Most often it is hard to stay motivated and on task. A lot of this is due to not having either enough of a want for extra money/change in lifestyle, or not having the need to make a change. For me, I have a decent job that pays the bills, live in a decent house, and have time to do things I like. It’s not what I want in life, but I can’t complain. But, I do want much more, and have much bigger dreams. I know how to reach these goals, but usually have a hard time finding the motivation to stay focused and on course. I’m not a starving person in a third world country; therefore I don’t really have a terrible situation I need to escape.

Lacking the motivation to work hard and diligently often leaves me short of my goals. This seems to be very common among the internet marketing community, and is in my opinion one of the hardest things to overcome. Finding the knowledge on how to make money on the internet is all over the place, but taking action, and continuously moving toward that one goal is different from reading a book.

Taking action and being accountable is really all on you, to do on your own.

Today I was balancing the checkbook so to say, and after crunching the numbers, I found that I needed more money in my account, or some upcoming transactions would not be able to take place. I’m not talking about just paying the cell phone bill or cable bill, but more like being able to pay the mortgage on one of the rental houses. This sort of set me into a panic, or stress mode, and set me looking for alternatives. Should I put all of the bills on the credit card (all of which are paid off, and trying to keep that way) and leave cash in my account for the bills that can’t be put on the credit card, do i pull money from savings…etc. I had a few options available, and quite a few places to pull money from, but the fact was that my bills were more than my regular income this month, and it was kind of stressful. I hate being in the situation.

I realized this stress really put some pressure on me to get my online business producing more. This stress isn’t fun to deal with, but I am the one who put myself into the situation. I put a decent amount into 401k and savings each month, which could easily cover things like this, and make things easier now. So it’s not like I can’t get out of my situation, but it actually helped motivate me.

I could decide to cut back on a couple luxury bills, or skimp here and there to save money, and maybe put in some overtime, or put less into savings, which would make living today easier and less worrisome, but putting the pressure on myself is actually quite helpful.

Putting pressure on yourself to make a change is often what is needed to get out of the daily grind. Put some pressure on yourself, set goals that scare you a little. Put more money into savings than usual to force money from another source. Get out of your comfort zone, and things will happen. Leaving your comfort zone will exercise your brain, and get you thinking again. As Tim Ferriss says, what we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

I recently started a new day job, which I am happier at, but I am able to do less of Internet Marketing. Computer access at work now is very limited, making it hard to use my lunch hour effectively. This time of day is one of my more productive times, as I’m not burned out like I often am after work in the evenings.

To get this time back, I have invested in a Netbook (small laptop). I have been wanting one for a while, just because its a gadget, and its pretty cool, but really didn’t have a reason, and not traveling much, dwindled the little reason I did have. After doing some thinking of how to make use of my lunch hour, I came to the conclusion that a netbook with a Cellular Data connection will be worth the price of a monthly data connection. Although its hard to sign up for another re-occurring monthly bill, it doesn’t take much work to be able to re-gain the cost of the monthly bill.

I started looking at a mac laptop at first, since I really like their PowerPoint software, and some other apple features. After a very quick glance though, the starting price tag of $999, I got scared off pretty quick. After doing some more poking around at laptops, I found refurbished Netbooks going for $200. This is the price range I like, and it didn’t take me long to do the math. Even if it didn’t work out very well, $200 for a computer is a pretty good deal.

I went with the Asus Eee 1000 with a 40gb solid state Hdd. All of the features are pretty similar of the netbook family. One of the biggest differences though is having a static or spinning hard drive. The static hard drive is basically like a usb memory stick, and requires very little power, unlike a standard hard drive.

So here is my first productive lunch hour on the Netbook. I will tell you about my data connectivity next time. I feels good already getting some of my time back.

I have been wanting to place a large dry erase white board in my office for a while now. I have a small 2′ x 3′ board that I haven’t mounted, but its really not that big, and my daughter enjoys drawing on it. I really have been wanting something bigger. Something I could use some parts for lists, some parts for brain storming, and some parts for whatever else.

So I did a little looking around, and what I ended up finding was this board that you can find at Lowes or Home Depot called Shower board or wall board. Its for use in bathrooms, or showers. Its basically 1/4 inch thick particle board that has one side coated with a glossy white paint. Well, this glossy white paint very closely resembles a dry erase board.

When shopping at Lowes, I found two options. One option was an 4′ x 8′ sheet for about $11. Wow, what a price. When shopping online for a dry erase board that size, the prices are above $400. The second option was a smaller piece of the same board in a 2′ x 4′ section for about 9$. Definitely a better deal for the whole sheet, but I had to test this out, and I didn’t have a means to get the whole sheet home at the moment.

I bought the 2′ x 4′ sheet, and when home to test it out. I used three different colors of marker on the board, let it sit about 10 minutes, and wiped a little off. Red and Blue came off an left no trace, and the black left a little trace behind, but very minimal. I decided to also wait a day and see how the marker came off.

After 24 hours, I had the same results as I did with 10 minutes. I also found that scrubbing a little harder with the eraser got rid of all of the black ink. This board it very similar to a dry erase board, and is more than worth the money.

Now since the board is thin, there are a couple ways to mount it. You could just use a couple screws, and screw it straight to the wall, or you could glue it to a thicker piece of plywood, or particle board to stiffen up the board, and hang or mount it. Either way, its a super cheap solution for a dry erase white board, and leaves you with almost no excuse not to have an oversize whiteboard in your office.