5 steps to being more productive

We all are aiming to be more productive in our day. Sometimes it seems like no matter how much we work, we never get anything done. Here are 5 easy steps to being more productive.

1. Close your email program

Too many people reply to each and every email that comes into their Inbox the very second it arrives. Unless you deal with time sensitive emails, don’t worry about it. We honestly can’t multi-task like we think we can. Studies have shown that it can take as much as 15 minutes or more to get back on task after an interruption such as an email takes a few seconds of our time. Timothy Ferriss writes in The 4 Hour Work Week about how he only answers his emails once per week. That’s a little extreme, but changing it to 2 times per day is definitely doable.

Check your email once right after lunch and once just before you are going to go home from work. These are ideal times because you are already interrupted from your days work from lunch and you need to be stopping work to go home anyways.

If you get an occasional email which is time-sensitive, you can set an auto-responder to let the person emailing you know that you only check your email at certain times. Be sure to include phone or other contact information if it is actually an emergency.

2. Turn off your phone

This may be hard or impossible to do in some work environments, but if you can turn off your phone, do so. Again, you can leave a message stating that you will check and return messages during certain times. This will help your productivity immensly. If you have a receptionist, instruct him or her on your interruption policy. Set clear guidelines on what warrants an interruption and what can wait. Many angry customers think their issue is an emergency when it usually isn’t. Also giving someone time to “cool off” often will make them more likely to find a favorable solution and leave them in a better mood than they were when they were ready to talk like a sailor.

3. Ignore the media

I know it’s election time and you have to hear about the latest scandle or figure out who this Palin lady is, but don’t. You can just as easily take 15 minutes out of your day, find out the candidates policies on particular subjects via Wikipedia and make your decision. The media will just sway you back and forth and back and forth and you will forget what the candidates actually stand for. If you are a die hard Democrat or Republican, you will most likely vote for your candidate anyways, so what’s the point of watching and reading the news? Just let it go.

4. Focus on one task

Don’t work on two projects at once. Do only one task. Again, we can’t multi-task. If you fully devote yourself to one task, then move onto a second task, you will complete both tasks quicker than if you tried to go back and forth between tasks at the same time.

Now if you have multiple large projects (such as week long projects) going on at once, you can do more than one in a day as you don’t want to get sick of a single project, just make sure you limit the number of times in a day that you switch between them. Try to keep it to one project before lunch and one after or something like that. This will reduce the amount of time needed during the day to switch focuses between projects. Since lunch is already a distraction, use it as your catalyst to switch projects.

5. Stop surfing the web

I know this may seem odd coming from a blog on the web, but seriously, if you are reading this post instead of doing productive work, you are actually losing ground. Stop going from blog to blog learning how to make your life productive and actually do it. If you love reading blogs, schedule a particular time during the day where you do it, but don’t keep an iGoogle page or an RSS Reader open in anticipation of the next post.

I read other blogs sometimes to help me get ideas for my own blog, but I set aside a specific time to do so. This help me to stay focused. I get nothing accomplished by reading other blogs. I get a lot more accomplished by actually sitting down and writing. You need to do the same thing.

Now get out there and be a productive worker!