

You can also check out the only piece of Johnny B. Truant fiction in existence right now, a short story I wrote years ago and which I was shocked to find I still loved, called Nothing But Flowers. This pricey bad boy weighs in at 99 cents.

Lastly, I’m writing something new right now that I’d say is like “zombies meet Fight Club.” I have absolutely no idea when it’ll be ready and up in the Kindle store, but if you have (or anticipate getting) an e-reader and would like to know when it’s done and have first crack at it, go ahead and sign up for the list below.

One question people ask a lot when trying to start or improve their fledgling businesses — or when they’re generally trying to do anything epic — is, “But… what should I DO?”

Loosely translated, this usually means that they’re more than capable of getting all pumped up and inspired, but then just sort of sit there with that energy, unsure what to do with it. Imagine pulling back one of those matchbox cars so that it’s wound up tight and ready to fire off the minute you put it down… if only you knew where the racetrack was.

The root of this problem is that you want someone to tell you what to do. And while you can get advice and guidance and tips when setting out to do something amazing, nobody can tell you what to do because what you’re setting out to do, if it’s to matter and be remarkable, is new. Nobody has been there before — at least not coming from your exact situation and in the exact same way, with the exact same ideas and ambitions.

And what’s more, if you read this blog, you’re probably setting out to do your amazing thing in part because you don’t like other people telling you what to do. So you’ve set out to do your own thing, all the while looking back over your shoulder and asking, “Psst! How should I do my own thing?”

Let me explain.

You are on your own

Got that? Good, because it’s important.

There are two components to forward motion in anything awesome or interesting or truly worthwhile that you do.

The first component is nuts and bolts and even strategy, or what we commonly think of as knowledge. Knowledge is what you look to mentors for, or what you look up in books or courses. If you want to know how to replace a muffler on a 2010 Ford Fusion, there’s no point in stumbling through trial and error when you can simply look it up, or ask someone how to do it. If you want to know how to create a marketing campaign, someone who’s been there before can tell you, more or less, how to structure it.

The other component is intuition, which is the big-picture stuff. This is the stuff of blue-sky creation, of stepping out in faith with only an inkling (but without any real knowledge) of what’s going to happen next.

The existence of this second element, of intuition, means that in any worthwhile venture, nobody can tell you what to do. Nobody should tell you what to do. If the thing is yours, you have to figure it out. If you don’t figure it out, the thing isn’t yours, and you don’t get to claim any of the awesomeness that goes with it. If you don’t solve the puzzle, you don’t get to do the victory dance.

For example.

If you want to be an amazing parent, you can read books and talk to friends and watch Supernanny and hire a child psychologist to get a bevy of tools with which to deal with individual circumstances (your kid won’t eat; you wonder if he should get an allowance), but it’s then up to you to do the rest — to fill the gap between “knowing a lot of stuff” and the nebulous goal of “being an amazing parent.”

If you want to build a great small business, you can hire coaches to help you figure out individual strategies for how to attract more clients or how to handle customer service. If that business is online, you can hire people to handle the technology or you can learn it yourself. But nobody can tell you how to be the most engaging you that you can be. Nobody can totally teach you the fine art of pleasing clients. Nobody can, with any real degree of specificity, show you how to find a boundary out there and push against it until people react, and react in the way you’d like.

It’s tempting to say that people don’t realize this and that that’s why so many people are paralyzed in their efforts to do some of that epic shit we talk about, but I think most people do know it… and THAT is why they’re paralyzed.

There is no map

Working without a map, or a blueprint or a guide or an instruction manual, can be terrifying.

If you’ve ever tried to go against the grain enough to do something truly awesome or revolutionary (both of which are relative terms; small things that affect only you can be awesome and revolutionary), you already know that nobody can tell you what to do. And that’s fucked up and scary.

Stepping out and doing just about anything worthwhile is kind of like being a kid heading off to summer camp with a bunch of people you don’t know yet. You stand there in front of the camp bus, all nervous, and you look back over your shoulder and your mom or dad or whoever is standing there, urging you to go on, and you realize that if you’re going to go on your awesome camp adventure (or what you hope will be awesome; right now it’s scary as hell), that only you can step up onto that bus. You look back and ask what to do, knowing that it’s up to you but somehow hoping for one last instruction, one last bit of hand-holding, one last chance for someone else to take that next step with you or for you — but that’s all just delay tactics and hand-wringing. You know nobody can take that step for you. Bringing mom along to camp is not the way to create an epic summer. You have to do it on your own.

