Need to Be More Productive? Follow These 5 Tips

Chances are you've complained that there are "only" 24 hours in a day. Between work, your spouse, the kids, and all of your responsibilities around the house, making the most out of those 24 hours is crucial. If you're like most people, your productivity could use a boost.

So, how do you do it?

Follow these 5 tips. They can help you get more done without feeling like you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off!

1. Get up earlier.

This is probably the last thing you want to hear, but being rushed in the morning sets the tone for the entire day - and it's not a good tone. If you currently go running out of bed and into the shower, then out the door with coffee in hand, you're just unnecessarily stressing yourself out. By getting up an hour earlier, you can give your brain a chance to wake up and prioritize the rest of your day - without being rushed.

2. Never multi-task.

Some people brag about their ability to multi-task, but how focused can they really be on six different things at once? If you really want to be productive, focus on one task at a time. That way, you can give you full attention to it - which increases your chances of doing it well. By focusing on one thing at a time, you'll start to notice you actually get things done much faster.

3. Avoid "Smartphone Syndrome".

With all of those apps, social networking shortcuts, emails, and games, is it any wonder that most people are completely fascinated by their smartphones? However, all of the tapping, texting, and browsing you're doing is getting in the way of the rest of your day.

If you really want to be productive, turn off your smartphone and check it on your lunch break. Don't worry... that witty email from your buddy or that funny comment on your Facebook wall will still be there.

4. Hire a virtual assistant.

It may sound like something a celebrity would get, but virtual assistants are easy to find and inexpensive to have. By outsourcing menial tasks, you can focus on the more important issues that require your personal attention.

There are plenty of VA companies out there. Or, you can head to websites like Fiverr to find people who are willing to do easy work for low prices.

5. Give time wasters the heave-ho.

Every office has one - the guy who spends most of his day going from desk to desk, shooting the breeze. Sure, having social interaction is a great way to keep your sanity during the work day, but having too much of it can be a bad thing. If you get distracted by conversations, you're never going to get your work done - and you'll only wind up getting more stressed out.

So, what do you do? Politely tell your office time-wasters that you'd love to catch up later - as soon as you finish your current project. If you want, you can spend your lunch hour chit-chatting with co-workers. If you're consistently polite, you won't have to worry about hurting anyone's feelings - and you won't have to worry about getting distracted from your work.

Tony Mase is a serious student of the works of Wallace D. Wattles and the publisher of the "A Powerful Life: The Lost Writings of Wallace D. Wattles" ebook that includes "Time" by Wallace D. Wattles along with twenty-four other rare books and articles by Wallace D. Wattles. Grab your copy now at: http://www.wallacedwattles.com/

Time Management on the Job - How to Be More Productive at Work

Time management is a skill you can improve. To improve your time management skills, you need to know what to focus on, and how to focus.

Here are ten ways you can use to improve your time management skills over time:

Work on the high ROI stuff. Apply Pareto's Principle (The "80/20 Rule"). Work on the 20% of activities that produce the 80% of your results. For example, rather than just do a lot of tasks just because they are easy to do, ask yourself, "What do I want to accomplish?" Chances are you can find smarter or better plays, with more leverage or more impact. Trade-up, and do less to accomplish more.
Team up. Pair up with other people and improve your own effectiveness. Ask yourself, "Who can I team up with to get results? How can I build more effective teams? Who should be paired up on the team for best results?" By pairing up, you create a team of capabilities and you can amplify your results. This can also help you get over your own personal bottlenecks, by finding complimentary skills. Worst case, you can make common chores, more fun.
Create clarity. Ask yourself, "Who, what, when, where, why, how?" Having clarity of mind makes it easy to focus on what's important. It also makes it easy to know where you are in the process. The bottom line is, clarity saves you time.
Clear your mind. Carry a small pad for tasks, notes and ideas. When you declutter your mind, you make it easier to act on your ideas, and you have more of your attention available to focus where it counts.
Don't dwell on the past. Catch the next train. Keep your trains leaving the station. When you miss one, don't hold your train back. Instead, catch the next one.
Learn how to scan. Find and focus on what's important faster. By scanning before drilling, you can figure out where to invest more of your time. You can also avoid spending too much time following dead end trails.
Make minor decisions quickly. Don't spend $20 on a $5 problem. Decisions take energy. If you over-invest in small decisions, then you waste your time and energy.
Periodically evaluate how you're using your time. Remember that time changes what's important. Your current schedule may be a slave to your past priorities, or may conflict with your current goals.
Give yourself less time for things. Remember Parkinson's Law - Work expands to fill the time available to completion. To waste less time, give yourself less time.
Use The Rule of Three. Use The Rule of Three to avoid getting overwhelmed. Limit yourself to three things and think in threes. For example, identify three wins to focus on for the day, or three wins to focus on for the week. Use these three wins to improve your focus and create compelling results.

