You (Yes You!) DO Have Urgency Issues

Ok, I admit it. I'm absolutely horrible at keeping my priorities in proper order. I'm willing to guess that you are too. Why? Because most humans are. It's sort of our nature.

You might not be as bad as I am or you might be much worse. Either way, we all have issues keeping our priorities in check in the face of a new "urgent" issue.

This morning my buddy Marcel Chastain pointed me to a blog that I've never read before. It's called Rock Your Day and it's written by a guy named Dave Navarro (no, not the musician.)

It's a very well written blog and has a lot of good motivational and entrepreneurial content. The very first article I read was his latest post titled: How To Keep Urgency From Ruining Your Life

I'll give you the real short version quickly, but I really recommend you read his post!

The article talks about ways to keep your goals and priorities in order even when a new "urgent" issue pops up. Yes, sometimes a seriously urgent issue does come out of now where. Maybe your dog got hit by a car or your kid is sick at school and you have to run and pick them up. Those are understandable.

A lot of times a new urgency is really just an excuse to avoid doing work that makes us uncomfortable. Humans are naturally afraid of rejection and look at failure as a form of rejection. So say something as easy as writing an email trying to sell something to your list, you'll put it off forever because you're afraid to fail.

That's a basic example but honestly it could be anything. Maybe you think it will be too hard or you'd rather browse YouTube for a while. There are a million reasons to move your days priorities around and trust me, I've used nearly all million of them.

In the article Dave talks about writing down your days goals EVERY morning on an index card on your desk. It's not so much having the card sitting there staring at you that helps, but it's the act of performing the exercise EVERY SINGLE DAY.

This is something I've recently started doing (even before reading this article) in my own life. I actually have been doing this daily on a white board next to my desk in big red letters.

What brought it on was me trying to juggle way to many tasks at once. When I start a project that shouldn't take me longer than 1 week to complete and it's taking me almost 3 weeks to really finish, it's a huge problem!

So far the daily exercise has been working well for me. I'm still trying to get myself back into a normal routine. Especially when it comes to working out (you know, physical exercise.) I've been spending so much time in front of my laptop that I haven't been working out the way I used to even as recent as 3 months ago.

I'm working on it though! Don't worry — I'll get there, that's for sure.

What About You?

How do you procrastinate and avoid doing the days truly important work? How do you get past the procrastination and actually get your shit done? Leave some tips in the comments of this post.

Grab What's Between Your Legs!

Crude title for this post but I think it's necessary.

I subscribe to many different mailing lists because I like to see what people are writing, teaching, promoting, etc. More importantly, I like to see the style in which they do it.

It's a great way to learn about marketing, copywriting, and salesmanship. One of my favorites is Frank Kern, which isn't really a surprise because he's huge in the internet marketing world.

Today I was going through my many, many mailing list emails and ran across an email from Frank about a new blog post he had just submitted. It's a great story about the very first female self-made millionaire. I highly suggest you read it.

(click here to read the blog post)

Basically the moral of the story is that this woman was able to pull herself from the most miserable conditions and conquer the odds, and the world, during a time where every possible chip was stacked against her.

I won't go too far into it but she was an African American daughter of slaves, widowed mother, had a skin condition and lived in the extremely racist deep south during the 1860's.

She built her empire by selling her own products door to door!

Grab Your Nuts!

When I was in the ARMY we were always told to "grab our nuts" and just "knock it out!" Basically means to stop being scared and just get it done.

We all could use a jolt of motivation at times. I know I could use it daily! In fact I've been pretty down on myself today because I was supposed to be done with a project I'm working on last night, but I'm only about 40% done. Other things have popped up and really screwed my plans for the week.

Now after reading that article I've decided to put my damn nose to the grind stone and just get it done. It gave me the little jolt I needed to get out of the funk and take care of business!

So if you're in a funk and are not sure what to do about it, just grab your nuts (even if they're metaphorical — for the ladies reading this) and take care of your self and your business. Don't let fear of stop you!

Click here to grab your nuts and get started!

"Checking In" Is Hot - But Not New!

Back in 2007 I started working at a startup named Groovr (which appears to not be in operation anymore.)

The idea behind Groovr was sort of an enhanced Twitter, only without the message limitation. It natively supported image and movie messages being sent to the service. A lot of people loved these features but my favorite was something completely different.

We had been using an idea back then that is all the rage today. "Check Ins" - that is, checking into a location so you're friends can see where you currently are. It was as easy as sending a quick message to Groovr to find which of your friends are checked in nearby or who has previously checked into the place you were currently checked into.

