What is one thing that you as a person will never have enough? What you think about this question? Probably the answer of many of you will be enough time.

You will always have only 24 hours in your day, and you need to do everything that you need to be done in that 24 hours.

Because of that time management is important part of your productivity. As you already know productivity is a measurement that will present the quantity of the work that you have done in a specific time.

The biggest question today’s modern and successful people continuously are asking themselves is how they can successfully manage their time. Because of the importance of time management on one side, and a dynamic environment of our work on other side, this question becomes more and more important for entrepreneurs.

Here are some tips that can help you in your efforts to become your own master of your destiny when it comes to time management.

1. Track How You Spend Your Time. You can’t succeed in your efforts to effectively manage your time if you don’t know how you are currently spending your time. Use services like Rescue Time for your computer based time, or simply use a timer for your non-computer based time to find how your time is allocated on average. The information that you will receive from tracking your time will be invaluable in your efforts to implement effective time management systems.
2. Always Try to Improve Your Time Spending Based on What You Learn From Tracking. Tracking as alone is not important if you don’t take next steps to improve how you will spend your time tomorrow. If you find that you are spending too much time on unproductive or unimportant tasks, you will have a large space for improvement. Your time management efforts will need to focus on that areas of improvements.
3. Use Time Management Matrix to Prioritize Your Tasks. I have already written a post about this tool when it comes to your productivity and your own time spending. Time management matrix will give you four quadrants, which you can use in prioritizing and deciding about tasks you will need to do as the number one priority, tasks that can be delegated and tasks that you can simply delete and forget about them.
4. Plan Your Day Ahead. Today’s work can’t be planned as we plan it in the past. They need to be done in more chaotic environment than we can imagine. Without proper planning your day ahead, you will easily find yourself in a very frustrated position where you work more hours but the results aren’t what you want them to be.
5. Use Weekly Plans. Sometimes there are not enough to have only daily plans, you will need weekly plans also. Your weekly plans will need to have a list of the most important activities that you will need to do in upcoming week. With such a plan, you can easily make weekly reviews and successfully manage your daily plans.
6. Manage Effectively Email Processing. Today email processing could easily sucked your time without you even notice that. If you analyze your incoming mails you can easily find many priorities, but your priorities they are other people priorities. If you want to effectively manage your time, you will need to implement strong process for email processing tasks. That means you will need to schedule several times daily for email processing tasks and in such a way to escape possibilities to be distracted when you work on your high priority tasks.
7. Don’t Allow Web and Social Media to Control Your Time. Except email, today you have many things around you that’s using for your own socialization and communication. The best examples are social media. They good places where you can spend your time, but they are also very distracting activities and when they take your attention you will easily spend much more time than you think or want to spend. In today’s world where only highly productive people succeed, you are not allowed the web and social media to control your time. You will need to implement different processes if you want to continue to build presence on social media, to follow many things on the web and to be highly productive person.
8. If You Can, Delegate Some of Your Tasks. One way to increase your productivity spending your time on most important tasks is to start with the delegating process in your business. Everything that is something that can easily be done from one of your team members can be delegated and in such a way you can have more time for important things that you need to do.

I am hardly working to improve my productivity no matter where I work and in what type of context is based my particular working tasks. In the last several months, I succeed in increasing my productivity especially in decreasing time that I spend in email processing and on social medias.

Implementing different productivity tools and processes I was able to decrease time that I spend on email processing from four hours weekly to two hours weekly. That is cutting of ten hours monthly, only from one thing – email processing.

Here is an excellent infographic from OfficeTime explaining top ten time killers and how to fight them.

The starting point in everything that will enable you to increase your own productivity is to know how and why you spend time on specific activities.

When we talk about productivity, we talk about our personal and business goals and their achievement.

If you succeed to achieve that goals in the time related to them, you can say that you are productive.

We start with something. Work to achieve our goals and validate the end results according that goals.

Because of that, I think that we need to answer seven important questions that will have the high effect on our productivity. If we have very clear answers, we can succeed in managing our work to be more productive.

What are that seven questions?

