Tales of the Talking Tiger

I’ve been frustrated with myself recently because I’ve been easily distracted and not nearly as productive as I’d like to be. I’m usually pretty driven and motivated but this has slowed down and I don’t know why. I’m finding myself doing a little bit of everything, but not finishing anything and this is annoying me. So I’ve been doing some reading and thinking about productivity. These are the 5 things I’m going to start doing today (well, tomorrow) and see if it makes any difference.

Do one thing at a time.

I’ll often have multiple windows open with email, internet, a Word document, Things (my electronic ‘to-do’ list), my feed reader and whatever else I find myself working on at the time! I’m going to just do one thing at a time, and shut everything else down until I finish that one thing.

Turn off email notification.

I get so distracted when emails come in – I stop doing whatever I was working on, just to check the email that has come in. Apparently it takes 15 minutes to really get into a task, so if you’re distracted, you’ve effectively wasted 15 minutes. So I’m switching off my email notification so I won’t know when new emails come in.

Check email at set intervals

Which leads neatly into my third tactic. So much time is wasted by checking email at multiple times throughout the day. What do I gain by checking email so frequently? The only real gain is for those I’m replying to – they get a faster reply! But I’m sure they can hold on for a couple of hours. Checking email regularly is just another distraction. The experts recommend just checking email 3 times per day, for 30 minutes at a time. For the rest of the day, switch email off and don’t think about it.

Set a daily schedule.

I am easily distracted by the urgent, which comes at the expense of the important. The reason this happens is because I don’t have a plan. I often have a rough idea of what I want to accomplish during my day, but I get overtaken by small, insignificant tasks that demand my attention because of their apparent urgency, which means the important tasks for the day get shifted. So I’m going to set a daily schedule – what I’m going to do and when.

Do the hardest task first.

I’m a great procrastinator. When something difficult needs to be done, or just something I’m not looking forward to, I can find things to clean or organise or rearrange that had never previously entered my mind. Yet the difficult or unpleasant tasks still need to be done. So I’m going to tackle one of these first up each day. Even before I check my email. This will get one unpleasant task out of the way, and will give me a sense of achievement before my day has even begun.

How do you stop procrastination and keep productive? Several blog posts have really helped me think through this problem:

• 10 obstacles to productivity
• 5 simple steps to greater productivity
• 10 simple ways to do only three things today
• 36 proven tips to increase your productivity
• 7 tips to achieve more

This post is tagged productivity