So many people on the verge of starting a business, writing a book, starting a movement, asking someone on a date, launching a product, coming out of the closet, breaking out of a bad relationship, leaving a job, starting a job, making a stand, questioning norms, or being who they truly are stand on the edge of the known, looking back at their friends, their mentors, their teachers, their reference materials, and societal standards and ask what they should do next.

And their friends, their mentors, their teachers, and the rest, if they’re good and positive, kind of nudge them forward, saying “Take the step.” But nobody can do it for you.

If something is new and awesome and worth doing — whether it’s moving from being an adequate parent to an excellent parent or whether it’s writing a blog post that puts you out there, raw, in uncharted and unexplored emotional territory — then it will require that you step into uncertainty.

If it’s not uncertain, it’s not amazing

Things that are predictable and known and plotted and mapped are not amazing.

I can tell you how to write Shakespeare. It’s easy. Go pick up Romeo and Juliet and copy it word for word.

But the problem is, Romeo and Juliet has been done. Shakespeare beat you to it, only it was amazing when he did it because nobody showed him how.

Or maybe you’d like to invent the iPhone.

Sure thing. Somewhere online, I’m sure someone can show you exactly how to do that, to recreate the iPhone piece by piece, but it’ll be about as amazing as building a model airplane.

And if you’re thinking, “Well, that’s idiotic. Nobody would do that. What they’d want is to invent something like the iPhone, but better.”

But how do you do that? That version of the task, which might be amazing, isn’t certain. Nobody can show you how to do it, and you could fuck it up. Probably will, in fact, since Apple has a serious market lead on you at the moment.

People, books, the internet, and teachers of all kinds can give you the exact steps to make a cake, build a couch, give a technical report on a topic, set up a website, and wire your house for surround sound. But nobody can show you exactly how to improve on a cake, draft a new design for a new type of couch, analyze and deduce information about a topic, design a beautiful website, or create a truly theatrical experience in your home.

And I think this is what has always bugged me about the mentality that surrounds internet marketing. (It surrounds everything, but it’s really prominent here.) Potential customers and students want to believe that a guru can tell them exactly how to make money, and gurus and teachers of all kinds are really eager to agree that they can do exactly that.

“Turn this crank and the internet will shoot cash into your lap!”

“Here’s my surefire, no-brainer system to creating a business that will make you rich!”

Hell, just do a Google search for “make money online.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

This is what I’ve had to wrestle with every time I’ve created a course. How do you explain that a course is full of great techniques and strategies and things to learn but that the final, magic piece is always intuition — and that it’s that final step that you must, by definition, devise and take on your own that turns a great plan into something with a shot at revolutionary success?

Meaning: Nothing I ever create will ever, ever, ever guarantee success. BY DEFINITION.

Everything I’ve created in the past few years has been missing one thing. Every time I’ve begun something, I’ve asked myself, “But what does this need to have in order to assure that someone has success with it?”

And the answer is always, “Magic fucking pixies.”

No advice, no course, no instruction, no bullshit “blueprint for guaranteed success” will ever work for someone who is unwilling to take their knowledge and then make that brave step out into the unknown and unknowable that is required.

This is what I was trying to say with my post promoting Question the Rules, about building a barn. The idea was that we could never give you a blueprint for your dream house, so we were instead trying to arm you with hammers, saws, and the knowledge of how to draft a blueprint.

The knowledge of how to draft your own fucking blueprint.

It’s why, when I originally wrote the sales page for my no-longer-available course Zero to Business, I included in the FAQ at the bottom the question, “Will this course make me rich?” and the answer “Absolutely not.” In bold.

Having a body of knowledge, advice, and mentorship — no matter how good it is — makes you this robot that is excellently equipped to respond in defined ways to defined stimuli. Only guts, bravery, and a general willingness to step into the unknown and unknowable can provide the necessary soul… the ghost in the machine.