1. What I want to achieve? Always start with the end point in mind. You will need to know what the destination will look like if you want to find the best way to get to that destination.
2. What I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? When you know the destination, you can start creating the map you need to follow. The first thing is to brainstorm what you need to do if you want to get it there.
3. When I need to do what I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? Then, you need to include time limits, or when you need to do something.
4. How I need to organize myself to do what I need to do, when I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? Next, you need to think about organizational aspect of your work. Better organization means more work done in less time, or simply more productivity.
5. Who will help me to do what I need to do, when I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? Sometimes you can’t achieve your goals without help from other people. If you are an entrepreneur, or a manager your job will be to delegate things to your staff. The answer from this question will help you in better understanding of the work that will need to be done.
6. What will be my, and responsibility of other peoples in doing what I need to do when I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? Next, important part is responsibilities. Everybody in achieving your goals needs to have clear responsibilities.
7. How I will track the help on doing what I need to do, when I need to do to achieve what I want to achieve? At the end, you will need to follow the success on your road to achieve your goals. This question will need to answer how you can follow your achievements.

Do you find yourself in a situation when you try to read something, and you reading, but your brain doesn’t process what you read?

Do you find yourself in a situation when you need to write something, but the words can come into your brain to be transferred on piece of paper? Or, at the end of the day when you feel that the work you do is not doing good?

When something can’t be done, it can’t be done.

What is the solution for this problem?

It is very simple solution. Rest your brain and you can continue to work with much better productivity.

Sometimes we need to give deserved break, and rest our brain if we want to make a comeback from such a hopeless situation. It is better to stop and then continue; instead of continuing to work without desired results from such a work.

Use the following simple rules to help you in escaping this situation:

• I will work until I can work, and then I will rest to energise my brain.
• If I continue to work without enough focus and energy for quality output from my work, it is the same as I don’t work at all.
• It is better to make a break, and after that continue to work.

You need to analyze yourself if you want to better understand your brain and your body. It is not only to increase productivity on the damage of the output of your work and your brain and body, because you are not productive if you work, you are productive if the end results of your work help in accomplishment of your goals.

How you know whether you are productive or not?

Productivity is the output as results per unit of input as a labor, equipment, and capital.

Another one explanation of productivity can be how much work we have done in specific time unit. For example, how much products we produce in one day, or how much articles we write in two hours, or how much words we can read in one hour…

Every day we make a list with lot of things that we need to do for that day. If your workday is 8 hours if you finish everything on your list, you can say that you have very productive day.

But, it is not true. What, about our wrong expectation for our working day? What if we can do more than the list of tasks for the particular day?

If we take into the consideration other things, we will have very different view of our own productivity. For example, I work from 09:00 AM until 17:00AM, for particular day I have five tasks on my to-do list, and my day looks something like this:

• 09:00 – 09:30 Coffee with colleagues,
• 09:30 – 10:30 Work on task #1 on my list,
• 10:30 – 10:45 Work on task #2 on my list,
• 10:45 – 10:50 Answer on phone call,
• 10:50 – 11:05 Continue work on task #2 on my list,
• 11:05 – 11:20 Checking my social media accounts,
• 11:20 – 11:30 Finishing my task #2 on my list,
• 11:30 – 12:00 Work on task #3 on my list,
• 12:00 – 12:10 Talk with the colleague that unexpectedly come in my office,
• 12:10 – 12:30 Finishing work on task #3 on my list,
• 12:30 – 13:30 Launch,
• 13:30 – 14:15 Work on task #4 on my list,
• 14:15 – 15:00 Coffee break,
• 15:00 – 16:00 Finishing work on task #4 on my list,
• 16:00 – 16:15 Talk with the colleagues,
• 16:15 – 17:00 Completing task #5 on my list.

It looks fine! I finish all my tasks as I planned. But, how much I am productive. If my productive time is time when I work on my planned tasks than I have worked five hours.

My productivity then was 5 hours of work time divided by 8 hours of available time = 62.5%.

This mean that I spend only 62.5% of my time available time to do important work for me. Knowing this number, I can set goals and then strategies to improve my productivity.

