How to Get Free Internet for Your Laptop at Starbucks

Free Internet Wi-Fi on Your Laptop

First Published: August 13, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

Whether you are an Internet Entrepreneur, or just a regular Internet addict, chances are high that the idea of having high-speed Internet on your laptop while sipping a cup of coffee has crossed your mind. But the question is, is it possible to get free Internet Wi-Fi access Hotspot service for your laptop while having a cup of coffee for free?

Starbucks coffee shops in Canada and in the US offer free high-speed Internet access for free. To use this free Wi-Fi access, you need to have a Starbucks.com user name and password. To obtain this user name and password, you need to buy a Starbucks card.

In Canada, if you are buying your card at a Starbucks location, the minimum amount you need to purchase is $5. Once you have a card, you will be able to register for a username and password and then you will be able to use free high-speed Internet.

A Starbucks card comes with many other perks. My favourite one is unlimited brewed coffee refills with any size cup. Free Internet access is limited to two hours daily; I think this is more than enough for most of our usual daily needs. This program works very similar way in the US as well. Visit Starbucks.com and Starbucks.ca for more information.

I enjoy having a cup of coffee outside while working on my laptop. Starbucks will be able to redirect a good number of customers towards them from other coffee retailers, just by simply having Wi-Fi friendly shops. This is very good for Starbucks from a business perspective. Soon, other coffee players that are not offering free W-Fi, will have to offer this service to hold onto their customers. 

How to Catch Up On Backlog Tasks

Handling an Accumulated Backlog of Work

I have a schedule for most of the tasks I perform on a daily basis. I know exactly what I am going to be doing on each day of a week. For example, I know what my assigned tasks are for next week’s Monday, or even for next month’s Monday. This strategy works out to be perfect because instead of doing one big task for hours, I break it down into days and I don’t feel like I am doing something that is draining my energy and taking too much time. The main problem with this strategy is that if you skip a day (due to an appointment or some unexpected events) or a week (due to vacation or business trip), you will be overwhelmed by the accumulated backlog of tasks and it will not be easy to get back into the flow again. How can you handle situations like this when you are way behind?

My simple solution is that I let go the days or week I missed and start again from the beginning of the cycle. Let me give you an example to make it a little clearer. My workout schedule is something like this:

 - Monday: Yoga

- Tuesday: Lower Body Workouts

 - Wednesday: Squash

 - Sunday: Upper Body Workouts

Now, if I miss one day, there is no point in me doing the rest because each of these is part of a program and they complement each other. So if I miss one day, instead of going to the next day it makes sense for me to start it all over again from day 1.

Another example should make it even clearer. Instead of writing a full article in one sitting, I break it down into parts and write a little bit every day. Let’s say I am scheduled to write an article for the Entrepreneur Journey site this week. I would write a little bit daily for the whole week to make it a complete article. Now, if I miss a couple of days in the beginning or in the middle, there is no way for me to finish the full article on time. So, instead of pressuring myself, I would set aside writing for that week and start again the next week.

The strategies mentioned above may or may not work for you – depending on how you handle your daily tasks. If you like to tackle one big task at a time, this may not work for you. In that case, you need to come up with other strategies to get rid of your backlogged tasks. However, if you handle smaller tasks daily like me, take a break if your are off schedule – you will be surprised to see the renewed level of energy and enthusiasm when you restart your cycle after a few days of unexpected but calculated break.

India and ASEAN Sign Trade Deal

India Continues Its Endeavour

First Published: August 18, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

As India continues its endeavour to become one of the world’s global economic superpowers, the latest piece of good news for the country’s economists came this week when the country agreed a free trade pact with the ASEAN complex, a powerful negotiating bloc made up of ten South East Asian countries. This pact is expected to greatly strengthen India’s external trade muscle at a time when it has the eyes of the financial world upon it. Much of the talk in financial forums over the past couple of years has related to the BRIC nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China. These four countries are seen as being greatly influential to the future economic path which the world will take.

The ASEAN countries – Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – account for much of South Asia’s wealth outside of China, Japan and North and South Korea and as partners wield a considerable amount of influence and purchasing power. By coming to an agreement with this trading bloc India has guaranteed itself the opportunity to trade with the countries without the imposition of tariffs – a major reason why many countries can struggle to make the economic impact they would wish to. With a list of natural resources that makes India a potentially very desirable trading partner, getting such agreements in place is hugely beneficial going forward.

Economic strength is something that gets built over time and needs to be accumulated in the face of challenges. As such India will take some time to be up there at the top of the world’s nations by GDP, but such a time is considered to be highly likely if not certain by the world’s top economists. This is why the nations involved in ASEAN see it as important to be involved with India. A country which brings in a lot of money through international trade will be in a position to spend a lot, too. Being geographically relatively close, India and the ASEAN countries will no doubt find a lot of opportunities for trade. The other economies in the area are considered to be too strong (China, Japan and South Korea) for working as a bloc to be worth their time, or too insular (North Korea) to even consider it.

India itself is geographically in an interesting position. Its closest neighbour, Pakistan, is not one of its allies due to the history between the countries. Therefore India is likely to continue to look further afield in order to satisfy its trading potential. Also in the pipeline is a national space program which will require no small amount of materials from outside the borders of India. In this respect it will be interesting to see what shape the trading between India and ASEAN (and its other trading partners) will take in the years to come. There has never been a better time to look for a trade agreement with India, and this should be borne out when we start seeing concrete figures.