You can apply these tips on a regular basis. One simple way is to keep asking yourself, are you working on the right things, at the right time, with the right energy, the right way. It's an easy way to find opportunities to improve your time management skills while you apply the ideas above. Remember that, a little daily improvement, will quickly add up over time.

About the Author

J.D. Meier created the time management system, Getting Results the Agile Way, which is a simple system for meaningful results. You can take Getting Results the Agile Way for a test-drive by checking out the free time management training system, 30 Day Boot Camp for Getting Results.

Busy Is Seldom Efficient, Effective or Productive

As we near the end of another year; are you any closer to realising your goals this time round? Or do you feel disillusioned, where you feel like you have given your all, spent the year frantically busy, but your results indicate that you have, just been spinning your wheels, yet again. You feel trapped on a hamster wheel of constant frantic activity, overwhelm and discontentment, where each year seems to just blend into the next one and nothing seems to change. Benjamin Franklin said it so well when he said "Don't confuse motion with action"

I want to offer you some practical tools and tips, to help you to finally break free from this frustrating cycle of discontentment and frustration. Your current ineffective, unproductive and inefficient daily routines are clearly not working; it is now time to build a new success habit set that will serve you better and allow you to turn your time and effort into success.

Go back to basics and address, these few crucial issues:

Create a clear vision of what you want to achieve each year.Build momentum and maintain direction, by turning this vision into a set of clearly defined goals.Prioritise and choose only one banner goal or huge hairy audacious goal, which would completely change your life if you achieved it.This one goal is all you are going to focus on this year.Break this goal back into a number of smaller, bite size projects. These projects are far more believable and make achieving your banner goal feel possible. As you travel on your success journey through the year and complete each project, you move one step closer to creating the life of your dreams.Break your year back into four 90 day segments.Choose three projects to complete during each 90- day segment. The secret to finally begin to see results is to focus all your attention on a maximum of three projects at a time.Break each project back and build an action list of individual actions, for each project. These are individual actions that you will take every day, which will help you to complete each project.These action lists are your source documents and are the foundation of the process I am going to describe to you below.

Now that you have documents detailing exactly what needs to be done every day, it is time to develop a daily routine that will help you to consistently carry out these actions. There are three major issues you need to address, to ensure that you actually get to make a difference in your life from this moment forward. The first one is the new habit, where you schedule time into your schedule every day, to carry out the actions from your action lists. The second one is a set of guidelines, routines and commitments you make with yourself, to help you consistently take the actions every day. Finally you need to measure your performance, daily, weekly and monthly, to ensure that the actions you are taking, are indeed delivering the desired results.

Meet Your Future

This is a really simple concept, where you schedule time into your itinerary every day to carry out the activities from your action lists. Each Sunday, during your weekly planning session, set time slots aside every day, in your dairy, to finally start working on your goals. These are unchangeable time slots that are penned into your dairy and nothing short of a fire or major crisis can change them. When you are "Meeting Your Future" every day, close your door, disconnect your telephone and ensure that nothing can disturb you. This is your special time where you work on your future and a crucial part of the reason why next year, is going to finally result in progress. By strictly adhering to this one new success principal, you will finally start to see results and within a reasonable time you will eventually realise your banner goal and completely change your life.

Code of personal Achievement

This is a daily commitment that you make with yourself to carry out five crucial tasks, which will promote your success and allow you to develop a new success habit set. Look at your banner goal and identify five actions, which, if you carried them out every day, would help you to achieve it. Now introduce these into your daily routine and apply sufficient willpower, to ensure that you carry out all five of these activities every day. Your head must never hit the pillow each night until these five activities are complete. How you choose to introduce these new daily routines into your life depends on your own unique circumstances. You could either use the time set aside each day to "Meet Your Future" to carry out these activities or you could make them a part of your normal daily schedule. I have found both have their place and depending on what you are attempting to achieve, either can serve you.