Robots never do epic shit. Remember that.

If you’re never afraid, you’re fucked

Tony Robbins has a quote I really like. He says, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with.”

What this means is, the more often you aren’t sure what might happen next, the more epic and awesome and amazing and just plain wonderful your life will ultimately be.

So the question arises: Does this mean that you should blindly and stupidly step into things that you know nothing about, simply because you know nothing about them?

No, don’t be an idiot.

Remember knowledge, research, and strategy? Those are part of the equation too. You need to ask for advice. You need to learn stuff. You need to have teachers and coaches and mentors and knowledgeable friends. You need to research, and experiment, and read.

But then the next step — the big, scary, next step out into what’s never been done before in your world — is up to you.

If you don’t take the step and don’t feel the uncertainty that comes with it, you’re doomed to a I-say-jump-and-you-say-how-high kind of a life. You’re doomed to forever fill in paint-by-numbers instead of painting masterpieces. You’re doomed forever to regurgitate what has been done before, to mindlessly repeat the past.

The world of the known, the step-by-step, is stale. It’s been done. If you forever want someone to give you the next step, you’re forever in need of someone to tell you what to do. And if someone is forever telling you exactly what to do, what you do will forever be unremarkable.

The world of the uncertain is the fog of all possibilities. Anything can happen when you are uncertain — yes, including total failure. But if you never step into the uncertainty, you never have the possibility of evolutionary, awesome change, either. So you do your research. You hone your techniques. You plot your strategy as much as you’re able. You assess your chances and your readiness and your risk as much as you can, but then you have to leap.

Don’t worry. It’s worth it.

For my August trial (bleeding into early September because I started late and because I’m all nonconformisty and stuff about things like trial start/stop dates), I limited myself to checking email twice per day.

Sounds simple, I know. So simple that it doesn’t feel worthy of a 30-day trial, even. Seems like it’s the kind of thing you just decide to do one day, like switch flavors of gum.

Well, it may seem that way, but this was a vital trial. More vital, even, than choosing gum flavors. And I’d just like to say one thing:

Everyone should do this. Immediately.

Email and internet fasting

What looked at first like a simple act of scheduling and discipline was actually something else entirely: It was a fast.

One of the reasons people fast is to find out what food means to them. When you fast, you start to realize that food is fuel first and foremost, and that all of the other things we attach to food are emotional hangers-on that have nothing to do with its real purpose.

You get popcorn when you see a movie because you’ve created an emotional hook between movies and popcorn and start to feel that joy comes from combining them.

Family meals come to mean bonding and love, especially in certain cultures.

Cookies or ice cream mean release from stress. And so on and so on.

A main reason for a lot of my trials has been to uncouple the true meaning of things from the emotional or social add-ons I’ve added to them. Most of the trials boil down to the question, “How much do I really need X?” When you fast, you find out just how much you truly NEED food, versus how much you’ve learned to WANT food. My quasi-minimalism trial was an attempt to clarify, in my own mind, just how much I NEEDED “stuff.” And this email trial was an attempt to clarify how much I NEEDED to monitor email, social media, and the internet in general.

So, for the past five weeks or so I’ve allowed myself to only check in on my various communication addictions twice per day. If you want to know the rules I set for myself and my reasons for doing this, they’re here, but the following are what I learned from my trial… and it’s some game-changing stuff as far as I’m concerned:

1. I was truly addicted to checking email and social media.

I’m not qualified, medically, to explain the psychology and physiology of addiction, but I think I’m qualified enough to recognize it in myself when I feel it.

During the first days, I felt itchy and nervous about not checking in on email, worried that I was missing something by not monitoring things more diligently. But even more than that, I simply wanted the activity. It felt like how quitting smokers say they want something to do with their hands in the absence of a cigarette.

The nervous feeling abated significantly after a few days, but this discovery alone was enough to make this trial a part of my life permanently. I don’t like the idea of being addicted to anything.

2. The vast, vast, vast majority of my email, social media, and internet activity seemed to be about distraction, procrastination, and the perceived need to fill my time — rather than actual accomplishment.