We even had iJustine fly out for a few days and we all were part of her live life cast that she was doing at the time.

Services like FourSquare, GoWalla, and Loopt offer this now and have it nailed down pretty well. Even turned it into a social game type of system that makes it super addicting to use and keeps the users coming back for more.

Granted we had a lot of problems with the system and it was very "cavemanish" compared to the services today that offer a similar experience. Remember though, at that time no one else was doing this (as far as I knew anyways.) Still, Groovr had a very hip feel and our user base, though small, loved the service and the community within it.

Not sure why I decided to write this post but I tried to go to the Groovr website for the first time in a year and it seems to not be running anymore. Sort of sad and sent me down memory lane. Oh well, on to the next one... RIP Groovr.

Anyway, Check In's may be going the way of the Dodo if Mark Cuban has his way.

This Blog Post WILL Make You More Money! (Easy 1 Click Upsales)

Well, if you're into selling products over the internet anyways...

Check out this video that shows how quick and easy it is to setup "One Click Upsales" to your existing website using the CartFreak shopping cart.

By now I know you're just dying to see more (right?!?) so follow the links below:

Full CartFreak Demo Here.

If you don't have any web hosting, I recommend HostGator.

Click Here To Visit HostGator.

Brand Spankin' New Design

A few weeks ago I went looking around Theme Forest for a new design to use on this website. A lot of people get confused and think that because I am a great web developer — *cough* — that I'm also a great web designer. Well web designer I'm not, and yes, there is a huge difference between the two. When I need a new web design I do it the old fashioned way, I buy it. Either buy a new theme or hire a designer to create something unique for me.

So there are still a few kinks to work out with the design and I'll get to those over the next few weeks. Mostly it's to make the formatting that was used in previous posts look properly with the new design & css. If you run into any posts where the page doesn't look right (and there are a few of them still out there) let me know and I'll fix it.

If you're looking for a new theme for your website, definitely check out Theme Forest! They have themes from plain HTML to Wordpress themes that plug right in. I paid something like $14 for this design, and granted I may have gotten what I paid for :p, so it's insanely cheap.

To head over to Theme Forest just Click Here.

UPDATE: ZerigoDNS Python Module

Last december I announced a new open source project I created. It's a Python module to work with the Zerigo DNS service API. Well, the API has been updated with support for two new features, Zone and Host "Templates."

This is an awesome feature and I took some time a week or so ago to update the Python module I created to support these new features. The module will now fully support all Zone and Host Template operations as per the API docs.

You can view (and clone) the source code at it's public repo page here.

I'm Going Off The Radar

Just a quick update. Starting tonight I am going to be unavailable for a few weeks. No cell phone, email, internet, etc.

Feel free to email me if you need anything and I'll respond when I get back. Also, any support issues will also be handled when I return.

I'll explain everything once I return. See you all in a few weeks!

Yeah... I've Been Hiding Out...

Yea, I sort of quit blogging the last few months. Not because I don't have anything to write about or that I think it's a waste of time. Even if it was a waste of time, the real issue is I haven't had much of just that... uh, time that is. No time.

I have a list of blog post ideas in my iPhone that I just haven't had time to write them up. I also have a list of like 4 or 5 products that I think would sell really well but just no time to put them together.

Plus, I have some other business needs that are taking up most of my time right now. One of them is CartFreak, which is a "super-human" shopping cart aimed at direct response internet marketers. Check it out if you're in the market for a cart to help automate your business. You'll see the feature list compares (even beats?) most of the major carts out there.

I've also been spending a lot of time consulting with clients on marketing their websites, improving their customer retention, etc. While I love helping small businesses out, I am starting to see that it's cutting way to much into my time and it's effecting my real business goals.

So that said, here are my plans for 2010:

Restructure My Entire Business Around CartFreak

As it stands right now, CartFreak is my main focus and I want to turn it into a huge success. My partner on this project is Joe Lavery, who is an amazing marketer. This guy lives and breaths marketing. The "crazy" ideas he comes up with never stop blowing my mind... Not because their crazy, but because they WORK!

Ok, enough stroking Joe ;) We are both working really hard to help turn CartFreak into a real competitor to the larger "old" cart companies out there. We have quite a few people paying us to use the software already, and it's only in beta release. We've also had such positive feedback from big name marketers on the cart and that has been very motivating and helping us keep our focus.