Science has shown that it takes about 90 days for any new activity that you repeat, to become part of your habit set. It will thus take substantial willpower initially to carry out these five activities, but over time, as you get closer and closer to the 90 days, the activities will just become part of your habit set. After each 90 days passes and you will have replaced your old unproductive habits with a new success habit set. If you apply this principal in your life, you could have introduced 20 new success habits into your life each year. Imagine how your life will transform, with 20 new success habits introduced each year.

Performance Management System

Whatever gets measured gets done. This is a simple system that starts during the planning process. A set of measurement criterion are established, to measure your progress, daily, weekly and monthly, to assess if the actions you are taking are keeping you moving in the right direction you want. If your actions are delivering the outcomes you want, keep doing them if not then have the foresight and courage to change them for ones that do. This is an on-going and never ending process of Plan, Do, Review and Improve. As the year progresses, keep repeating this cycle until you complete each project.

This system I have described above is really simple and easy to do. The only challenge you have is that as easy as this process is to do, so easy is it not to do. Make a different choice this year and give this a try, I guarantee you will enjoy far better results if you do.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Hi my name is Andrew Horton; I am an inspirational Speaker, Master Teacher, Radio and TV Host, Global Traveler and Author. My area of focus is in the field of human behavior, expanded awareness and enlightenment. I travel the planet constantly researching, learning and seeking ways to unlock the mysteries of the human mind. I delve into the inner workings of the universe, always looking for ways to understand my role in making things better and contributing to the improvement of the human experience. Please visit my website to sign up for a daily inspirational message, by following this link Daily Inspirational Message. This is your daily call to action, a reminder to do things better each day. Visit my website at http://www.andrewhorton.co.za/

Tips for Getting Rid of Distractions When Trying to Be Productive

I don't know about you but I'm one of those people who has a hard time...I'm talking about an extremely hard time...ignoring distractions when I'm trying to work and that can really wreak havoc on my time management plan.

My solution...the only solution that has ever worked for me...is to take complete control over those distractions. If you really think about it, you too have much more control over your own distractions than you may think.

In this article I'm going to share my tips for getting rid of distractions when trying to be productive.

Temperature

This is really a pretty simple thing to control. You can put on more clothes, take off some, or control the room temperature.

In my house I'm the one who's always cold. If it's below 80 degrees I'm in a sweat shirt (and I'm a native Floridian...go figure). So when I get cold I put on more clothes.

Mostly in the summer I'll just work on the screened-in porch unless it's really humid. In that case I have a couple of rooms in the house where I can shut myself in and turn on an oil-filled radiant heater. Yep, I'll run that sucker even in July.

I don't care what it looks like, when the AC's on full blast it's cold to me and that's very distracting.

Noise

Noise is another thing you can control. For a long time before I purchased my laptop I had to work in the dining room which is off of the living room...you know that room where everyone watches that big idiot box (I'm the only one in my family who doesn't care for TV). For that reason, I became very familiar with the various types of earplugs.

Once I got the laptop controlling noise has been much easier...I just remove myself from the noise.

Lighting

Lighting is another thing that's always been very distracting to me so I created my own perfect lighting. On my porch...where I'm writing this very article...I have an adjustable torchiere floor lamp with a smaller one attached about a quarter of the way down from the top that I can point any which way I want for softer or stronger lighting...whichever suits my mood at the moment.

It costs all of $15 at Wal-Mart and has been worth so much more than that. The lighting is much more flexible than the ceiling fan.

Hunger/Thirst

These two are just too easy to control. Get some peanuts, popcorn, or whatever healthy snack you prefer. Eat just a light meal before you attempt to focus on whatever it is you're working on.

Keep a bottle of water close by. I keep 2-32 oz Rubbermaid containers in the door of my fridge with Brita water in them. I keep one with me at all times.

Physical Discomfort

If you sit...like I do...for long periods of time you know you get sort of cramped feeling. To solve that problem I try to walk around often. I'll get up just to stretch.

I know this isn't feasible for most people but I'll try to work a couple of hours and take a one hour walk then I'll work a couple of more hours and walk another hour. Even if you can't do that you could still take a break every so often and walk around and stretch. Your productivity will probably positively reflect it.

I hope my tips for getting rid of distractions when trying to be productive have been helpful to you.

By the way, do you want to learn more about time management? If so, then download my brand new free ebook about Time Management. Or, visit me at There Must Be A Better Way