I think that the whole ADD thing is over­played, but I can’t shake the feel­ing that there might be some merit to it. I remem­ber Louis Black talk­ing about the start of the cur­rent war in Iraq and how the news sta­tions went nuts with the scrolling tick­ers and over­lays with move­ment and crazy col­ors. It got me think­ing about infor­ma­tion over­load and why we sub­ject our­selves to it.

Keep­ing the day in perspective

Since I started work­ing inde­pen­dently, I’ve had to learn a few valu­able lessons that I don’t think I could have learned with­out them smack­ing me in the face. I learned that out­sourc­ing those things that you aren’t good at is a good idea. I’ve learned that no one per­son can do every­thing. I’ve learned that good time man­age­ment is more valu­able than a good assis­tant. I’ve learned that a PDA is only as good as the infor­ma­tion you bother putting in it. I would have learned them all faster if I had dis­cov­ered Sim­ple­ol­ogy sooner.

I’m not get­ting paid to say this, and I’m in no way affil­i­ated with Sim­ple­ol­ogy or Mark Joyner, I just truly dig the pro­gram. I dig it enough to do an unso­licited plug.

What it is, for those of us who vol­un­tar­ily chain our­selves to a com­puter all day, is a god­send. If you run Win­dows or Mac OS (which I don’t), you can join the pro­gram and get the 101 course for free. After you sign up, you can down­load tools to help you man­age your time that install directly to your desk­top. One of them that I par­tic­u­larly like is called the “Browser Body­guard.” When I did run Win­dows, it kept me from burn­ing count­less hours on Face­book and YouTube watch­ing videos of cats and play­ing Mafia Wars.

The real value in the pro­gram, though, is what Mark calls your “Daily Tar­get Praxis.” It’s a sim­ple means of keep­ing you focused on major goals so that your daily goals can move you closer to them. The sys­tem is as genius as it is sim­ple, but with­out the soft­ware, peo­ple like me get lost in a sea of stu­pid details.

When I go through my 15 min­utes of day plan­ning, I get reminded of the fact that I don’t need to actu­ally do much of the stuff I thought I had to fin­ish. I can say that not need­ing to do the stu­pid stuff saves me hours of work and gets me to the daily fin­ish line faster. Funny, until I fig­ured that out I for­got why I went inde­pen­dent in the first place.

Long and short, check out Sim­ple­ol­ogy and see if it works for you. If you’re in busi­ness for your­self and you’re tied to a com­puter, you just might find the tool as indis­pens­able as I do.