When I started checking my email twice a day, I found that I could get through that email — and Twitter, and Facebook, and the other online places I spend my time — in 45 minutes or an hour per day. I never tracked how much time I spent on it before, but I’d guess it was 3 hours per day or more… and I was still constantly behind and felt that I was never able to truly stay caught up.

So where did that time go? What did I cut out, if, during this trial, I was able to get through it in roughly a quarter of the time?

Answer: I cut out fluff. Distraction. Busywork. Totally and completely WASTED TIME.

I used email as a way of breaking up a harder task that I knew was important but that required concerted effort. “I’ve written a paragraph of this post,” I’d think. “Maybe I should check my email to see what came in.” And usually something fluffy would have come in, like a Remember the Milk reminder about running with my sister in the morning. So I’d note it and delete it, and then decide I might as well check Twitter while I was at it. And hey, speaking of running, I’d been getting curious about ultramarathons and wondered how you’d train for something like that, and so I’d do a few minutes of quick research.

Eventually, I’d return to my task. I’d write a few more paragraphs and then repeat my distraction as a reward.

In this manner, I’d finish a piece of writing in, say, five or six hours. Of that time, two hours might have been solid effort. One or two hours were distraction time, in which I didn’t even make serious headway on email but instead dealt only with the simplest messages and then got sidetracked. And the final one or two hours was in re-gaining my momentum — getting back on track with my writing after mentally careening off in the opposite direction.

But while I had my “no email or other internet distractions” rules in place, I couldn’t go there. So I’d write the piece straight through and finish in two hours.

That’s not an exaggeration. At all.

3. I realized I don’t actually like email as much as I thought I did.

This is where this trial really began to resemble a fast, where I truly found out what email meant to me, the way fasters often discover that food is fuel.

I’d always thought that I enjoyed email, and no wonder — I used it as a constant reprieve, a place I went to over and over and over again when what I was doing was difficult or unpleasant. Email and social media were vacation destinations I could visit whenever I wanted, for a quick escape.

Once email could no longer be that vacation, I realized that I don’t actually enjoy the “guts” of email… i.e., the part that is about reading and responding to messages, divorced from the emotional high of “taking a break” or “checking to see what good stuff has shown up.” Stripped to its utilitarian core, email became a chore rather than a fun vacation.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I do enjoy communicating with people and shooting the breeze, but I started to look at new messages in terms of the time they would take to reply to rather than as constant “time candy.” You know how sometimes your best friend will call, and you enjoy talking but know it’s going to take up a crapload of time if you go too deep or do it too often? That’s the basic idea.

4. I realized I had way, way more time than I thought I did.

This has been a busy summer, and there have been days where I worked from 6-9am, did email from 9-9:30, and then accomplished absolutely nothing else. And yet, despite a number of days like this, I keep getting more and more important stuff done, and getting it done faster.

When you know how to make the best use of your time and prioritize your most important tasks and then can focus, totally uninterrupted, on those key tasks for only a few hours a day, it’s amazing what can happen.

With email confined to specific focused times and removed as a distraction, I began to realize that I could probably consistently run my current business in only 4-5 hours a day.

And because I haven’t yet found more epic shit to fill that time that I didn’t know I had, I found myself using it in one of two ways: Sometimes I’d work on projects that had been back-burnered forever, and sometimes I’d simply play or read, either alone or with my kids.

So what does this mean to you?

It means you should do this. Seriously. For real. Honestly. Fo sho.

If you’re worried about missing important stuff, ask those likely to bring you key stuff to call you or text you when something is red-hot instead of emailing. Start using a good appointment calendar (Google’s calendar and others will alert you to upcoming events with popups). Don’t “keep your to-do list in your inbox,” which is one of Charlie Gilkey‘s pet peeves; instead, write one on paper for the day or use something free like Nozbe.

Remove your email and social media shortcuts from the desktop of your smartphone so that you’d have to dig for those applications if you wanted to use them. Close mail windows in your internet browser or on your computer, and force yourself to find and open the required windows or apps each time you want to use them. Put obstacles in your own way.

Batch email and social media. Do it, but do it only during certain times and do it all at once.

For at least a while — for as long as it takes you to learn this lesson — make rules for yourself about when is and is not an appropriate time to check email. Stick to these rules. You’ll find yourself saying things like, “Well, I can’t check email… so I might as well finish this project” or even delightfully indulgent things like “If I’m not allowed to check Twitter or browse time-waster blogs, I guess I might as well go play Rock Band.”

