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Improvements and Fixes to WP E-CommerceImprovements and Fixes to WP E-Commerce Like many of you, I am a user of the WP E-Commerce plug-in for Wordpress as well as a Gold Cart upgrade customer. While WP E-Commerce has many excellent features and does wonders for the Wordpress-based...

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Credit cards: a lifeline for cash Hi all. It certainly has been a while since I've last posted. That's because in many ways the 4HWW concept has been shot given the urgency of making ends meet and scrambling to get whatever dollars are...

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Version 0.2 of Show User Level Content Plugin Now Available Making an update to the Show User Level Content Plugin ... finally on version 0.2 This version should allow multiple hide statements in the same post. This is a test of that functionality. The first...

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More on Banking... A while back I posted about business banking accounts, and asked the community what their thoughts were on the best ones for FHWW'ers. I never really did get a good response, but the post is out there,...

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Is it time to buy a car? Happy Inauguration Day! For many of us who have worked hard to make this day possible, this is truly a day of celebration. I think for all Americans, regardless of your political persuasion, we should...

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Contribute to Your Public Blogger — Passing the Tip Jar

Category : DHFW Site, muse, revenue

I often listen to NPR and other Public Radio stations. Do you? Doesn’t it annoy you when they have to interrupt their broadcasting to make an appeal to their audiences for donations and support?

Just like you, I find it annoying that those pledge drives interrupt the shows I like to listen to you, but at the same time, I understand why they do that. They have to somehow fund their activities, and since they don’t barrage you with advertisements, the pledge drive is the only way to make their financial ends meet. It’s actually good that they don’t rely heavily on advertisements as the non-public radio stations do, since that could also taint their independent perspective.

Like public radio stations, I write in this blog mostly for my amusement and for the information and pleasure of those who read it. While I do have many advertisements placed throughout the site, the truth is that they really don’t result in much, if any, revenue for me.

I posted a while back on the topic of blog revenue as a passive source of income, but until this blog reaches a significant traffic level, it’s pretty much all a pipe dream.

In that vein, I come to you, my faithful readers. Like NPR, I’d like to take this opportunity to pass the Tip Jar and ask for donations. I am working as hard as I can to turn this blog into a Muse and thus a Passive Income source. But until then, it’s hard for me to focus on the blog when there are other pressing financial concerns.

As such, I’d like to ask you to donate whatever you can to my cause. On the right side of the screen, you might notice a donation widget from a website called ChipIn that allows you to contribute to my Muse. If you can’t find it, I’ve also included it below:

 

 

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Anyways, without belaboring the point, I hope you can support me as I try to turn this blog into both a source of information and entertainment as well as revenue to continue to support those goals. Any amount can help as well as any feedback you might have about making this site, or my Muse attempts, any better.

 

Thank you so much and keep tuning into this station!

eLance Sucks

Category : outsourcing

Sorry, Tim. eLance sucks. And here’s why.

  • Enforcing exclusivity – The big mistake is that the folks at eLance assume that I won’t be simultaneously posting the job req. on other outsourcing sites. Why wouldn’t I? I’ll be increasing the number of respondents and selecting (I presume) from different resource pools. But eLance wants you to be with them entirely or not with them at all. How do I know? Because…
  • The 20% rule – If you don’t award 20% of your issued projects to eLance respondents, they’ll shut off your account. That simple. They want to force you to use them for 1 out of every 5 bids. Now, that might not seem like exclusivity to you (after all, you can award 4 of them to other sites), but it really is because….
  • eLance penalizes canceled projects – Let’s say you don’t want to continue forward on the project at all, or more likely, you found a better resource on another site or on your own. So, you have the chance to cancel the project. All good, right? No, because eLance counts all projects towards the 20% rule. So if you start 5 projects and then find a better place to find those 5 resources, guess what… you can no longer post on eLance because your account will be frozen. This is complete bunk. So, why am I not finding resources on eLance in the first place? Because…
  • Poor Quality of responses – I find that I get few qualified responses on eLance, at least in comparison to the other sites I’ve been bidding on. The respondents tend to respond to everything on the site, which means that you have to really filter to find the person appropriate for you. It’s like the problem with Monster.com… too many people vying for too few jobs yields very poor results. But, if that weren’t all…
  • High Average Bids — The bids I get on eLance are easily twice as high if not as much as ten times as high as the ones I get on GetaFreelancer.com. Why is that? I’m not sure, perhaps because eLance respondents are mostly in the US while in GAF they are overseas, perhaps? Or maybe because of the sort of resource pool on eLance? You’d think it would be the opposite given that there’s oversupply on eLance.