This example is something that we can calcify as OK, but in many real cases we can measure our productivity to be lower than 30%. This means lot more work for improvement.

However, if you want to succeed in your efforts for increasing productivity you need to measure your productivity.

Distraction is one of the biggest enemies of your own productivity.

Do you find yourself in a position when you start working on something important for you, or your business and you stop with the work because simply in your office come your colleague to ask for something, or you receive the sound for newly received message, or you find something interested on the net…

Someone else priority is not your priority. You have your very own priorities.

The most important question today, when we live in a distraction based environment with so many gadgets, is how we can affect to eliminate distractions.

Here, I want to present 14 possible tactics that you can use if you want to enter the battle with distraction.

#1 First, understand what distractions are and what affect they have on your work.

You need to start with the understanding about distractions that you have already experienced and know exactly how that distractions effect on your daily work routine. Don’t escape this tactic, because you will not know what to do next, you will do something that will not help you in your efforts.

#2 Always use to-do list.

You need to know what you need to work on. How you can start working if you don’t know what you need to do and when. To-do lists is most important productivity tools. Use them in the how you have organized your workday.

#3 Analyze possible interruptions and build a strategy for eliminating them.

What interrupt you when you work on your tasks? This is an important question in your efforts to eliminate distractions. When you know what interrupt you, you can start building strategies to eliminate such interruptions.

#4 Analyze your working habits and try to implement different time-saving techniques.

Again, here you need to start with your own analysis – analysis of your working habits. How you do your work? Is it on one PC, or two? How much time you spend on the work with some of your tools needed to accomplish the work? Can you improve the process of using that tools? We know that often productivity can be dependent on the tools that you use in your everyday work. Why not try to combine them in the most productive way for you? If you can save more time in doing your current work, you can escape some of the possible distraction in the time. This is simp probability theory. More time for finishing work, will have more probability to come different distractions.

#5 Start reading only when you are on your mobile devices.

Use your mobile phones and tablets to go through your daily reading routine. I know that you read magazines, blog rss feeds, research readings… But, you can read everything from everywhere with the help of your mobile devices. Why not using them to help you in your efforts for increasing productivity instead to be your biggest distracts.

#6 Start using pomodoro technique.

The pomodoro technique will help you to organize your units of work, and analyze how you progress through finishing things from your to-do list.

#7 Try with the anti-to-do list of Marc Andreessen.

Anti-to-do lists you can use every time you do something useful during the day. Something you are proud of. You simple write it down in your Anti-To-do List all your accomplishments. At the end of the day, take a look at your lists and everything that you got done that day

#8 Check your email at particular allocated time for that job.

Email can easily be classified as one of the biggest distracts for you. Because of that, allocate part of your time each day to process your email. In such a way, you will not need to keep open your email client that is the source of possible distractions.

#9 Turn your mobile phone in airplane mode.

The airplane mode means to turn off all wireless connections and services on your mobile phone while you work on your biggest priorities. In such a way, you can escape possible distractions that you receive when all that connections and services are active.

#10 Put your desk phone on do not disturbs.

When you work on your priorities, simply turn off your desk phone, or if you have possibility put it in the “do not disturb mode.”

#11 Use Rescue Time to collect information about your productive work.

Rescue Time is the tool that measure everything that you do on your computer and categorize your work as productive and unproductive work. You can easily see where you spend unproductive time and think about the strategy to decrease it or eliminate it.

#12 Before starting with the work finish all your physiological needs.

Don’t start with the work until you don’t satisfy all your physiological needs. In such a way, when you work you will not think about food or other needs.

#13 Listen inspirational music to escape distraction sounds.

If your workplace is the place where you have a large amount of distraction sound you can simply turn on some inspirational music.

#14 If necessary, isolate yourself completely.

If something is so much important, you can simply isolate yourself. Before several months, I decide to spend one week to work only on my PhD thesis, and because of that I move in the village where I don’t have Internet connection. There, I have been completely isolated and my only concern was to work on my PhD thesis.