The Importance of Time Management in Personal Development

Time Management and Personal Development

One of the biggest reasons that people do not achieve anything in their lives is because they get lazy. Another big reason is that people say they simply do not have the time. A person will say they would love to learn a new language, but they just do not have the time to do it. This is incorrect and a cheap way out. It is a way for people to keep from bettering themselves because it is a good excuse. In fact, you do have the time because it comes down to time management. In order to practice good time management, you need to do the following:

1. Make a list of the things you do in a day that are done every day. This can include making meals, getting ready for work, going to work, being at work and spending time with the family. Add all this up and determine how many hours that is.

2. Add in eight hours sleep and then subtract the total from 24 hours.

3. See how many hours you have at this point. Those are hours you can use for personal development

So, if you spend eight hours at work, one hour going to work, one hour getting read, one hour preparing meals and three hours with the family, you get the following amount of hours: 14. Add in eight hours and that comes to 20 hours, which leaves you four hours every day that you can use to better yourself. Four hours multiplied by 365 days means that in one year, if you keep to a schedule, you have the potential to use 1,460 hours to better yourself, that comes to a whopping 60 full hours per year. That is a huge amount of time you can use to change who you are and to better yourself. Granted you will not use all that time for personal development. Movies, walks, sports will all take time out of that but even cutting that in half you get one full month of time to better yourself. That is a month you can use to lose weight, learn a language and more and all it takes is scheduling your time properly. Should you sit on the couch and watch television instead? Sure that is okay, as long as it fits into your time management scheme, however don’t let it become a habit or your decision to better yourself will fail to the background.

You need to make yourself a time budget when you are trying to better yourself personally. This will tell you how much time you can spend on something and you cannot go over budget. You got five hours of television a week? Well, use them wisely. You can’t go over with a financial budget, and you cannot go over with a time budget. That is what bettering yourself comes down to, having discipline to make the commitment to change who you are and what you are.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on May 28, 2011

Career Success Without A Real Job

Success Without A Real Job – ADJ Book Review

First Published: ADawnJournal.com August 19, 2009

What Is This Book About?

Ernie sent me this book a while ago, and I have been reading it during lunch two times a week for the last two months. I have only so many hours a day and working a corporate job and being an Internet entrepreneur at the same time makes it hard to have time for anything else. Career Success Without A Real Job talks about exactly what I am trying to achieve – to live a free life doing something I love and something I’m passionate about.

Difficulties I Have Reading Zelinski’s Book

Whenever I read Zelinski’s books, I get the feeling that he believes exactly what I believe in and we share the same perspectives on virtually anything you can possibly imagine – such as living with fewer possessions and living on your own terms. It is very hard to read and even review a book if it feels like you are the one who wrote or should have written this book – how can possibly you review your own book? I talked about this more in another post.

Real Job and Unreal Job

Ernie talks about real jobs in this book. A real job is working in a corporation or for someone else with no freedom and flexibility. An unreal job is something you truly enjoy with a lot of flexibility and freedom. Also, the author talks about unconventional business. An unconventional business is a business that does not require any employees, with minimal to no presence on your part, and very low start-up cost. I can’t think of a better example than my Internet entrepreneurship.

An Inspirational Book

Career Success Without A Real Job is mainly an inspirational book – it does not lead you to a specific roadmap for choosing your unreal job. However, it gives you enough information and resources to help you explore your best possible unreal job. The author provides many questionnaires throughout the book to help you recognize your career strengths, steps to create a dream career, questions to help you find your life’s calling, questions to test if you can be self-employed, characteristics to recognize an ideal business and much more. Also, in this book, the author provides lists mentioning 100 of the world’s coolest unreal jobs, top excuses to stay in the corporate world, advantages and disadvantages of being self-employed, lists showing why the corporate world isn’t all that as it seems, ways to sell information, and many more useful lists.

The Work Model for People Too Prosperous to Do Mornings

The above is the title of Chapter 7 that is dedicated to Internet entrepreneurship. It is no wonder that I read the above chapter before reading anything else. The author was able to give a good summary of what kind of things you can do online and what to expect. One misconception we have is that you can be rich doing Internet business overnight – and the author points out these and other misconceptions we have about Internet entrepreneurship. Chapter 7 is a very resourceful chapter and I suggest you read this chapter with the utmost attention. Here are some lists the author mentions in this chapter:

– Examples of Profitable Internet Business
– Top-Ten Ways to Make Money on the Internet
– Ten Questions to Help You Find Your Internet Niches
– Seven Main Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website

Some Important Highlights from Career Success Without A Real Job

Here are some highlights I must mention before I finish writing this review:

– Success as an entrepreneur takes time. Don’t expect to things to happen overnight.
– Achieving Career Success Without A Real Job is like climbing a mountain. There will
be risks, disappointments, and adventure.
– Ordinary individuals were able to achieve extraordinary success – and so can you.
– It’s never too late to pursue your dream career.
– The strongest single virtue for attaining success is self esteem – believing in yourself. – Believe in you, your dreams, your talent, and that it is possible for you to reach your
dreams. You will succeed.
– Don’t be afraid to spend money on your self-development and the stuff you need
along the way to reach your goals.
– Creativity is your best asset. Explore it, culture it, use it, and grow rich.
– Try to live with fewer possessions. Material possessions are an obstacle to set your
soul free and live a happy, unreal life.

My Take

This is a must-read book for everyone – even if you love your current corporate job and have no plans to quit for an unreal job. Who knows, maybe you will look at life from a different perspective after reading Career Success Without A Real Job.