“The problem comes when you postpone decisions in the hope that a perfect answer will come to you later. It won’t. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.”

- Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

“I can’t believe I can’t get on Twitter today.” I actually just said that out loud. “Life ain’t right without Twitter,” my father-in-law responded. He’s right. Or at least that’s the way it feels.

I’m in the middle of the woods at my in-laws home. Ridgeville, South Carolina to be precise. They left Daniel Island recently, a home in the middle of everything cool, for a secluded home 30 minutes from anything. Their French style home now sits surrounded by the most beautiful snow many of us has ever seen in these here parts. It’s been 21 years since the South Carolina lowcountry has seen anything like this.

We haven’t had electricity in 12 hours. We can’t leave because trees now hang over the long driveway and we can’t get the neighborhood gate open. I’m not sure our little BMW could make it through the snow covering the driveway even if that wasn’t the case.

We have no water because the pump runs off electricity. We have a gas fireplace but the blower also runs off electricity. It’s getting cold. I have no Internet and as I write this word, I have 18 minutes of juice left in my macbook pro. I didn’t bring any magazines or books, but I do have a healthy stack of my mother-in-law’s Coastal Living and Southern Living magazines I could read.

You could say that I’m in paradise. We can cook with our gas-powered stove. We have a full supply of wine and beer. We don’t have a coffee maker, but we were able to heat water on the stove and make coffee the old fashion way. I have my wife, my dog, and some cool in-laws to hang out with. And we are so secluded that all we can see are white trees.

Still, I find myself full of anxiety. What popped in the news this morning? Who else is without power? What’s happening on Facebook? I could be finishing that website. I could be catching up on all the geek news I haven’t had time to read over the past month. What are people tweeting right now?

I guess I could whip out a pen and notepad and write a couple campaign plans I’m late on. I could finish some Internet strategy plans. I will have about 6 press releases to write next week. I guess I could get ahead of the ball. Actually, I have 3 emails that need to go out on Monday and I haven’t written even one of them yet.

Or I could just write this blog post. Although I better type fast because my macbook pro will now die in 12 minutes. I love Apple products. I hate Apple batteries. My iPhone is completely dead. Elizabeth has juice, but she has no signal. I guess the phone towers in the area are down too. Who knows. I can’t get on the Internet to find out.

I love working. Maybe too much. The problem is that politics is much more than just doing work and making money. Yesterday I met with my financial advisor in Summerville who asked how many hours I work. We started talking about time vs money and while I’ve read just about everything there is to read about productivity, the fact is that in politics, most of the time, more time doesn’t mean more money.

Too much time is wasted reading news. Way too much time is wasted gossiping, reading bullshit blog posts, and just getting caught up in the rumor mill. The fact is that this career means you work too much, have no hobbies, become way too physically unhealthy, and even more mentally unhealthy. And you don’t make any more money.

In fact, in another career, I’m sure I’d double my current salary with the current amount of time I work. Why am I’m even sharing this on my blog? Well, I believe the large majority of this trend goes back to the Internet. We’re becoming more addicted and much less productive.

It’s 10 am. We just called the electric company and all they can say is that it’s “going to be a while.” By the time you read this post I’ll be back online, frantically trying to catch up on all I missed.

All this is showing me that we have become too connected. I’ve become too connected. There’s no time to just shut down. Even when I go on vacation, I’m hitting refresh on my email, twitter, and facebook apps every 5 minutes. Yeah, I’m just bitching now, but when I started this blog I said that I’m going to talk about what its like to be a political operative and an entrepreneur. This is what its like. So much anxiety about what I’m not doing that rather than spend my time escaping in a Coastal Living magazine, I write a blog post.

With the 4 minutes of battery life left, I’ll tell you about my dream. I hate Columbia, South Carolina. I’m there for two buildings – the South Carolina Statehouse and Williams Brice Stadium. That’s its. I long for the day that I can move an hour and a half southeast to Charleston. I want to live so close to the beach that I can smell the saltwater. I don’t have to live beachfront. I just want to live close enough to smell it, a 5-minute drive to a marsh front bar. I want to do politics from my porch, and while I might be too connected right now, I believe that connectivity will allow me to accomplish my goal.

I’ve been offered a few jobs on DC recently. I don’t want that either. No Washington drama. No Columbia drama. Just the beach, beer, good music, and real work, where my income is directly related to the material I pump out.

