Finding My Lost Hours

How Finding My Lost Hours Enabled Me to Start My Online Business

It turns out that how and when you take daily action makes a huge difference in your results. This might seem like common knowledge that is no surprise to you, but for me this was a revelation of epic proportions. Finding my lost hours opened up a new world to me, and ultimately changed my life.

Let’s travel back to 2005, when I first learned that individuals could have businesses online. I already knew that companies, publishers, and news outlets had an internet presence, but finding out that people like myself could set up a virtual business and sell information and digital products online changed everything for me.

I was teaching full-time and working in real estate on a part-time basis and needed to change my life. I was exhausted and barely getting by financially. My mother needed help supplementing her Social Security, so I had to work every possible waking hour to make ends meet for both of us. Having an online business seemed like something I could do, so I started learning and taking action whenever I could find a spare hour or so. It wasn’t so easy.

With the same 168 hours a week everyone else had, I began subtracting the hours I was already committed to working, commuting, and sleeping, along with shopping and other personal time. I had 12 hours a week left over, yet as I began my efforts online it felt like I had just two or three hours at the most each week to do this. Where were those missing hours going?

It only took me a couple of days to find those precious hours that I was missing. They were being sucked into oblivion by my television! When I would come home at 7 or 8 in the evening, after a long day of teaching and real estate work, I would unwind by eating dinner in front of my TV. Sometimes I would watch the 11 pm news as well, making it even more difficult to get up at 5 the next morning.

My life was at a crossroads; I could continue my habit of watching 10 to 12 hours of television every week, or quit cold turkey and use those hours to start my business. You can guess what my decision was, I’m sure. And there were two shows I felt like I just could not miss, so I recorded them to watch later, after my work for my new business was completed. What were those shows? Two brand new ones, Grey’s Anatomy – now in its 20th season! and Commander in Chief with Geena Davis as the first woman president, which was cancelled a year later. Finding my lost hours turned everything around for me.

My business took off and I never looked back. My self-esteem and confidence skyrocketed overnight, and people close to me said I had become a different person they were proud to know and emulate. To this day, I never watch live television and only record what I care about and know I will watch within a week, saving lots of time by speeding through the commercials. My motto became “Do for a year what others won’t; live, forever the way others can’t.” Have you started your year? That’s the question I ask the people who work with me in one of my mentoring programs. Once they can answer in the affirmative and in an excited way, I know they’re on the right path that will lead to great success.

I have two couples arriving this afternoon to be a part of my Santa Barbara Retreat. I’ve been hosting these for over a decade and we all benefit each time from these three days together. I limit these to no more than five people in all, and only two businesses. Typically, people stay in Santa Barbara for a few more days after our Retreat concludes.

One of the couples both work for a company that instituted the “employee ownership” model, and now they’re in a position to start their own business with the equity they receive each year. I hope more companies adopt this model over time. I asked all of my mentees arriving for the Retreat to think about how they show up in their life and business. It’s a question seldom asked that holds the answers we all must be able to answer with certainty. I’ll also be sharing my strategies and the logistics of finding my lost hours and making the best of them with my mentees this week.

How do you show up for the people and pets in your life and the goals you have set for your business? As I was preparing to resign from teaching and give away my real estate clients years ago, I found that by the end of my long days I was too tired to accomplish anything that required me to write or think strategically. My solution was to leave for my long drive earlier each morning and park in front of the post office down the street from my school.

My car became my office and each morning I would work on blog posts that would be turned into articles a day after they published on my blog. Then, I would make notes around what I could write next and which affiliate products I could promote. My emails to my online community each day are a part of my morning routine. My mind is sharper earlier in the day and this is my way of showing up for you. After I hit “send” I begin interacting with the people I mentor in my two ongoing programs.

While my brain is still excited about what I’ve written here to you, I’m able to email back and forth with anyone who needs my help with a new product or something they are working on today. Sometimes someone is stuck and I help them get past whatever is blocking them so they may move forward productively.

My message to you is to show up at the time of day that works best for you and take massive action. If you wait until you are too tired to do your best, your business may not ever get off the ground in a way that will make a huge difference for your future and your bottom line. Finding your lost hours will be life-changing for you, as they continue to be for me.

Do You Prefer to Choose Your Own Adventure or Take the Path of Least Resistance?

I do 90% of the work for my business on Tuesday through Thursday, but it wasn’t always that way. As a classroom teacher I was an employee and in real estate I owned a business that was dependent upon banks, insurance companies, and attorneys to assign work to me and this kept my busy seven days a week. This life all changed when I came online in 2006 in order to change my destiny.

No longer would I take the path of least resistance, which wasn’t the easiest or simplest course of action, but just the status quo. Many years I was unable to take a one-week vacation because I hadn’t earned enough and still had work to complete for one or both of my jobs. As an online entrepreneur, I am able to choose my own adventure and determine my own paycheck at the end of each day.

What’s stopping you from doing the same thing? I wasn’t a writer when I started, but writing every day turned me into one. I still have very few tech skills and depend upon others for help with this. I continue to learn about marketing, sales, and persuasion and wrote a book about this – “Marketing in Your Underwear: Stripping Down to the Basics of Sales and Persuasion”  to help everyone who wants to follow in my footsteps in even a small way.

Getting noticed online takes time and effort. I believed my early mentors who encouraged me to start a blog and post regularly. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the people who blog, no matter what their niche topic, business model, or marketing style are the ones who do the best in terms of creating a time and financial freedom business and lifestyle. Finding my lost hours made a huge difference with this part of my life and business.

Recently, one of the first people whose blog I followed – Darren Rowse – had this comment… “Top bloggers carry a kind of individuality and confidence into their blogs and get rewarded with people noticing them and paying them attention.” I have found that attention online translates into huge, responsive subscriber lists and massive sales and I want that for you.

Leveraging your “home on the internet” by posting regularly to your blog makes sense, and this is what I’m teaching in my popular, effective, ongoing course…

Keeping Your Eye on the Prize Each Day with Intentional Focus

If you’re familiar with the Stanford marshmallow experiment led by psychologist Walter Mischel in 1970, you know that it was a study of delayed gratification. A young child was placed in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes. If they did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or a pretzel stick, depending on the child’s preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by a a variety of criteria.

I was the “one marshmallow” child, and this continued until I came online. I never could see the value in working towards a goal if the result I was looking for didn’t come quickly. I justified this behavior by telling myself I deserved to achieve my goals more quickly, but that did not typically happen. Now I’m able to have almost infinite patience as I work towards my goals and dreams. What changed to get me on this path to great success? I believe it was when an early Mentor showed me how to keep my eye on the prize and enjoy the journey leading up to achieving the goal. And finding my lost hours continues to bring joy and success into my life experience.

By having an intentional focus and paying attention to the habits, tasks, and activities I was engaged in each day, even the most challenging goals became simple in my eyes. Paying attention pays off handsomely, and in untold ways over time. I would love to know your thoughts on this powerful strategy to have the life you want and deserve, and one that’s already waiting for you.

My goal and intention is to help you to navigate the waters of online marketing and entrepreneurship in a way that makes sense for you. If you’d like to work more closely with me on this, take a look at what I am offering with my mentoring before the investment increases and let’s begin!

How do I have more free time and disposable income than almost anyone I know? It’s the level of productivity I’ve achieved. Now you can learn from the same person who helped me to take back my life and move forward as an entrepreneur and author.

I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author Connie Ragen Green, finding my lost hours in the strangest of places. Come along with me, if you will and let’s discover the secrets of the Universe that make online entrepreneurship the most satisfying endeaver you can imagine.