I've got the most distracting co-worker who's always trying to bring me down. His name is Netflix, and he sits right across the hall.
You see, I work from home—from my bedroom, specifically—which not only means that I have distractions galore, but also no one around to witness if I cave. There are no co-workers or supervisors who would notice if I took a three hour lunch break, and there's no one to glare at me if I watch three episodes of Friends at my desk.
Basically, it's up to me to make sure that I have a plan to stay productive, and that I stick to it.
At first, I thought my productivity would be nosediving at home. But since I've left the office for my bedroom, I've actually become the most focused I've ever been. I've learned a lot about productivity since setting my own hours, most of which wasn't obvious to me before I acquired such aggravatingly amusing co-workers.
Below are a few of the things I've learned—unexpected tricks I've accumulated that help me keep Netflix in his place during the day.
1. Don't work Monday morning.
The first thing I do every Monday morning is go through all of the deadlines I have coming up in the next two weeks. For me, this means going through my docket and checking the status of every case with an upcoming due date. As I go through my docket, I put notes on my calendar so that when I'm finished, I can visualize (literally, on my calendar) exactly what I need to get finished that week.
It takes about an hour for me to do this every week, but it's definitely not an hour wasted; once I can see everything that needs to happen, it's a lot easier to prioritize. I can set goals for each day so that I don't have to think about it again during the week, saving me time, headaches, and panic in the long run.
2. Schedule a time to worry.
My boss actually taught me this when I first started working in a law firm, when I was thoroughly overwhelmed with the idea of a docket. He told me what he does to manage the stress of his (even larger) docket: he makes a list of daily tasks (like I mentioned above) and then doesn't think about those tasks until they're scheduled. By scheduling a time to think about each task, he is able to keep today from being overwhelming.
Because today is the day he worries about Tuesday's worries, not the day he looks ahead to the ever-growing mountain of things he has to get finished this week. He's scheduled time to worry about that, so he's able to keep cool now.
3. When you get an email, ignore it.
When I first started working, I treated every email I received like a ticking time bomb—if I didn't stop, read, and reply that second, it would blow me up to unresponsive smithereens. And so every time I received an email, I stopped what I was doing so I could send a reply.
And you know what? I would waste half my day re-starting projects where I had lost my focus. But in reality, instead of losing my steam with whatever I was doing, I could have easily responded to the email after I was finished—turns out, none of them were actually going to explode.
Now, when I get an email, I briefly skim it to see if it's critical. And if it's not, I make a note to myself to reply later, and then I ignore it. It's amazing how much more quickly I can finish something when it's not punctured with less-than-urgent interruptions, and much to my relief, I've yet to encounter an explosive email.
4. Don't work too hard.
Forget everything I just said about interruptions—sort of.
You see, while I've found that a report is ten times harder to write when you're answering Linda from down the hall every ten minutes, it can be just as hard to write if you stare at your screen for hours at a time. After about an hour and a half, my mind starts to wander, and I realize I've been reading the same line three times while thinking about what I'm having for lunch.
One of the biggest things that helps me stay productive is hourly (at least every two hours) breaks to take a walk, get a drink, or sometimes even jump rope in my living room. The breaks aren't long (maybe five or ten minutes), but they're enough to give my brain a second to cool off and start fresh.
Plus, my hourly movement is like quitting smoking—talk about a win-win.
tl;dr - How I Increased My Productivity
|
What's your biggest weapon for staying productive?
