$150 46-Hour Week Challenge

November 25, 2007 Posted by Tyler Cruz

I’ve really been slacking with work the past few weeks, and whenever I find myself working only 5-6 hours a week I know it’s time to slap myself with another "Work Week Challenge".

My last challenge was held back in mid-September, whereby I challenged myself to a 46-Hour Work Week Challenge and put up $125 if I didn’t make it.

It was very difficult, and also very close, but I managed to complete the 46 hours just in time.

To most readers out there it may seem silly (as it probably is) to have to force myself to work,  but the fact is that when I do these challenges I get so much more work done than I usually do that it isn’t even funny. I typically do more work in one of these "work weeks" than I do in an entire month. The compactedness (if you will) of the conditions also means that I’m forced to work longer stretches of hours which in turn means that I tend to get work done that requires those long hours… work that I usually put off or procrastinate on.

My new challenge, then, is to work 46-hours within 7 days. These are the same conditions as last time. However, this time I’m going to increase the prize money as well: The first 6 people who comment on this post will receive $25 each if I do not make the 46-hours by December 2nd at 11:00 am.

Please leave your PayPal address or if you don’t want to disclose that publicly you can e-mail it to me from the same e-mail that you have attached to your account here.

Part of why I didn’t get much done over the past couple weeks is that I was quite sick was a nasty throat infection. I’m on the road to recovery now though and hope to be back to normal within a few days.

One of the things I hope to get accomplished during this challenge is to physically visit NeverBlueAds’s company headquarters as part of the review process for my review of them on PublisherSpot. I’ll definitely be taking photos "behind-the-scenes" and be making a blog post about it. I want to go there before it snows here though, which will be any day now…

In addition, one of the perks to this challenge is that I’ll be able to make daily blog posts again, if not more. I’ll have many posts backlogged for my blog and will hopefully drive my RSS readership up again.

Wish me luck!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment below, subscribing to my RSS feed, or following me on Twitter.
Posted: November 25th, 2007 under Miscellaneous  

26 Responses to “$150 46-Hour Week Challenge”

  1. fumbler says:

    good luck on this one Tyler! If only I could afford to hold a contest like this, I could probably motivate myself to get some work done πŸ˜‰

  2. Gary Zaydman says:

    I wish you best of luck. I think the reason why this type of contest works is because your making your goals public. It is easy to ignore your private goals but nobody wants to ignore their public goals. πŸ™‚

  3. Alex says:

    Best of luck Tyler, I was very impressed with your results the last time around. Perhaps you can also share your strategies for working smarter to really maximize your productivity! I would love to hear it.

  4. shawna says:

    Hope you meet your goals, and if not six of us win πŸ™‚

  5. Good Luck Tyler! Anyway, i hope you wont succeed, because i like to win contests πŸ˜€

  6. Hey, good luck with the challenge. Wish I could only work 46 hours a week! πŸ˜‰

  7. Tyler Cruz says:

    Heh… it’s always very interesting to see just how many readers you have when the lurkers surface when money is up for grabs πŸ˜‰

    4 comments made within 25-minutes of posting this made by people who I’ve never seen comment before…!

  8. ok i am in for another round.

    try shooting for giving yourself goals for the week. much like you would give your contractors.

    • Tyler Cruz says:

      Well as beifly mentioned in my post, my goal is to review NeverBlueAds and to visit their company headquaters and make a post about the visit πŸ™‚

      • fumbler says:

        Are you planning on counting the drive down to Victoria as part of these hours πŸ˜‰ Take it easy on the malahat, its been pretty icy here lately in Vancouver and I know how nasty the drive can be in the winter. (Part of what keeps me coming back Tyler, is that I grew up in Parksville which is a half hour north of where Tyler lives)

        • Tyler Cruz says:

          Yeah I do plan on counting those hours. Normally I wouldn’t, but I would be making the trip especially to see them so I think it warrants being calculated as part of the hours.

          Yeah this is partly why I want to make the trip soon, before it snows. I actually don’t mind the Malahat at all, I don’t know why people have such a problem with it. I find driving downtown far worse… and NeverBlueAds is located in the heart of downtown… I’ll have to park a ways a way…

  9. To late for me to get in on this πŸ™‚ good idea though! I can see where your coming from, i have the same problem.

  10. Just missed the first 6. But good luck with your latest goal.

  11. Mike Huang says:

    Darn, I didn’t get to comment quick enough πŸ™‚

    Anyways, good luck to you Tyler!