You will not regret this. Give it a shot and let me know what you find out.

NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of six 30-day trials I promised to do in 2011. Don’t get impatient if you just read the title and want to know how to have a crapload more time. I get to that at the end. What are you, anti-suspense? I’m trying to be a compelling writer here. 

—

When it first occurred to me to do some sort of an “unplugging from the internet” trial, my first thought was that it was a totally unworthy trial.

I mean, look at the string I have going here. For my first trial, I played with the essential biological need for sleep. My second trial was a radical change in diet. The third (releasing resistance) wasn’t terribly mind-blowing, but the fourth, on quasi-minimalism, was a hell of a thing and forced me to flat-out get rid of 310 of the things I owned.

So when I thought, “Maybe I’ll force myself to only check email once or twice a day,” I figured that I was being a huge pussy. I mean, there’s nothing to that. I’m not doing without the internet. I’m not doing without anything. I’m not forging a new skill or breaking a paradigm. I’m hardly being epic. I’m just… being slightly less neurotic.

But as time wore on and I thought about it more, I realized how afraid I was of actually doing this trial. I started to notice how often I pop into my office just to check my email. I realized how much time I spend distracting myself by opening gMail and closing it again, having accomplished nothing. When I’m out doing errands, it struck me just how often I pulled out my phone to check first one email account, then the other, then Twitter. And then, when everyone started having wet dreams about Google+, I added that to my set of browser tabs and to my phone too, despite the fact that I didn’t give a shit about it and still don’t. Why? Because it was one more thing to check in on, and one more way to distract myself.

I’ve heard theories about email and social media being addictive, and actually triggering an endorphin response in the brain. I have no idea if it’s true. But if it is, I’m no longer feeling the high. You know how they say that addicts eventually stop trying to get a rush from their drug of choice and instead have to use simply to feel normal? Yeah. I can relate to that.

As I started to think more and more about this “unworthy” trial, I saw how obvious it was that I use “checking in” as a way to deal with stress. Having a bad day? Check email more often, because email sometimes brings good news. Feeling beaten? Maybe there are some new @ replies on Twitter that will give me a hit of love. During periods of waiting, it gets even worse. For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting to hear about something that really excites me. Each time I’d check email, I’d get a burst of anticipation followed by a little downer when nothing cool had arrived.

Checking email and social networks compulsively is, for me and I imagine for a lot of you, a way of willing something to happen. When I was waiting for my news, I thought on some level that the more often I checked in, the more I was helping it to happen faster. I’ve known people who get slow on business, and so they will business to come their way by constantly checking to see if any is arriving.

We’re not stupid. We know that if some kind of good news is to come, it’s going to come no matter how often we check to see if it’s arrived. And if we’re awaiting possible bad news, we know that it’s going to come whether we know it the second it’s knowable or not. But that’s not how we act. We act like rats pressing buttons in a laboratory, to get a reward.

This trial may not sound impressive, but it scares the bejesus out of me, and I seriously wonder if I can do it.

Some people try to quit smoking. This… this technology… is my cigarette.

The plan

I’ve decided that starting next Monday and continuing through September 8, I’m going to only check email and social networks twice a day. (August 8 is the day that my assistant Amy comes back from vacation, and I’ll be able to let go more easily if I know someone is kind of keeping an eye on things.)

In the meantime, I’m making preparations. What are my fears and neuroses, and how can I address them? How can I make sure I don’t cheat? How will I make sure that the right things get done at the right times?

Here’s some of the thoughts I’ve come up with:

Q: Will less work get done?

A: No way. I’m sure that much, much more will get done. The excess time I spend answering emails and dealing with email stuff doesn’t make my business better or make profits richer any more than looking at your car’s gas gauge makes the tank fuller. It’s busywork in the truest sense of the term. It distracts me from writing and doing other important things.

Q: Will my service levels and communications suffer?

