Contract Your Time to Expand Your Income

After 12 long years of work­ing seven days a week, I’ve made a deci­sion. I’m tak­ing tomor­row off.

Sounds strange? Well, I’ve had vaca­tions. Many of them. And I’ve taken half-​​days off, here and there. Some­times, I’ve even taken whole days off. But I would still check my email in the morn­ing, or return to my com­puter at night.

Aside from my vaca­tions, I’ve not taken an entire day off in over a decade. I mean, a full 24 hours with­out doing any work, includ­ing using the com­puter even if it’s to surf the web.

My wife and I are finally heed­ing to some very pow­er­ful advice about tak­ing an extra day off to earn more money from Terry Dean, a per­son I admire and fol­low closely.

Like Terry Dean says, by tak­ing some time off, it helps you to focus more on the work at hand on those work­ing days. It clears your think­ing, and also applies the Law of Contraction.

That means, work tends to expand or con­tract depend­ing on the time it is allot­ted. As if to fill a void or meet a dead­line. If you were given five weeks to write a saleslet­ter, for exam­ple, you would take five weeks, often uncon­sciously — even though you might have com­pleted it in four or even three.

Sim­i­larly, if you had four weeks, you would cram your work into what­ever time you’d have. (Take stu­dents who cram at exam time.)

The Law of Con­trac­tion (once enun­ci­ated by Brian Tracy, and it actu­ally has a name but it’s escap­ing me right now), is pow­er­ful. And the rea­son why I don’t set long-​​term goals.

Why? Because a long-​​term goal is self-​​limiting. What if you could have reached that goal in half the time? Uncon­ciously, you would take all the time you have given your­self to fill the void, thus lim­it­ing your own poten­tial. (I talk alot about this in my book, “Drop Your Goals.”)

The Law of Con­trac­tion also forces you into right action. It forces you to do what needs to be done to get things done. Other, small dis­trac­tions are less impor­tant when more impor­tant work is call­ing for your atten­tion — and even more so as time con­tracts. That way, you learn to be effec­tive. Not efficient.

There is a dif­fer­ence. A big one.

We have per­sonal assis­tants tak­ing care of things until we return, which Terry Dean also preaches — and which I highly rec­om­mend you have, too. So using “what about emer­gen­cies” as an excuse is just that… an excuse.

(Eve­lyn, my assis­tant, as well as LaDawn, Alli­son, Shiela and Arlene, and other key staff, are hold­ing up the fort for us. With­out them, we wouldn’t be able to do this. If you haven’t hired a per­sonal or at least vir­tual assis­tant yet, you should seri­ously think about it. We’ve made more money with the help of our assis­tants than we ever did by our­selves. Trust me on this one.)

Any­way, this time around, we’re tak­ing the entire day off, from one dawn until the next, com­pletely. No com­put­ers, no surf­ing the web, no check­ing emails, no writ­ing copy, not even a phone call.

And we’re doing it on every Fri­day from this point on.

I must also add that, I don’t “work” seven days a week. I play and make money while doing it. To me, I love what I do. I adore it. But I think that it’s time for me to start think­ing about… me! (My lovely wife, Sylvie, is not only back­ing me up on this. She’s the one who sug­gested it.)

She, too, loves her work. (Her com­pany is called “Worka­holics For Hire” for a rea­son!) But with events of late, it’s a real­ity check that we needed.

In fact, she recently posted an update to her blog, where she talks about her end of chemother­apy and the begin­ning of a round of five weeks of radi­a­tion treat­ments. (Osten­si­bly, to kill off any left­over can­cer cells the chemo might have missed.)

But Sylvie is con­vinced, and has done enough research, to know that the direct cause of her can­cer is caused by what I believe is the num­ber one killer of all.

Can­cer is not in her fam­ily, so it’s not genetic. It’s not due to envi­ro­men­tal fac­tors, like asbestos, pes­ti­cides, hor­mones and so forth. (We’re veg­e­tar­i­ans, after all. And we eat organ­i­cally as much as possible.)

The cul­prit is, with­out ques­tion, stress.

Stress is the num­ber one biggest killer, in my esti­ma­tion — if not at least con­trib­u­tor to other killers. Sure, you can suf­fer from a heart attack, stroke, can­cer or what­ever. And you can blame it on car­cino­gens, tox­ins, lack of exer­cise, diet, smok­ing, or even genetic predisposition.

But what causes it and, in many cases, accel­er­ates it, is stress, pure and simple.

For my coach­ing stu­dents, I told you I will not answer emails on week­ends, and that won’t change. But ques­tions emailed on Fri­day will be answered Sat­ur­day, as nor­mal. (And then, I won’t answer any ques­tions until Monday.)

There’s a mas­sive snow­storm head­ing our way, so my beau­ti­ful wife just went to the video store and rented sev­eral movies. We were orig­i­nally plan­ning on going to the movie the­ater, but from the looks of it, we’re going to be stuck indoors, I’m afraid.

Nev­er­the­less, just mak­ing such a deci­sion is like a huge weight has been lifted from our shoul­ders. We already feel good, and Fri­day is not even here, yet! I highly rec­om­mend you do the same. Go “unplugged” for one, full day.

All I can say is, “It’s about time!”

About the Author

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