John Thornhill shattered my comfort zone. I had been aware of him through his links with Dean Holland, Michael Cheney and Omar Martin.
I responded to a note from Omar to his readers in which there was a call to action. Are you still suffering from SOS (shiny object syndrome) and have a computer full of unused super software? Yes, I have. How many mentors do you follow? The number should be 3 as a maximum. Unsubscribe the rest.
My unread e-mails were running at 750 from countless, helpful mentors, which was strangling me. I need to see my current e-mails to ensure that I responded quickly to work e-mails from administrators and students, otherwise I could miss a timetable change or offer or more work that required a response by return. Some days I was working long hours, so might have little time to check my mail (I only use my home computer for this).
It was time to be brutal and slash my e-mails, sending them to oblivion with unsubscribe notifications.
Thanks to Omar, within a few days, my mail was manageable. I am grateful to all those who provided so much information and products so freely, but I just could not keep up and implement everything in the foreseeable future. I was planning a summer break when I could use everything I had acquired, but an endless summer to do this was not realistic.
John Thornhill opened the door to creating my own products promising that this was something that could be done much more easily than I had anticipated and could be done repeatedly. This resounded with me, as I had produced my 50 accounting books (see second and third blog items). The first book was an age in preparation, but by book number 50, I was systematically producing new books in minimal time.
Earlier, in the UK over an eight-year period, I had produced 212 reports on different industries for merchant banks on a contractor basis. My first report took two weeks to write, even with a sample to help. My 26 year old manager, Marie Mendez, made a critical decision to give me more work, but without a sample, to develop my style. For that and the next 210 reports, I am very grateful to her.
My productivity improved such an extent that I was due to receive a report on the day before I flew to Russia for three months in 1993. The post arrived at 8.00 in those days and I received two reports on the car industry to complete, instead of one. I was not going to let Marie down, so completed the two reports by 1.00 the following morning and sent them back, before my early flight to Moscow.
If I could create a system to produce new products, I should be able to do so efficiently.
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