    -Mike

  12. Gyutae Park says:

    Good luck Tyler.
    If you do accomplish this goal, I’ll have to start thinking about making an Internet Workaholics support group.

  13. marius sescu says:

    Good luck Tyler!I ussualy work 50 hours, so i think you will make it!

  14. Arjen says:

    Tyler, could you make a blog post about your earnings these days? You used to post a daily average over X months – but wrote that you stopped doing that because of declining earnings. However, I, and probably most of your blog readers, would find it interesting if you would post about this again.

    • Tyler Cruz says:

      It literally takes me almost an entire day to calculate all my earnings which is the main reason why I stopped. The second reason was because my earnings stopped growing.

      I would estimate that my earnings are about the same as last reported ($256 a day), perhaps $10-15 less per day now. I’m working on increasing this, but it ain’t easy!

  15. bloggernoob says:

    its good to set mini goals. its like the curse jar(put a quarter every time u say a bad word) good luck with it tyler. i missed the first six. i always love a good bet. tyler u still play sc?

  16. Stupid Tyler says:

    That’s stupid, you should focus on quality instead of quantity time. I do not see any point in motivating one to work longer, why should i even be working for 46hrs a week? lol

  17. steve sway says:

    Tyler, you really need to get off your lazy behind and get to work. I am appalled that you need to force yourself to work 40+ hours a week.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the bulk of your income comes for pokerforums.net and it would a damn shame if anything ever happened to see this dry up. But now that you have all the free time in the world to explore other entrepreneurial avenues you should be doing just that. I would have no sympathy for you whatsoever if you sit back and rest on your laurels and this main income source were to somehow disappear.

    I can’t tell you how jealous I am that you have so much free time (yet squander it). I work a full time + job in Japan – 60-75 hours a week and can only dream of my web projects at this time. Get to work buddy. You’re a bright guy but just need to wake (grow) up. Sure you got lucky but there’s so much more you can do to ensure your career will be a success.

    Remember, there is no one else to tell you what time to get up and start working. You need to push yourself or suffer the consequences. I also hope that you are saving a good portion of your earnings for the dry times.

    • Tyler Cruz says:

      I agree with most of what you say Steve.. the fact that I do these work challenges should attest to that.

      But I should also mention that it isn’t as easy as you may think to just work hard day after day. Part of the point of working from home and for yourself is to relax; I could work a regular 40-hour-a-week job and have arguably more ‘secure’ income, but then I’m working far more than I want to.. or should be for that matter.

      However, I also understand that I need to work more in order to grow my operations to where I am financially wealthy and can handle any big problems.

  18. Remo says:

    Total cop out

    But I should also mention that it isn’t as easy as you may think to just work hard day after day

    thats what you do if your in a 9 – 6, so why so different if on your own, thats most people motivation to be in that situation

    Part of the point of working from home and for yourself is to relax

    Agreed, when 60 when you can spend $256 a day without just having made it during the day

    I could work a regular 40-hour-a-week job and have arguably more ’secure’ income,

    that has pretty much nothing to do with it, a big difference between working for yourself and enjoying at a particular age what seems like great money/salary

    Whether for a big company or for yourself you should have a plan, that should include growth by X in income for the employed or alternatively the same for the self employed

    I would be more concerned about a 3 year plan than a 46 hr week.

    Each to there own, but fast forward a few years whats the plan – how do I buy a bigger place? how to I achieve greater audience growth for my forums? what could I introduce that will help retain and grow my users

    Your stats are harding “that” impressive, and I am trying to be constructive.

    Whats your average visit time per user?
    Average page views per visitor?
    Time spent, increasing or decreasing?

    If I had an active user base on Poker Forums as you appear to do, trust me there is some simple things non forum related you could grow on that

    as I side note, I like the new blog design, your response to Steve Sway just annoyed me a lot

  19. Remo says:

    blockquotes dont appear to work so my above post may take some extra reading

PeerFly

Leave a Reply