A: I seriously doubt it. This is a sad world if someone who emails me with even a relatively pressing matter can’t wait a few hours for a response. And let’s not forget that my old habits didn’t have me answering emails in a timely way anyway. “Hard” emails still sat in my inbox for days. All I’d do when checking in frequently was to handle the “easy” emails that required only a very fast (and usually unimportant) response and to weed out all of the junk. But somehow, deleting reminder emails and archiving things that didn’t require action felt good, as if I were cleaning up a mess on the floor. Chances are that I’ll respond slower to unimportant email, but will actually respond faster to the things that matter.

Q: How can I make sure I don’t miss anything vital?

A: Email has always been my home base. Because I check it so compulsively, I know I won’t miss anything that goes into it. Having reminders of timely events emailed to me is akin to having a jester jump on my desk and shout things at me. I wasn’t going to NOT see something in my email. Because of that, I’ve always counted on Google Calendar email notifications and Remember the Milk email reminders to keep me on top of things. So, to prep for this trial, I’ve removed super-timely reminders from Remember the Milk and placed them into Google Calendar. I’ve changed the calendar notifications from emails to pop-ups, so as long as I’m in front of my computer or phone, I’ll know when an appointment is coming up.

Q: How will I plan?

A: Charlie would kill me, but lately I’ve fallen into one of his pet peeves, which is to keep at least part of my to-do list in my inbox. Now, I do use a system that helps me stay on top of to-do’s, keeps my eyes on the prize, and keeps me very productive, but thanks to entropy, we all slip. I slipped into email. With things like my reminders going to email, I have in part relied on email access to keep me on task. So, I’m simply changing that and reinforcing my other planning methods, and simply being more conscious about what needs to be done, using methods that work offline.

Q: How can I make sure I won’t cheat?

A: I’m not a willful cheater at anything, so the only cheating I’d do will come out of habit. So, I’m putting some roadblocks between me and my habits. I have a gMail, Twitter, and Google+ icon on my phone’s desktop, so I’m removing them, meaning that I’ll have to dig through the applications to check any of the three — something I hope will kick me in the teeth with its obvious cheating nature. I need a web browser often for my work, because I work on my own site and on other people’s sites, as well as do other online stuff. So I’ve closed all of the gMail and social network tabs in Chrome, along with a few other time-wasters. (Remember this post? The Facebook “share” buttons across the internet seem to be broken, so if you want to know how many times something has been shared, there’s a URL you can use to check it manually. That post has been a major sharing whore, and I’m obsessed with the numbers. As of yesterday, it had been shared on Facebook almost 2300 times. Leaving that tab open is an invitation to refresh every time I go online for anything. Ditto several affiliate tracking consoles I like to refresh often in an effort to magically make more commissions appear.)

The rules

Here’s the way this is going to go down:

1. Twice (and only twice) each day, I’m going to check and respond to and/or deal with email. This will happen at approximately 10am and 5pm.

2. I will not check email first thing in the morning. I usually get up at 6am, so this means that I’ll put in 2-3 hours of solid “important” work before checking email and then will take some time to do my morning stuff and play with the kids. The “no first-thing email” rule trumps the rough email-checking schedule. EX: If I sleep in until 10 for some reason, email has to wait until noon or later.

3. Email-checking is email-checking. If I check it on my phone at a red light in the car, that’s my check, and I can’t then do email on my laptop when I get home. The one exception to this rule is if I know I have a drive ahead and want to respond to emails using this awesome but sometimes hilarious service I’ve started using called Voice on the Go. Using VotG requires a few minutes of pre-screening and prep to ensure that I’m not listening to receipts or blog comments during my whole drive. In that case, I’ll allow myself just those few minutes on my laptop before my drive, and the drive and voice transcriptions are my actual check.

4. I’m going to tentatively allow myself to post to social media from my phone only. Because this could be a slippery slope, I may yank this one if it becomes a problem, but for now I’m going to let myself tweet and post to Facebook from my phone pretty much whenever as long as I don’t check my replies on either. The reason for this is because social media is at least a little asynchronous, meaning that I’m unlikely to ever talk to anyone if I only use it twice a day. I’d tweet and someone would reply 5 minutes later, but I wouldn’t see the reply until half a day later. And you know Twitter… when someone responds to an hours-old tweet, hell opens up or something. It’s odd. But I’m only doing this from my phone. Having a browser tab open is too dangerous.