Is that possible in politics? I think so. We have cars, planes, and the Internet. I don’t see why it’s not possible from Key West either. This Coastal Living article says it has the most beautiful sunset in America. I agree. We went there on our honeymoon.

The snow is starting to fall from the trees and there isn’t a cloud in this amazing blue sky. Not one. My battery is gone in 1 minute. This blog post could have been written in 41 tweets.

Catching the Wave from Wesley Donehue on Vimeo.

• TC: Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)
• Ad Age: Staples vs. Office Depot: Comparing Their Media Strategies
• Internet Evolution: Take Charge of Your Online ‘Personal Brand’
• Micropersuasion: Streams from the Road: Trends from Friends – The Steve Rubel Lifestream
• Wired: Top Ten Geekiest Constructed Languages
• TwiTip: Play Bingo On Twitter, Win Free Prizes
• The Onion: Market Evidently Capable Of Supporting More Than One Reality Show About Cake
• Problogger: How to find Readers for a Business Blog
• Official Google Blog: I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

State Rep-Elect Dan Hamilton twittered last week about the new storage application Drop Box and I have to tell you folks, I’m seriously freakin’ pumped about it.

Get hooked up with Drop Box and throw away that key chain thumb drive. Just like this:

Drop Box is a storage application that allows you to securely backup your documents and retrieve them from a different location.  Instead of carrying around that stupid thumb drive, you can just upload your document to getdropbox.com and get it from any computer with Internet access.

That’s cool and all, but I’m more pumped about the ability to help transfer documents. Lauren, our badass designer, likes to send me massive image files that clog up my inbox and slow down my computer. With Drop Box Lauren can just upload the image file and let me know it’s there. I can download it without slowing down everything else I’m doing.

Do yourself a favor and get Drop Box.  You will be pumped too!

2nd in my productivity series.

I’m not productive yet, but everyday I’m becoming more productive. It’s something I’ve been working on for weeks with the help of different books, websites, and other simple experimentations.

I based my productivity on Pareto’s 80-20 Principle which was first brought to my attention by Tim Ferris in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich.” Unfortunately applying many of Ferris’ ideas are impossible for a political operative, but I’ve taken his basic premises, experimented, and found a few things that’s worked for me. The result has been more productivity, more free time, and a happier me.

Tim Ferris talks about total lifestyle redesign. I haven’t reached that point yet, only made my daily life a little more productive. I plan on taking bigger steps over the next few weeks in both my personal and professional lives, which for a political operative, is so intertwined that there’s really no difference at all.

Let’s start with my daily work schedule.

Stop working 9-5. It just doesn’t work anymore for those who wish to be successful. We are operating in a 24-hour news cycle, a new global economy. The world is moving fast and if you work 9-5 you are going to miss it. My average workday starts around 6:30 am and ends around 11:00 pm, even during non-election years. I’ve been working like that for years, but now I am figuring out how exactly to use my time.

It all starts with the night before. I strongly suggest creating a to-do list before you quit working for the evening. That way you don’t have to spend your morning formulating your to-do list and you are able to immediately start working.

I wake up pretty early and start working around 6:30 am by going through my RSS reader (which I will explain in a minute) for about one hour to read all the day’s top stories. I tag those stories in delicious and post them to my blog for you to read every morning.

I try to get in the office around 7:45, giving me plenty of time to get some essential writing done before the 9:00 crowd starts blowing up my phone. Half of what I do requires writing and it’s very hard to do when the phone starts ringing and co-workers flood into your office.

Each day is different, but my most important bit of advice is not to stay at the office just because you feel like you have to. As I said, I work until around 11:00 pm Monday – Thursday, so I finish my to-do list as fast as possible and leave work, either running errands, reading a book, or spending time on strategic thinking. I do not under any circumstance stay at the office just to stay at the office. Doing so forces me to surf the Internet tirelessly, wasting valuable time that I could be spending on creative thinking.

Another big mistake is going home. Don’t do that unless you just have nothing to do, which shouldn’t be the case if you are truly attempting to be a successful person. I’ve found that successful people are always trying to find ways to better themselves. Sitting at home watching soaps doesn’t fit that characteristic.

I’ve also found that working from home and mixing the locations that you should be working and relaxing is very dangerous to your health. I’ve made that mistake and made my home my second office. I worked my self sick…seriously. I’ve worked around the clock for so long that I ended up in the bed for a week. That was just stupid. As Timothy Ferris writes “separate your environments – designate a single space for work and solely work – or you will never be able to escape it.”

