The blog has changed formats over the years, and it seems to be time to change it again. I changed accountants, which delayed the income reports from containing the details that made them income reports, and they evolved into more of a status report. Lately, that’s all I have been posting.

I am looking to get back to more informative posts about what’s working and what isn’t. Since starting the blog, I have been making enough of an income online that I quit my job. Since then, however, I have mainly being doing client work and posting once a month. In an attempt to make this blog a little more information and less autobiographical, I am going to take the 4DX approach.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution

The book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, was a book I read and liked the idea. It’s basically the plan of coming up with a goal, and then using little weekly goals to achieve the big goal.

Here is what it actually is:

So with the blog getting off course, I plan on getting it back on track with the help of the 4DX method. Similar to the Habits post, I really just want to see if the 4DX method would actually work.

This gives me something to try it out on.

Also, it gives more structure to the blog that was kind of going downhill.

The Wildly Important

For the wildly important goal, I thought about doing something more specific, but couldn’t think of a single thing. Really, I am still focused on generating money for the investment deals I talked about earlier. Because of that, I came up with the goal.

Increase savings from $0 to $100,000 by December 31, 2019.

I don’t really have $0 in savings, but I would like to add $100,000 to it to help with the investments. My theory is, I do a lot of things, but the overall goal has always been to come up with cash. The weekly commitments might vary, but they are also designed to increase revenue….most of the time.

Sometimes I also try to decrease expenses, so having a goal of savings would allow me to do both. I only count the money I bring in that I don’t have to spend on anything else. If I make $100,000, but spend $100,000 doing it, that will count as $0 saved.

The only exception is if I save the money, and then end up doing an investment. I won’t count the spending of that money since that was the whole point. If I save $50,000, and then I buy the real estate that costs me $50,000, I will still say I am at the $50,000 mark and won’t reset it back to $0.

Lead Measures

The lag measure is clearly my savings account. I will actually move money from my checking accounts into the high-yield savings account. It’s that balance that I will be tracking and once the money is in the account, I will not move it for any reason other than for the investments.

The lead measure I came up with was the number of sources of income. This could be number of clients/contracts along with things like my own websites generating revenue, selling websites, and online sales through eBay and Amazon. The higher I get that number, the more likely it is for me to save $100,000 in 4 months.

The Scoreboard

I will add a scoreboard to the blog that will show weekly how I am doing. It will essentially take the place of the income report on the side bar. I will likely have another page that is the scoreboard in more detail that will not only show how the wildly important goal is coming along, but also how well I hit the lead measures and the weekly commitments.

Currently, I have nothing for the scoreboard. I will develop it as I go along, but right now, I am not entirely sure what I should put on it, and since I just started, it would be blank anyway.

Accountability

I will make weekly WIG Session Wednesday posts starting with this Wednesday that will be my accountability check. I will post my weekly commitment along with lead measure progress, and whether I met last weeks commitment.

You can follow along and boo me in the comments when I miss the mark!

This Wednesday will be my first one, where I will define in more detail exactly what I will be doing. Right now, I am still getting everything figured out. Since I only have a few days before the WIG session, I am thinking my commitment now will be to contact 3 people about potential work.

Reconnecting with existing contacts or reaching out to new ones, ask if they know of any ecommerce work available to replace the contract that ended. At least 3 messages sent out.

That’s the commitment for this initial week.

I will get the scoreboard page created soon. I will also likely do an updated About Me page since the current one is pretty dated.