Posts Tagged ‘Work’

I wrote a couple weeks ago about managing time and getting things done.  I have several techniques that I use, with varying levels of success, but of course time still gets away from me and I end up accomplishing less than I otherwise would.  Here’s something from a lawyer friend of mine:

Chris,

Like you, I did not realize how hard it is to "work" for 8 hours a day.  I have to keep track of my time in six minute increments--and they add up fast when I am reading your (entertaining and thought provoking) blog posts or the morning newspaper.  However, it helps me be accountable for how I spend my time each day.  Though obnoxious at times, it is good for me.  I still have a long way to go--it still takes me 10 hours to "work" 8--but I am getting better.

Thanks for keeping me on your email list.  Your writing is always entertaining.  You have a way of explaining life's lessons in a way that connects with a lot of people.

Hope things are well with you and your family.  Please let me know if I can ever do anything to help any of you.

Best,

Brock

Jones Waldo
Brock Worthen
Attorney

Last post I discussed the excellent book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, by Joel Salatin, and this time I want to extend the analysis a bit.  In the book, he describes a situation where he is instructed by some federal food police to alter his pricing for his beef such that his business becomes not a beef producer, subject to sales tax, but a service provider, subject only to income tax (which every farmer has more than enough deductions to offset).  This is a compromise to avoid shutting down his operation for a phantom infringement of some obscure and destructive regulation.

See what happens here.  Someone complains to his representative about beef being prepared in unsanitary conditions.  The representative gets a law passed forming an agency to inspect beef packing to make sure it’s sanitary.  Then the agency promulgates a gigantic mess of regulation, ostensibly to make sure that if the regulations are followed, the beef will be safe.  Businesses then bear the cost of complying with the regulations, even though they are of necessity made to fit operations that are massively different from theirs.  This cost is least easily borne by small businesses, many of which close.

Thus the original complaint, focused on getting safe meat to the table, closes the businesses most likely to provide it.  That’s consequence #1.  It also raises the cost of the meat.  That’s consequence #2.  And then, best of all, it encourages those businesses which are accidentally now the focus of regulatory scrutiny, to cheat and evade not only the regulation but the taxes that they were happily paying before.  That’s consequence #3.

How much of the US economy is in the gray and black markets now?  10%?  20%?  I’m not talking about the hiring of illegal workers, which absolutely fits into consequence #3 above, but other things like the evasion of labor law by paying under the table, or the changing of business classification from for-profit (taxpaying) to not-for-profit (non-taxpaying), without changing the nature of the business at all, simply to avoid regulation that makes it increasingly impossible for the business to make money.

Salatin’s book describes a situation where the cheese police came and shut down a small cheese factory because it was selling uninspected (though perfectly safe) cheese at a farmers market.  So the enterprising woman called the bureaucrats and asked what the restrictions were on fish food.  They said there weren’t any.  So the next week she labeled her product “Fish Bait Cheddar” and “Fish Bait Swiss”, and nobody could touch her.  Until someone decides to regulate fish bait.  Which someone inevitably will.

Leia Organa famously once said, “the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  This is a terrific commentary on the current US government.  There is already no theoretical way that all the rules and regulations we have could ever be enforced.  Life would come to a grinding halt altogether.  So we are reduced to cheating, lying, and turning a blind eye, running our economic activity in the gray areas, inside the house, but in the walls and the crawl spaces, in order to get anything done at all.

I hate it.  And I think it’s ridiculous.  And I’m now thinking, after reading this book, that I might finally have to give in and run for office.

Sigh.

My son Nicholas tells me he wants to be a writer.  I think that’s wonderful, except for one thing:

He’s wrong.

How do I know this?  How can I penetrate the heart of my 16-year-old son so deeply, to expose this secret?  Simple.  Writers do one thing that other people do not.  They write.  And Nicholas does not.  Not letters, not a journal, not stories, not, except under duress, even papers.  He writes nothing.  Q.E.D., he is not a writer.

I’ve always wanted to be able to write well.  Really well, well enough to sell the things I write.  When I was in high school I failed my geometry class because I was writing a post-apocalyptic romance novel about me and this girl I had a crush on.  Sixty-three longhand pages later, I had a work of surpassing ugliness and sap, and an F in geometry, but it didn’t really matter.  I had to be writing.

I wrote a diary.  I wrote stories about my fictional football players.  I wrote newspapers.  I wrote essays.  I wrote quite a bit, when I look back.  When I got to college, I wrote short stories and essays, and some of them won prizes.  I got published a couple of times.  That’s not, as I look back now, a bad beginning.  Clearly, I had some skill.  There might have been a career there.

But I stopped writing.  Oh, not entirely, never that, but seriously.  I stopped writing stories and entering contests.  I stopped sending essays to magazines.  I finished a novel – a really, really bad novel about things I know nothing whatever about – but only because my father told me I never would.  It was unreconstructable, unpolishable.  A dead story with no future.  But it was a beginning, and I finished it at 23, and I had clean sand in front of me.  On this sand, I have made few new footprints.

I have marveled for years at the clarity and power of the writing of people like Orson Scott Card, Dick Francis, Isaac Asimov, Donald Westlake (okay, “clarity and power” don’t fit here, more like “hilarity and seismic wit”), to say nothing of classic writers like Jane Austen or Alexandre Dumas.  Card, especially, has embraced the internet and the opportunities it provides.  He writes multiple columns, reviews, blogs, and still churns out novels and short stories and all sorts of material.  I write a lot, even still, but this guy writes fanatically.  He’s a writer.  So he writes.  No wonder he’s good.