If you leave the office during the day like I do, go to Starbucks, a park, or somewhere else that you can be productive. I for one like to go to Starbucks or the gym. I typically go to both every day. In the morning around 10:00 or 11:00 I like to get my blood flowing with some Starbucks. I usually get strategy memos and such done there. Again around 3:00 in the afternoon I find myself sluggish and unable to think creatively. That’s when I hit the gym. Going to the gym daily for one hour gives me alone time with my iPod and a natural energy high that fuels creativity.

The late afternoon and early evening is reserved for phone calls and doing any urgent task that arose during the day. The late evening is spent blogging, reading, and formulating the next day’s to-do list. I do not take calls in the late evening unless they are emergencies.

Obviously I do a lot that isn’t included in this post, but I’m just trying to give you an idea of why I don’t work 9-5. I say I work from 6:30 am – 11:00 pm every day, but the truth is that I just mix a lot of my personal and professional life so that I can continue to think creatively, stay up-to-date on all the latest news, and maximize the amount of productively at the office.

In my next post I will tell you how I use an RSS Reader, limit my email checking, turnoff my wireless internet, and manage my call time throughout the day to limit information flow and distractions.

Believe it or not, it’s because of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

It all started at this year’s State of the State when Governor Mark Sanford once again continuously quoted Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat.” After years of hearing Governor Sanford recite Friedman during speech after speech I finally decided to read the book. After all, how can I as a political operative understand South Carolina politics if I have no clue what our Governor is talking about?

It turns out that the book is more about outsourcing than anything else and much of the book concentrates on the use of Virtual Assistants and both the professional and personal outsourcing of our lives.  Friedman tells the stories of multibillion-dollar companies outsourcing everything from software development to everyone’s personal favorite – customer service calls.  Most intriguing is that Friedman explains that outsourcing isn’t just for the rich.  Many small business people are outsourcing parts of their business. For example, a chain of McDonalds is outsourcing their drive through order taking.  No, seriously. The customer orders through the normal speaker that we are all used to, but instead of talking to a person at the McDonald’s, they talk to a call center operator on the other side of the country. The operator plugs their order into a computer which is read directly by the McDonald’s cooks. According to Friedman’s research, McDonald’s is saving seconds per customer and although that may not seem like a lot, those seconds are adding up.  They are servicing more customers each day and paying the call center operators far less than they would have to pay an employee at the McDonald’s location.

I became fascinated with Friedman’s outsourcing research and decided to try it on my own. When we opened our Internet company Under The Power Lines, I really wanted to hire a full time web coder, but because we were just starting out, we could not afford it.  I decided to save money by outsourcing my web coding to a WordPress coder in Chicago.  When my business started to grow I hired two more web coders. I am now able to build websites cheaper and offer faster customer service, but most importantly, I don’t have to manage full time employees. That frees up a great deal of my time to spend serving clients and being creative.

That led me to the idea of productivity. One of my best friends is my former college roommate Clark Covington.  Clark is one of the most innovative and driven men I have ever met.  He is the owner of several Internet based companies, makes good money, but unlike many successful Entrepreneurs, Clark always seems happy. He’s always been a very jolly fella, but now Clark has the money to do what he wants to do when he wants to do.

Completely hooked on how Clark got this way, I just started asking questions one day over a couple beers. Clark explained that through outsourcing, he is able to concentrate on the functions of his company that makes customers happy and brings in more business. He outsources the functions that are most time consuming giving him the ability to concentrate on what’s most important.

WOW! I just couldn’t believe what Clark was telling me, so I started digging deeper.  That’s when I stumbled across a book that has completely changed the way I operate – Timothy Ferris’ “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”

The title of the book is a little misleading. It’s not about how everyone can make millions by working just four hours a week. The book is a blueprint on how you can make work more productive, giving you more free time to enjoy life.  It’s all based on Vilfredo Pareto’s 80-20 Rule.

During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s Pareto observed that 80% of Italy’s income went to 20% of its population. That has been adapted as a business principle stating that 80% of a companies income comes from 20% of it’s customers.  In the concept of productivity, we can mold this principle into a lifestyle design rule – 80% of your productivity comes form 20% of what you actually do.

Over the last month I have used that rule for my daily operations and although I am not where I want to be, I have steadily increased my productivity and my free time.  In my next post I will tell you how I have used Ferris’ ideas in my political career, what’s worked and what hasn’t. Over the next few weeks I’ll keep you updated on new methods I’m trying. Hopefully you can use some of these ideas to increase your productivity too.