Experiments in Productivity or, How I Applied These 7 Tips To Work More Effectively

In the past little while I’ve been harder on myself than usual regarding my “productive time” or time spent on activities and priorities that are both important and lead to income generation. With the cancellation of a major project I was looking to undertake, a dip in other projects, and unfocused/changing priorities have resulted in excessive web-surfing and poor time management.

On my best days I would wake up with a laser-focused vision of what I wanted to accomplish. On the worst days 4 0′clock would roll around and I would wonder where the day went.

So what’s a guy to do?

My solution was to start fresh.  I rolled up my sleeves and dug out a few productivity hacks that I had heard about but failed to actually implement.

The goal? Get my ass in gear and start getting more shit done. New habits are not easy to adopt. Worse we often take on several things that we want to differently and then expect them to work and function as planned overnight. They won’t. A habit is all about repetition and trying to take on too many will just lead to none of them getting used at all.

My biggest problem? Distraction. When your a web-worker you do everything at the computer – there’s literally countless cute shiny things that can pull your attention away from what your supposed to be doing. Facebook, Twitter, MSN chat, Email, Reddit, Blogs are my biggest distractions. Sometimes I feel like I have the worst ADD – but I know I’m not alone.

When it comes to working online, I am the worlds worst multitasker and have accepted the fact that I cannot work on multiple tasks at once. I’ve tried really hard to do multiple things at once but I most of the time I end up doing something completely different than what I was originally doing – often forgetting that I was working on something else.

So here’s are a few things I’m going to try.

Cut out mailing list subscriptions

This is a huge distraction for me. I must have at least 20-30 different subscriptions to ecourses, newsletters, blogs, and who knows what else. I’ve started to pair down the number of subscriptions and blog updates because goddamnit I could spend half a day going through them all, and they just end up cause more stress because I feel the need to read them before I actually delete them. There’s something about getting something delivered to your inbox that makes you feel like you need to take action on. If if I ever hope to reach holy grail of email, inbox zero, in a timely fashion, I can’t spend hours in the inbox.

The best action I’ve taken is hitting the unsubscribe button so I don’t feel the need to take action on it. If it’s not there, it won’t bother me.

Don’t check email first thing in the morning

This comes directly from the Tim Ferris Four Hour Work Week school of thought. When he implemented this change he said it was a life-altering move. I tried it this morning and guess what? I got an important to-do off my to-do list scratched off before 10AM. As much as it is difficult to take up new habits it’s difficult to break old ones too. I resisted the urge and instead decided to get something more important accomplished and then “reward” myself with checking email after I was done. It sounds kind of stupid but it actually works.

Did something catch fire during that short-period of not catching up with email?

Definitely not. Match point: Ziarko.

Check email at set times during the day

I have yet to fully implement this but I know it can be effective because just today I caught myself switching back forth between a task and my inbox much like I’ve always done. Baaaaaaaad. There’s nothing gained by checking and responding to email as soon as it arrives. Yes there are urgent things that arrive and need to be taken action on, but your world will not implode around you if you respond at Noon vs. 9AM. This depends on what you do of course – some jobs make you live in the inbox no matter what.

The ultra conservative way is to check twice a day at 11AM and 4PM, but a more realistic approach I’ll likely adopt is 11AM, 2PM, and 5PM – which allows for time to respond and check responses to responses in the same day.

Take up residence in Evernote

Evernote is quite an amazing peice of software. It allows you to store information that automatically saves and syncronizes to the web and mobile devices. It’s fantastic for jotting down notes, storing grocery lists, storing images, receipts, drafts of blog posts, whatever. One of my favourite features is the auto-save feature and the search functionality. Once something is input it gets automatically saved. You’ll never have to worry about losing something because MS Office decided to crash on you again.

Evernote is not new for me of course, I’ve been using it to organize my ideas, my goal lists, and project notes for the most part – and most recently I started saving entire webpages for research that I’m doing for another project. Awesome tool – check it out and prepare to amazed.

Physically write things down

I’ve been all over the map when it comes to to do lists. At the beginning of the year I was pretty hardcore. Then I read somewhere that To Do lists were overwhelming and caused you to become a slave to them, which I agreed with, and I stopped doing them altogether. The end result? I was completely overwhelmed. I was better off writing stuff down and you know what – I’m going to stick to it.

I’m not taking about writing a list in notepad or Evernote. I’ve tried that, and it sucks. There’s something psychologically calming about writing down your to dos and having them in front you. If you throw them in Evernote, it’s way to easy to have them sitting in the background while you spend 45 minutes on Facebook. On a notepad, they serve as a constant reminded of what needs to be done.

Speaking of To Do lists, my To do list is a slight modification of Erica Douglass’s excellent video post on the subject. Essentially my aim is to write out all the things I want to accomplish for the week on a sheet of paper in a notebook.

I use the weekly format because it doesn’t lock me into tasks on particular days, I think about my week on Sunday night before Monday comes around so I can hit the ground running, and I don’t have to transfer all that I want to get done from the weekly sheet to the daily list if something gets bumped.

Which leads me to my next point…

Limiting daily tasks to the 2-3 most important, get those done first.

This is another widely adopted method from Tim Ferriss where you ask yourself, If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? And that’s how you figure out with of those items on your to do list are mission-critical. For me, it’s the tasks that push projects forward and help  business grow.

If it doesn’t fulfil that criteria, it gets pushed down the list and not done until the important tasks are accomplished first

Set deadlines

If you give yourself the entire morning to write a blog post or to respond to email, that’s exactly how long it will take. Beside every item on my to do list I put a rough estimate of how long it will take to accomplish that task and try to stick to it. Yesterday I started this blog post (90 minutes), and today I’ve alloted 15 minutes to completing the post, editing, and posting. Perhaps I should have alloted more? Hey it’s not a perfect system people! I just started this thing yesterday.

So there you have it. The 7 Habits of highly effective Ziarko. It might be useful to do a check-in on all of these in a month or so.. so stay tuned.

What productive habits have you starting applying to keep yourself from being distracted and work more effectively? Leave your response in the comments below.

*Photo by totalaldo