Getting Out Of Your Element

Does your day seem to just fly by? Do you ever find yourself doing 9000 things but not getting any of them done (all Swedish no Finnish) ? Maybe its time to change it up a bit. Mixing up your computer workstation No matter if you are a windows, mac, or linux user its pretty easy to change up your computing environment. While its cool to have 2 giant 30 inch monitors attached to my computer its also a massive distraction to have Wordpress, Email, IRC, AIM, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter reloading every second telling me if there is updates. This will also drain your work time. They say for every distraction it takes 22 minutes to get back to what you were working on... (I actually stopped writing to look that up and it took me over a hour to get back to this post cause I got distracted with email... ironic!) Often times when I need to get something done I take a super bare bones laptop (we have a really old dell at the office) into the conference room, shut the door, and bust it out. Our staff knows when I am in there with the door shut not to bother me. This bare bones computer often times does not even have internet access. All I need is a text editor, photoshop, and/or a WYSIWYG HTML editor because 99% of the time I am writing a article, sketching out something, or building a concept landing page for one of our affiliate offers. But you do not HAVE to have a separate computer to do this. Sometimes just mixing up your operating system getting you out of your normal element helps a ton. For instance install Linux on your mac/pc. Boot into that when you want to get out of your element. Mixing up work locations A lot of times I just need to change up my work environment to gain inspiration. In today's awesome world we can take a $300 netbook to just about anywhere around town and have a pseudo office outside of our element. My favorite pseudo offices with free wifi are Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, McDonalds, Chipolte, and... wait for it... Hooters! Conferences Out Of Your Element I used to love to go to all the SEO based conferences. For several years I never missed one. But then I branched out into performance marketing conferences... and now into Venture Capital conferences and events. With each one I started just a regular attendee but after 3-4 events you get to know people... or they get to know you rather. You get comfortable in your circle of friends and you rarely venture out of it. This is when I like to change it up a bit. I can't tell you how many awesome connections and deals I have made getting outside of my conference element. So whether its your computer, work environment, or social environment hopefully you are venturing out of your comfort zone and trying new things. If you are not please try it. Trust me!