It’s been almost a week since attending the Earn $1k A Day Summit down in sunny Orlando. Almost every local Orlandoan I chatted with kept apologizing for the unseasonably cold weather. considering I left Nebraska at 5 below zero, 60 felt almost warm enough to hit that outdoor pool at the hotel…

But what does this have to do with sleep deprivation? Well, I didn’t want to miss a single thing at the summit, so I set my return flight for Monday morning rather than risking having to leave early by taking a Sunday evening flight out. 6:15am Monday morning, in particular. Which meant my prepaid shuttle company guaranteeing catching my flight only if I took a 3:15am or earlier ride. For a night owl like myself, the first thing that popped into my head was ouch!

Nevertheless, my mind was fried from all that information thrown at me over the weekend, and I thought I was tired enough to actually get a few hours of sleep after everything wound down. Only to find my mind racing. And racing. And racing. And looking over and seeing 1:42am on the clock. And then the alarm waking me about 40 minutes later.

A half hour sleep + the piss poor rest you can get in economy airline seats doesn’t really cut it!

The rest of the week? Kind of a blur.

More on the summit later…

I used to lurk in many marketing forums. And while there is a ton of information to be eked out of many of them if you search hard enough, I have finally whittled my way down to just two that I visit with any regularity.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along…

Some were easy to drop, because there just wasn’t that much there to begin with. Think the 4HWW forums.

Tim Ferris’s book was great as far as motivation goes, and offers up a wonderful alternative to the normal life. But as far as specifics, the forum, as well as the book for that matter, are borderline useless.

Oh, Look At That Shiny Red Thing…

Then there were forums that are just far too easy to lose yourself in. For days. And weeks. And months.

Think The Warrior Forum. Absolute tons of great information. So much, in fact, that for the chronically distractable like myself, hanging out only ensures that you never get a damn thing done. I had to move on, to move on.

The Most Dangerous

But my recent trimmings were because of the state of mind encountered at every visit. The unfortunate thing is that both of these were for products I really like.

For instance, the Build a Nice Store forums (members only). I deeply appreciate the Build A Niche Store software. I used it to achieve my first real (and continuing) online successes. That $97 spent on it have been recouped many times over. But the forum has got to go. Far too many of the regulars are nothing but complainers, either permanently convinced that eBay is out to ruin their tenuous business or so set in their particular method of doing business that anyone attempting something different is immediately pounced upon as either a fraud or a simpleton. I’m sure that the tone of the forums certainly helped to push me away from future development with the software altogether recently.

And while I may be too logic driven to be able to accept everything about the law of attraction at face value, I am certain that always looking for the dark side pretty much guarantees that you will eventually find it. Life is far too short for that, so so long BANS forums.

Save The Best For Last

Oh, about those two remaining forums:

• Earn $1k A Day
  Dream It, Believe It, Plan It, Achieve It. Great people, great ideas, and amazingly, a truly supportive community of marketers. But then, what else would you expect from Dennis Becker?
• Campaign Blasts
  The methodology you get with the ebook is awesome, but the push one gets from participating in the blast challenges via this forum is worth admission price X 10. Oh, and if you hurry, you can get in the next blast challenge: It should be starting up in about 30 minutes…

Yes, they are both paid memberships. And yes, they are worth every cent.

One area I struggle with is wandering off on too many tangents while attempting to keep all those tangents alive. Lately, this is the path I keep taking:

• Start a project.
• Somewhere in the process, need to do research to continue that project.
• While finding the info needed, stumble across something really interesting that triggers another potential in my mind.
• That something becomes a whole other project.
• Rinse. Repeat.

Right now, too many domains waiting for development, too many half-finished ideas involved in those developments, too many potentials to possibly meet all of them. Especially when more of all three find their way into my head regularly. Too many choices is leading to decision paralysis, and nothing is getting completely done.

The simplest solution? I’m just going to have to resign myself to the fact that every domain doesn’t need development tomorrow, or that every idea doesn’t need to come to fruition. And that potentials are just that.

Resolved: Tomorrow, one thing, any one thing, is getting completely done…

Over the last few months, I’ve been looking at various ways of supplementing my income by making a buck or two from a few site I have online. So far I’ve taken a little action, and even made a few dollars. But mostly, I’ve just been digging up all the info I can reasonably find.

Needless to say, I’ve found myself subscribed to quite a number of internet marketers’ ‘newsletters’ AKA their sales pitch autoresponders. I’ve bought very little of this stuff so far – actually taken advantage of all of two offers for a total cost of less than $50 – but the informational freebies they throw my way attempting to convince me to buy their latest and greatest have kept my education cheap so far. I’ve been tempted by several offers; even have a few on my list that I’m considering and, very likely, will purchase in the not-so-distant future. But generally I reach the end of the pitch and the price chases me off. I consider myself a lot too green to really consider paying $297 or $497 or $xx7 for an information product right now.

But now that I’ve been subscribed to many of these marketers autoresponders for awhile, it gets a little annoying when one of the big guns is about to release a new product. Suddenly, everyone is pushing the same product, and because the product is a guru’s, it’s pretty much guaranteed the price will be through the roof. At least for anyone still within sight of being a newbie like myself.

The last week or two has seen a veritable email explosion, with just about every marketer out there almost tripping over themselves to be the last one to get you to click through their pitch, and thus grab what must be quite the golden ring of an affiliate commision, to get you to sign up for Brad Fallon & Andy Jenkins’ StomperNet. At just shy of $800, per month, I immediately priced myself out of that offer! I was tired of the pitch a week ago, but they just kept coming and coming.

As a result, a whole slew of those pitchers received an unsubscribe from this newbie, and a few of those ‘going-to-buy’ products got removed from my list as well. But, at least it’s helped me clean up my subscription list – should help that little information overload problem I’m working on anyway…

Feeddemon tells me ‘You have a total of 9 folders, 373 feeds, 9239 items, 431 unread items, and 287 flagged items‘. And it tells me this after I spend more time than I care to share trying to purge it of sources I haven’t actually visited for some time.

My ‘Read These‘ folder in Gmail has 68 unread items in it. These are links to articles I run into that look extremely interesting or useful, but whose content is long enough that I choose to set them aside for now, thinking ‘I just don’t have the time to read the whole thing right now, not with the other 50 smaller posts I have to look through; I’ll get back to them later!‘

My homepage is set to news.google.com.

I’ve got more than a touch of news addiction. Hi. My name is Sean Oelkers, and I’ve got a full-fledged case of information overload.

And what golden nuggets of information have I gleaned from the ridiculous amount of time I spent perusing all this so far today? Well, let’s see, what pops into the ol’ noggin first?

• Some football player I’ve never heard of (because, you see, I don’t watch football) purportedly tried to kill himself.
• A new RSS advertising service has launched.
• Anna Nicole Smith got knocked up by Howard Stern. Howard K. Stern. Her lawyer.
• The White House released part of a national intelligence assessment on terrorism, but is getting flack for not releasing the whole thing.
• New York City is trying to ban trans fats in its restaurants.
• Steve ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin’s family is still mourning.

As you can see, time well spent.

Meanwhile, I’ve got 13 items waiting on my To-Do list. Things generally end up on my To-Do list when I’ve forgotten about them once or twice, and their not-being-done has come back to smack me in the back of the head. So you can imagine there are many more things swimming around that should be on that list, but aren’t.

Plus, I’ve also got an ‘Ideas!‘ folder jam packed with all sorts of topics I’d like to delve into furthur, several of which could even make a dollar or $10,000 on if I spent a bit of time developing them. If I could just find the time…

Admitting you’ve got a problem is half the battle. Methinks it may just be time to try something new!