Want To Be More Effective In Your Business?

I’m very excited that my book is coming out on Kindle in a couple of weeks! (It’s already out in paperback.)

Does every business owner need this book? I will say that if you already work 40 or fewer hours each week, make a profit that makes you happy, and enjoy things like time with loved ones or favorite activities on a regular and frequent basis, you probably don’t need my book. (Though you might enjoy picking it up just to see all the things you’re doing right.)

If any of those are not happening for you… my book, The Rebel’s Guide to Getting $hit Done: Peak Productivity for Business Owners, provides actionable tips, based in science, that you can start using right away. You don’t have to put them all into place, but once you’ve discovered how much time you can reclaim from your day, you’ll probably want to add more.

How the book helps you improve productivity

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a handbook on getting up at 4:30 am every day. I don't have a checklist of the 75 things you should do every morning before you start work. I’m not going to tell you what you have to do, but I will tell you what juices effectiveness and what drains it. 

And I don’t spend a lot of time discussing tech fixes or AI prompts. Because those things can help you on the margins, but at worst they’ll waste your time and money. The real driver of productivity – that is, accomplishing the key objectives that move your business forward without spending more hours of your day at work – is your brain.

As I’ve said many times, American work culture is bad for your brain. It actually makes life harder than it needs to be, and makes completing necessary tasks difficult. Adopting a different mindset that acknowledges busyness as a distraction and not a badge of honor will help you hone in on the critical aspects of your business.

In the book, I explain how the human brain actually works when it comes to things like number crunching, strategizing, planning, and other complex tasks that require your full attention to do well without wasting a lot of time. Hint: brains don’t work the same way computers do! 

You’ll understand the reason why the brain works the way it does, so you’ll be able to make better decisions. You’ll also get to know what’s good for your brain and what isn’t, so you can keep it as healthy (and therefore effective) as possible.

What’s in The Rebel’s Guide to Getting $hit Done

Everyone has different goals and a different lifestyle that they aspire to, or currently enjoy. That’s why I don’t give you a 79-step checklist. Instead, I have a template called the LaserBrainTM Method that you can apply to your own situation, wherever you’re starting from.

I’m GenX, and we have a unique perspective on work because we started before there was a lot of email (or even websites), and we adapted to new technology as it came. I remember the Way It Used To Be, which in some ways was actually much better for humans than our current reality. Yet I can also appreciate the new tools we have as well. You’ll get a perspective that balances the 20th and 21st century ways of work.

The book has a few chapters on how to keep your brain healthy, which is what feeds productivity. Those are generally short chapters because I think at this point most people understand the benefits of good nutrition and physical movement.

When your brain is healthy, it’s in the best shape to do cognitively complex work – what I like to call “thinky” work. This type of work is usually a priority for business owners, so maximizing it brings you a huge bang for the buck that‘s sustainable. As long as you still follow the healthy brain practices.

The fastest way to get $hit done well, no matter how cognitively complex it is? Focus. 

Multitasking is a myth (as explained in the book), and yet so many businesspeople talk about it as a necessity. It’s literally not possible when you’re working with more than one complex task. (Walking and chewing gum at the same time, however, is 100% possible.)

If all you did was focus only on the important work at the time of day that’s best for you to be doing that work (also explained in the book), you’d experience a huge and sustainable boost of productivity and effectiveness. This way of planning your day cuts down on your working hours so you have time for other important things, like loved ones and adventures.

The problem is that so many people lack focus. It’s not necessarily that you have a short attention span, though reading book summaries instead of actual books and consuming click-bait media will decimate your attention span. For most people, it’s because you don’t have an environment that allows you to focus.

You’ll find tips on how to engineer a focus-first environment. Plus how to communicate the necessary changes so you can get your time back. Each chapter has ideas for how you can incorporate its principles into your own life so that it works for you and your goals.

A word about technology and productivity in the workplace

Some technology can absolutely help you be more efficient at the margins. If you still treat your brain like a computer and don’t give it the inputs it needs (like rest, exercise, and sleep), you’re just giving yourself a little more time before you burn out. 

At the same time, if you’re still trying to maintain a list of clients on a spreadsheet, you’re going to be more efficient with a CRM. Which one you get doesn’t really matter – you just have to use it and incorporate it. If you bill hourly or have employees that bill hourly, a time tracker app will save you a ton of time instead of entering it manually on a spreadsheet.

I find a lot of business owners get stuck on which CRM or which social media scheduler or tracker app or which newsletter platform to use. It doesn’t really matter as long as you find one that fits your budget and learn how to use it. 

Which brings me to AI. I have a huge ethical problem with AI – all the chatbots and large language models (LLMs) have been trained using stolen data. No acknowledgement has been made to the creators, and copyright protection has been completely ignored. Yet without all this content, AI would not exist. For a while I refused to use it for this reason.

However, it’s become clear to me that my business is at a disadvantage if I don’t use it. I have found it tremendously helpful in things like summarizing all the 5 star reviews on productivity books, for example. (!) I don’t use AI for writing (as I’ve explained in other posts) but I can see quite a few ways using it might relieve me of some repetitive chores

Since the plagiarism ship has sailed, I think I’ll do something similar to land acknowledgements. We can’t go back and fix the fact that we (the US) drove indigenous peoples off their land, but we can at least acknowledge them. I’m currently working on what was Tongva/Chumash land. 

My plan is to acknowledge when I’ve used AI and note that it was trained on plagiarized material. There is no AI-generated content in the book, nor was it edited using AI.

Recap (tl;dr)

If you’re not where you want to be in business and life, buy my book and try a few things! I also love reviews, so please let me know when yours is posted! You won’t get a checklist of 197 Things To Do Every Single Day, but you will get a template you can sustainably use over and over again.