In any case, I’ve now been banished from eLance because I couldn’t find any resource on that site to meet my needs. I gave them a really good shot – I posted 10 projects there. But I simply was able to find better respondents somewhere else. Sure, if I was exclusive to eLance, I would have awarded them to someone on eLance, but that premise is false. I do what any responsible buyer would do and look to multiple sources for my resources. If eLance wants to take themselves out of the running by not allowing me to include them in my sourcing pool, that just makes things worse for them. I really can’t understand their business justification for that. At least give the benefit of the doubt to the person who is responsible for building their value in the first place — the buyer.

I have had my best luck with GetaFreelancer.com, and maybe Guru.com. Anyone else have any thoughts to share? Disagree with me? Have any better luck with some other sites I haven’t mentioned? Let me know and share! I need some outsourcers for website development, product prototyping, etc,and have not been fully happy with my experiences so far.

So, what did I actually eliminate?

Category : time management

I got a good comment yesterday from Jennifer @ LifeMuncher in response to yesterday’s post on more effective time management. Rather than reply as a comment (and leave it buried for everyone to find), I though it would make a good follow up post.

The question simply was: “What were some concrete examples of things that you’ve eliminated to get from 60+ hours to 20?”. The answer, in my case, pretty basic, but perhaps has to do with my specific work style, activities and business. But, here’s the details.

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How a spreadsheet and a kitchen timer eliminated 40 hours of my work week.

Category : life balance, time management

In a few past posts, I mentioned that my primary task towards achieving the goals of the Four Hour Work Week is to reduce my 60+ hour work week down to 20. As evidenced by my recent trip to Denmark and Sweden, I was able to successfully do so. Of course, the big question is “how”?

First, in order to reduce your total work week, you have to find out where the time is going. Using a combination of my Time Audit Spreadsheet and the Personal Task Manager (PTM) application, I realized that much of my time was going towards tasks that could easily be eliminated, trimmed, or outsourced. I resolved that I would at that point force myself to focus on my “day job” from 9AM to 1PM only, freeing up the rest of the time for my new muse and new-business tasks.

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Back from my hiatus!

Category : DHFW Site

Hi DHFW readers! Missed me? Haven’t heard from me in a while? Want to know why? I was on a 10 day vacation to Scandinavia! And, without any stress. Yes, I have managed to reduce my work week down to 50% of what it used to be. I’m going to reveal a bit more about the results of my time audit and how to utilize the PTM tool in my next post (as well as some gripes as to how it can be improved, or maybe how I need to be educated on how to use it better).

Yes… you CAN live a 4-hour work week. Or at least, not have to live a 40-hour work week. That said, I have not mastered many of the concepts of the book around Passive Income and Muses and outsourcing, but at the very least through more focused time management you can recover the inherent waste in your day and Eliminate it. Next step: Automate and Outsource better to reduce my time another 50%.

Stay tuned!

Time Management: Sometimes Things Change (A Guest Post from Brick)

Category : life balance, time management

Editors Note: This is a guest post from Brick Andrews of Life Sutra: The 4-Hour Workweek Journal. Brick Andrews is the founder of Life Sutra: The 4-Hour Workweek Journal. The Life Sutra questions old assumptions and socially reinforced illusions about how to live a fulfilling life while exploring new ways to live and work smarter.

Inspired by both the principles of time management and The 4-Hour Workweek, I had developed the Life Management Matrix. This matrix classifies the activities we perform into four categories which I will summarize here:

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