Stop Consulting With Small Businesses

As much as I love helping small businesses improve their internet marketing, it's time for me to ween myself away from doing so. The reason being is that it's way to time consuming. With clients all over southern California, I find myself traveling to meet with them several times a month and each time I lose a few days in the process.

I'm still going to help out my clients, and other small businesses, just in a different fashion. I have a product in the works that will be very useful to these type of businesses and much more affordable than paying me to personally come out and meet with them so often.

Helping the "Little Guy"

Even though I, myself, am a little guy, I still have a lot to offer people new to internet marketing and process automation. I have a small, but very loyal, following and I appreciate them very much. I want to spend more of my time giving back to them - my customers!

I've got some awesome stuff in the works for them and hope to be able to start with that really soon. Note, if you want to be kept up to date on this, click here and enter your email address.

Focus on Business Automation

As a software developer, I thrive on automation. The lifeblood of my business is getting a computer to do the things that I would normally have to do. In the last year I've sort of lost track of this and honestly, been completely neglecting it. Not because of laziness, but I come back to the lack of spare time.

So I will definitely be focusing more on automating (or outsourcing) as much of my business as possible.

Do Some Software Contracting

I love writing software using Python and Django. The "geek" in me won't let it go, so assuming I can find the time I'd love to pickup some short term contracts writing software on a cool project. This wouldn't even be for the money, but more for the "fun." As odd as it sounds, writing code is almost therapeutic for me.

Write More Open Source Software

I love open source software. A lot of people don't realize this but the vast majority of internet services run on open source (FREE) software. Everything from web servers to mail servers to name servers. The very services that are the backbone of the internet, all come from people to write software and literally give it to the world.

I recently released the Zerigo DNS Python module to the open source world. I've also been submitting patches and code changes to other projects I am interested in. I want to do more of this, when I have some spare time or am in the "zone" and just want to "code"

Try To Improve My Personal Life

This is hands down the most important part of my plans for the future...

Things in my personal life have been sort of out of whack lately and I have a lot of changes coming in the very near future. Some of them are very hard for me to deal with, but like always, I will have to suck it up and move forward. Like my ARMY drill sergeants used to say - FIDO - which stands for "Fuck It, Drive On." So that's exactly what I plan on doing.

At the same time, I need to create some sort of balance. I work way to much and everything else in my life has suffered a little bit because of it. Especially my relationship with my 2 daughters. When my 10 year old tells me she doesn't get enough "quality time" with me, then something is wrong and MUST change immediately. So that's exactly what I'm doing. Making changes in the right direction.

Wrap Up

This turned into a way longer post than I planned on. Guess I had a lot of writing in me to get out ;)

Even though I will never shut down this blog, and I do want to write more here, I know I won't get to write as often as I like. Just stay subscribed (either via RSS or email) and I'll update you as things progress.

If you really wanna know what I'm up to during the day, then follow me on twitter. I update throughout the day, usually every day, there.

Here's to a great 2010!

Announcing Python Module For Zerigo Managed DNS API

I've been searching for a stable managed DNS service provider for some time now. One of the big "must haves" was an API so I can easily manage my zones (domains) via software that I would create.

I didn't really find any service that tickled my fancy and I was about to give up. Then I stumbled upon a forum post asking for essentially the same thing I was searching for. A person replied and recommended looking into a company called Zerigo, who offers cloud hosting of various services - including DNS.

The web interface is awesome but the best feature, imho, is their full featured API. It's a normal REST interface that uses XML as the wrapper for the data being sent back and forth.

They even offer 2 API libraries for the service. Unfortunately for me, they were offered in PHP and Ruby. Neither of which I choose to write my software with.

I'm a Python guy and so I decided to create a Python module to interface with the Zerigo DNS API. I'm giving it to the world of open source and it's released under the BSD License.

You can browse, or clone, the source here at the public repository:

http://bitbucket.org/petersanchez/zerigodns/

Check out the example.py for example usage and tips.

Use the repository page to file any bug reports, etc. Feel free to email me (contact page) if you have questions or need help using the software.

Happy Thanksgiving

If you're reading this, I want to say thanks for being a reader of mine.

Also, just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there who are celebrating it. We all have things to be thankful for in our lives - no matter how big or small. Enjoy them all!

I'm off to stuff my face with turkey, potatoes, gravy, and biscuits. Seriously it's one of my favorite meals. I'm not a big fan of stuffing or any of the other "normal" Thanksgiving extras.

Of course, being hispanic we'll also be eating some non-traditional food. Tamales, Pasole, Enchiladas, Tacos, etc. Good stuff!

Once again, Happy Thanksgiving.