Have you ever experienced a time when your productivity just soared and you got everything done & more that you’d planned to? How fab did it feel?
There’s a whole industry now around GTD (Getting Things Done) – from complex systems to anti-productivity systems, simplified and elegant.
I like to think I can be pretty productive when I put my mind to it and I realise that actually I could be a whole lot more productive than I currently am if I choose to be…but earning a decent enough income on approximately 5 serious hours of work a week (that doesn’t include the blogging, some of the marketing and general RSS feed/blog reading which I count as leisure time), I reckon I’m not totally rubbish at being productive.
These are my tips on how to be more productive & get the ‘right’ things done each day:
- Create a goal card, vision or mission statement for your business which you read every single morning to focus you for the day ahead.
- Make a To Do list with no more than 3 things on it at the end of each day for the next day – read this To Do list after doing number 1.
- Turn off your email alerts, Facebook alerts, skype alerts, mobile phones or disconnect totally from the internet if you really want to get some serious work done without any distractions.
- When you are using the internet, create a separate Bookmarks folder on your tool bar of your most commonly used links so you don’t have to go searching for them every time amongst all your other bookmarks.
- If you like to read lots of blogs, make sure you use a feedreader (I use Google Feedreader) and if, like me, you sometimes have over 100 updates to read ensure you use the “List View”, so you can scan through the headlines and only expand any of interest.
- Keep your desktop free from clutter.
- Regularly (every 3 months or so) tidy up your online (and/or offline) filing system & folders so you can find documents easily.
- Add Quick Launch icons to your Taskbar (or Dock on a Mac) so you can launch your most-used applications quickly.