Put that much time in at anything, you’re going to be good.  This is the premise of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, a book the Chris Jones Group highly recommends.  You do something a lot, all the time, even, and you’ll be good at it.  Get training, get feedback, be humble and listen, and you’ll get better faster.  But nobody comes out of the box brilliant.  Everyone has to work at it.  Even Christopher Paolini.

That should make you feel good.  It does me.  You want to write?  Write.  You want to sing?  Sing.  You want to program computers, then program the bleeping computers.  Whatever it is you want to do, do it.  Do it a lot.  And you will become good at it.

In my last post, I addressed where the borrowers had gone.  In this one, I want to talk about how to get them back.

As I mentioned, borrowers are having trouble qualifying, much as they would have trouble running a 10k.  Some can do it, but those people are almost all those that have been training, saving their money, hoarding their equity, shepherding their credit.  Everyone else?  Well, it’s time for those magical fitness tools, diet and exercise.

There are two difficulties with this.  One, many people don’t know what they need to do, and two, almost everyone needs someone to help them, or they won’t do it correctly, no matter how badly they want to.  This dramatically restricts the pool of borrowers and makes it hard for Realtors and loan originators to make a living.  It sounds terrible.  But it isn’t.  Really, it isn’t.  There’s a fabulous hidden opportunity here.

The good news here is that this means the market is as big as you want it to be.  EVERYONE, or, okay, not absolutely everyone, but functionally everyone, will buy a home at some point.  Right now, true, most of them cannot qualify for a loan to do so.  The solution is simple.  Stop being a track timer, and start being a fitness coach.

By this, I mean that it’s time to stop just taking an application and pulling a credit, and deciding that there’s no deal.  Of COURSE there’s no deal.  That shouldn’t be surprising.  But if you want to make it in a market like this, you’re going to have to do more than issue a denial.

What we do is create a plan.  We train our clients and show them how to get to the point where they do qualify.  More than two-thirds of our clients are people we’ve been working with for more than 90 days.  Almost half of them are people that we’ve been working with for six months and more.  In May, one of our clients opened her file 228 days ago.  But the week before her, we closed a loan for a fellow who opened his file 447 days before the close.

We discovered, looking at our closings, that we had done just as much business in 2009 as we did in 2006, despite the complete market meltdown we saw over that four-year period.  But that happened because in a good market, like the one in 2006, we had no competitive advantage.  Our specialty is rehab, doing the hard work to move a client from unable to qualify into position to get the loan they want.  In a market where everyone can already qualify, in the hundred-yard-dash market, we have no advantages.  But in the 10k market?  We shine.  Rehab and training in this market is not a frivolity.  It’s a necessity.

Anyone can do this.  We happen to be really good at it, and we like it (which is why we’re good at it), but anyone can do it.  I spoke to a loan officer of my acquaintance a few days ago, and he was getting out of the business.  I asked him why.  Was his phone not ringing anymore?  No, he said, it was still ringing, but none of the inquiries was turning into a loan.  “Yet,” I said.  “What?” he said.  “Not a loan yet.  As in, you work with them and eventually they’ll qualify.”  At first he had no idea what I was talking about.  Then he thought that was way too much work.  So now he’s selling cars or something, instead of doing what he really likes and is good at, because he couldn’t change his thinking.

The borrowers are out there.  There are just as many as there ever were.  And we can have a greater impact on their lives than we could ever have had when all they had to do was roll out of bed and get a loan.  All it takes is a little bit of hard work and some patience, and this market can have more opportunities in it than any other.

My job is not subject to hourly requirements.

This is a fancy way of saying that I can work when I want to, within certain boundaries.  I do have to work, unless there is nothing going on.  I never have to come to work and sit there.  There are no time clocks.  I hate those things, anyway.

Except.

Fact of the matter is that I don’t do that much real work.  I don’t do ANY real work in the old-timer sense, where I have actual physical labor that I perform.  No, I push paper around and rearrange pixels on a computer screen.  Still, the work of connecting people that need money with people that have money pays, so it must have some value.  Problem is, it’s very hard to quantify that work.  Can I do it in 10 minutes a day?  Can I do it in half an hour?  An hour?  Two?  Five?

I didn’t know.  A month ago it became important to me to discover how much time I was really spending working at my mortgage business in any given week.  This is time exclusive of Rotary meetings, exclusive of teaching school, exclusive of Heart-2-Home Board meetings, even exclusive of time I spend at work but surfing the Internet.  So I counted, and I’ve been counting for four weeks.

No, I will not share the results.  They embarrass me.  And I think I came a ways toward discovering one of the reasons that my success has not been as incandescent at it otherwise ought to be.

With all due respect to Tim Ferriss, whom I admire greatly, right now it is important to me personally to put some time into my business.  I want always to make that time more productive, but at the moment all I’m counting IS productive time, so that takes some care of itself.  I made a commitment to a partner that I would work – really do productive work – for at least a certain number of hours a week, even though I don’t strictly have to.  It’s been interesting.

But the reason for this post is that today was a victory.  I was a few hours short coming into this morning, as in, in a normal workday I would not get to my commitment for the week, which would necessitate my working on Saturday, a thing I almost never do (for good reasons).  When the baby got me up at 4:30, instead of going back to bed, I got dressed, went downstairs, and began to work.  Not at all coincidentally, I was able to make progress on some things that have been neglected, things that I believe will allow me to generate more work for myself and more business for the company.  Being a creator, I saw that this was good.

It would never have happened if I hadn’t set a time commitment for myself, and that would never have happened if I hadn’t started measuring what I was actually doing with my time.  It’s only one day.  But this thing might actually work.