In the last 13 years, Geoff McDonald has read 550 books and written sixty plus Book Rapper ebooks, as well as over 1000 blog posts. And now he’s launching two books on the same day, Done and Project Done.
McDonald has always been prolific, great with ideas and creativity, but not so strong at execution. It wasn’t until he bought a new laptop computer that he realised the untapped potential of all that creativity, and the problems he had with not finishing his various projects. Whilst copying over files he found 25 unfinished books.
I was like, “Oh, my God, how much of my time?” You know what’s going on, that if I’d finished even half of them life would have been different. I’d had a whole bunch of products I’d know I’d be known for, a whole bunch of my ideas, and in that moment, I realized my life had been about building this body of work. And I haven’t actually finished half my body of work. Heaven forbid, had a lightning bolt come down and zapped me on the head in a moment I would have had nothing to show. I would have had a whole bunch of unfinished stuff to show for my life.
In this episode, we discuss the following:
You can find out more about McDonald and getting things done here.
Mel: We're going to spend the next half hour or so talking books and publishing. I'd like to welcome Geoff McDonald. Hi Jeff.
Geoff: Hi, Mel. Great to be on your show.
Mel: Geoff has written a book called Done: Why You Fail To Finish Your Projects and What To Do About It. Everyone who knows me knows exactly why I've got Geoff on. He's read 550 books in the last 30 years, written 60 plus books under the guise of book report which we'll talk about shortly. He's got 1000 posts and over100 podcast episodes. And that's just in his spare time because he’s also a Public Ppeaker. He's an ideas architect and the list goes on.
Mel: Let's start with your current project, Project Done. Help us out, Geoff. We’re writers and some of us are perhaps bits of procrastinators. It’s what attracted me to your book in the first place because I believe you had that problem yourself, even though your list doesn’t show it.
Geoff: I can point to that list of all these things well done but I'm probably closer to you than you think, and I think it's an interesting one that there's probably a little tipping point there. Basically, I did my strength profile a while back and I realised I had almost no strength around the execution stuff. And pretty much that summed up what I'd been doing. Not finishing.
A few years ago, I bought a new laptop computer. I previously had a desktop that had this really big hard drive on it. When I got the laptop, it had a really small hard drive on it, so I couldn't just press the button to copy all the files. I had to manually sort through them. I found an old book file. I had spent a lot of time on that one, but I never finished it, and this went on and on.
It turned out there were 25 unfinished books and they weren't just headline blind folder. There were l50 to 100, 150 pages on each of these books. I was like “oh, my God, how much of my time?” You know what's going on, that if I'd finished even
