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There is one thing I learned a long time ago that has had a dramatic impact on my life. It can be summarized in three words.

Know your outcome

This seems like a foofoo thing to say, and just a cliché, but it is can completely change your life and how you approach problems and situations.

If you don't know what you want to accomplish, or it isn't clear and well thought out, you will always struggle to get there. For example, when you write a post is your goal to make money or to gain an audience? For most of us, it is both, but gaining an audience will get you the money. Getting the money won't gain you the audience.

As simple as this sounds, it can dramatically change your perception and performance. One area I found it helped me is with my son. As someone who is always busy and thinking, I found I would frequently be distracted while spending time with my son when he was first born. Always checking my phone, answering emails, and doing research. The time I spend with my son is valuable, but what is the outcome?

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My outcome is to spend time with my son, bond, and enjoy our company. When I started to focus on my outcome, I was able to eliminate things that did not get me to my goal. I dramatically reduced how often I checked my email and how distracted I was. It didn't help me achieve my goal; spending time with my son.

If you don't know what you are trying to accomplish with absolute clarity, then you are just looking busy. You will take exponentially long to accomplish goals if you achieve them at all. You will struggle with focus unable to know what you should be doing and what is a most important task (MIT). You may even spend time on things that are counterproductive to your end goal.

Project planning sucks, it is no fun writing shit down and thinking about a problem, especially when you don't fully understand the problem or how to solve it.

I used to have an employee that worked for me at a startup helping users with their technical issues. This allowed me to focus on mission-critical problems and keep the business on track.

One thing that bothered me though, he spent a lot of time doing the same things over and over. Reinstalling the operating system and all the software needed by the employees. I told him to learn how to "ghost" a machine, but he refused as he was "too busy".

Ghosting a machine is the process of making an image of a freshly installed machine with everything needed for all users. Then using this as a baseline install for new machines or machines that need to be reinstalled. It would take a full day to create a good ghost image but to fix future machines would take less than an hour instead of four. Not only that, he would have an easy solution to fix problems that didn't need a complete reinstall but would take longer than just restoring to troubleshoot. It was also completely hands-off, once you kick it off, it just finished on its own with five minutes of manual labor at the end. You could restore 10 machines in parallel in less time it would take to fix one.

I explained to him how much time he could save doing this, but he refused to spend the time to learn and set this up. In the end, I gave him an ultimatum, if he didn't learn how to ghost a machine and use it on a machine by the end of business day, he was fired. We were good friends in life, and this was a hard thing to do for me. At first, he didn't take me seriously, but once he knew I was, he started working on it.

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By the end of the day, he had fixed three laptops and was blown away by how much time he would save in the future. His stress level dropped dramatically as he wasn't running around like a chicken with his head cut off. He had a new tool in his toolbox and it was amazingly effective at its task.

Always take time to know where you are trying to go, what is your purpose, why you are doing something. When you know the answers to these questions, you will be much more effective and have a much higher chance of success.

There are a few more steps to this line of thinking, but I will leave that for another post.

What you think? Is this utter bullshit, or does it make sense? Have you ever tried it?

Take one thing in your life that is important and apply it, let me know if it helps.

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Stuck? Not sure what to do? Wasting time? Not getting what you want done?

Know your outcome

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