Very useful presentation by productivity guru and coach David Allen at TEDx Talk where he talks about stress free productivity.

Can we have really stress free productivity? I think we can.

I have really enjoyed to watch this video and learn something new.

Each week I want to share different productivity tools, articles, or ideas that I find in the previous week. You can find all earlier published post about weekly productivity tools here.

Today, we are witnesses of high technological effect of our everyday life. That means that we use different technological solutions to stay on top of our to-do list. We use different technological solutions to be more productive, to remember everything, to learn more and more…

I want to learn, to try different things, to test different options to become more productive person.

This series of posts on My Productivity Tools is the place where I share different resources that I find and think will be useful in increasing my own and your productivity. I encourage you to check the links also try tools to see how they can affect on your personal and professional life.

Excellent productivity stuff that I chose for this week:

• Rescue Time. Rescue Time is the tool that measure everything that I do on my computer and categorze the work as productive and unproductive work. The tool can be customized according to my own selection of productive and unproductive work. I can easily see where I spend my unproductive time and think about the strategy to decrease it or eliminate it. All in all this is the excellent tool.
• Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Managing Your Own Psychology. This article talk about Anti-todo lists which you can use every time you do something useful during the day. You simple write it down in your Anti-Todo List all your accomplishments
• How to Get Away From Your Tight Schedule (And Still Get Things Done). Excellent article explaining our true about very tight schedules that we make to ourselves. Such schedules, instead to be tool to improve our productivity becomes the tool that increase our stress level. Here, you can find a useful blueprint for creating solid scheduling practice.

If you missed something, here are the posts titles from this week at My Productivity Tools:

• [Infographic] Work is Not a Place, It’s a State of Mind

The technology around us in our everyday life change the way how we do the work, and how the work process is accomplished by us.

You can’t separate anymore working at work from working at home. The complexity of work tasks needs more complex processes.

How you are doing your work? Is it accomplished only at work as a place, or home as a place? Or it is done in combination work and home?

Look at this info graphic, courtesy of Compliance and Safety, about work as a state of mind.

Featured By: OSHA Safety Videos

]]> http://www.myproductivitytools.com/infographic-work-is-not-a-place-its-a-state-of-mind/feed/ 0 http://www.myproductivitytools.com/goal-set-up-mistakes/ http://www.myproductivitytools.com/goal-set-up-mistakes/#comments Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:30:41 +0000 admin http://www.myproductivitytools.com/?p=554

Can you be a productive person without achieving your goals? The answer is probably not.

Can you know are you a productive person without goals that you need to achieve?

Everything that you do have connections with some of your goal, and because of that they become important part in building your own productivity.

But, as human beings we can make mistakes. The important thing is that we need them, and we need to work toward their achievement. On the other side if we have wrong goal, our productivity will suffer. Is there something achieved as unimportant for us can to become something that will increase our productivity?

The mistakes that you can make when you set up your goals, and that can decrease your productivity are following:

1. You Are Not Clear About Your Own Desires.

Everything starts with your own desires and wishes about you and your future. What you want to achieve? What you want to become in the future?

These desires and wishes are the basis for your future goals. Be clear about it and use them when you set up your own purposes for the future.

2. They Aren’t SMART.

One mistake that I can see too often is setting up goals that’s not SMART. You need to try making them specific, measurable, achievable and time limited.

Non SMART goal is a large source of our unproductive efforts of achievement.

Using the SMART system to set up your goals you can drastically improve your own achievement and productivity.

3. They Can’t Motivate You for Achievement.

Because you want to achieve them and make your dreams to become true, you will need motivation to do that. If your goal not motivate you to start doing things to achieve it, you can’t expect that you will be productive in doing things.

4. You Are Afraid of Failure.

Sometimes you can find yourself in a position when you want to adjust your goal because you are simply afraid that you can’t achieve it.

Fear is something that can have a negative impact on your goals and achievement. Try to eliminate it.

5. You Have Too Many of Them, Without Personal Capacity to Achieve Them.

I know that you have big dreams, but you have your own limits because of different factors in your life. It is better to start with something and increase how you achieve them one by one.