5. I’ve told (or will tell) the people who may legitimately need to get ahold of me in a timely manner to call or text me rather than emailing. There’s very little that can’t wait a handful of hours, but both Amy and Jess often need to ask me something or let me know something that shouldn’t wait. Also, because I’m asking Amy to keep a closer eye on my email than normal, she can let me know of anything red-hot that I might miss… not that there’s likely to be anything that red-hot.

That’s it. Those are the rules of the game.

The challenge

I’d like to invite you to do this with me (as long as you’re not Amy!)

If you’re reading this blog, then chances are excellent that you’re a modern, electronically connected person. Few casual internet users read blogs, and even fewer read nichey, sweary blogs like this one. I’d bet that you have played with Twitter or are possibly on there all the time. I’d bet you’re on Facebook. I’d bet that you have an email account you actually use, that people know to reach you at, and that you keep a close eye on. I’d bet, in short, that you do some of the compulsive stuff I do, too.

Once I really started paying attention to my email and social media habits, I realized how much time I waste DOING NOTHING. I’m not working; it just seems like I’m working. I’m not accomplishing anything at my desk; I’m just sitting at my desk. Once I really started analyzing my habits, I realized that I never do something (and especially not anything important) from A to Z without stopping or being interrupted. I realized that even though I’ve always thought of myself as an easy-going, relaxed person, that my ability to truly relax had atrophied horribly. The other day, I was sitting at Barnes & Noble, reading something that had nothing whatsoever to do with work. It was, simply put, pure pleasure reading. And even after thinking through all of the above — even after deciding that I’m going to do this trial and I’m going to do it now — I was unable to leave my phone in my pocket or on the table for more than 10 minutes. I’m not at all kidding.

That bothers me. That bothers me a lot.

We spend so much of our time nowadays in anticipation, waiting for the next thing to happen. We need to be entertained all the time, so when things are quiet, we need to manufacture tasks. Check email. Post on Twitter. Sometimes it matters, but usually it doesn’t. The way I do it, probably 10% of it matters. The rest is just lost time.

And here’s something else.

Today, just to try it out, I’ve followed this schedule. I got up at 6, did some important writing, and didn’t check email or my social networks until 10. After I’d finished, I’ve made myself wait to check in again. It’s now 4:30, and when I finish this post, I’ll check email again.

What did I experience?

Well, I got a hell of a lot of important stuff done. But I also watched some nature shows with my son, did some reading, bought some presents for people, played The Sims, and had two leisurely meals with my family.

I realized: All that pretense and effort to feel busy was robbing me of HUGE amounts of time that I didn’t know I had.

I was totally out of sorts today… but in a good way. I kept wanting to check email, to see if there was more stuff I could add to my to-do list, but I couldn’t. So, I… well, hell, might as well write that thing I’ve been wanting to write. And when I was done, I’d want to check email, but I couldn’t. So, hell, I guess I can do this other thing. I guess I can read with Austin. It doesn’t seem right, but I guess I can play video games.

I’d trained myself to think that if I was pretending to work, that I was working. But the only thing that was being done was that I was throwing away all of my time.

Try saving that time, just to see what it’s like. Who knows? You might like it.

Remember how I mentioned that I was presenting at Blogworld New York in May? Well, if you missed it, a video of my session is below. The folks at Blogworld kindly said they’re totally cool with me sharing it.

(If you can’t see the video below, you should really click through to the post on my blog to view it.)

In the original video, you couldn’t see my screen very well, so I superimposed my slide presentation over it in making this new one. So, in the video below, you’ll hear me reference some formatting issues that you won’t see. (At the live event, I had to switch to a computer that they supplied at the very last minute… and the text was bigger on that computer, causing my text to sometimes bleed off the top or bottom of the slides and making for an interesting presentation.)

There were also a ton of technical problems with said replacement computer, so please excuse the slip-ups where I couldn’t get the mouse to click or whatever… and the fact that I had to keep looking to my left at the computer screen (there was no speaker’s podium).

In spite of all of the difficulties, I like how this turned out. I got to show off how easily I roll with the punches.

Oh, and you may want to watch this full-screen if you can’t see the slides well.