photo credit: Eiti Kimura

1. Plan your day ahead of time.

Put 3 – 5 big things on your schedule with blocked-out time for each one. Don’t wing it. Don’t cram it full of details.

2. Include transition time between tasks and major projects.

Don’t expect yourself to switch instantly from one task or project to another. Work in transition time, give your brain and body a break, and give yourself mental room to close out of one project and switch to another.

3. Take breaks.

Stand up. Stretch. Take a ten-minute walk. Loosen up those neck and shoulder muscles. When it’s work time, do the work and take short breaks, then get back to work. When work time is over, take a longer break. Don’t carry work around with you. Focus on play time, family time, rest time. Work isn’t life. Work is part of life.

4. Set a timer and force yourself to work on one task for the duration of that time.

Bribe yourself with a reward (a cup of coffee, a piece of chocolate, a quick FB check, a short walk); set the timer and work on given project until your time is up. Write or Die is awesome software (and only $10! Seriously. Go get it.) for helping writers and bloggers sit down and just pound out that first draft without stopping.

5. Tackle the most daunting task first.

You’ll up your productivity for the rest of the day by tackling the big, scary thing first. If you’re interrupted and distracted for the rest of the day, you’ll know you made progress on that big one even if you get nothing else done. It’s the old “big rocks first” principle.

6. Take five minutes to visualize what you want to have accomplished at the end of the day.

No shady, hazey positive powerful thinking visualizing whirled peas-ness here. Just a strong, clear, mental reminder of what you want yourself to accomplish, and what you need to do in your day to get there. It’s easy to get side tracked and then talk yourself out of doing the work. Visualizing your ideal “end of day” will help bring you back.

7. Check email, Facebook, etc., once at the beginning of the day.

Then turn them off. Only look again during breaks. Why? Because they are mainly a waste of time… Duh.

8. Don’t confuse busy for productive.

Things like, oh, I don’t know, email and Facebook make you feel busy but leave you with nothing actually done. Just because you can have 20 tabs open in your browser and incessantly switch back and forth doesn’t mean you’re working. Define work – day by day, if needed – and don’t confuse “busy work” for real work. You’re not in school anymore. You don’t have to waste time on busy work. Skip straight to the important stuff.

9. Imagine the rewards.

How good will it feel to get through this project? How great will the paycheck be? How nice will it be to enter your weekend knowing you finished the draft, finished the ebook, completed the prototype, made the calls, got the customer, shipped the product? (By the way, if you can’t come up with any rewards, you might want to rethink what you’re doing and why.)

10. Don’t try to do everything.

Ah, multitasking. Stop doing that, people who want to be uber-productive, and just focus on one thing at a time. This is the way of the uber-productive (the focus thing). Oh, look, more on that:

11. Focus.

Once you quit trying to do everything at once (i.e. multitask), you are free to focus on one thing at a time. You’ll do a better job at it, you’ll enjoy the work more, you’ll get through it and finish it and be able to move on to the next thing.

12. Clear your workspace.

Clutter is distracting. Spend five or ten minutes at the end of the work day stacking your papers (or – gasp – filing them), clearing the clutter, straightening, putting away. Keep your workspace clear and pull out what you need for each project as you approach it.

13. Build in 10 minutes of warm-up time for each new task or thought process.

Free write, mind map, doodle, scribble, rough draft, sketch, make sculptures out of pipe cleaners… Warm up into the project as you approach it. Don’t expect pure and perfect production as you start working. It’s priming the pump. You can throw out the warm-up stuff later once you’ve finished the work. Or you can save it and sell it later, when you’re famous.

14. Use blocks of time.

If you don’t set aside time for it, chances are it won’t get done. Use blocks of time (30 minutes, 2 hours, whatever). Nice big blocks of time give you mental freedom to relax into a project, and, ironically, find yourself completing the work faster.

15. Announce your deadlines.

To someone besides your cat. This is called creating accountability, and the hypothesis is that you’ll then be embarrassed, shamed, humiliated, and ostracized if you fail to meet the deadline.

16. Take yourself seriously.

Because if you really want to succeed, you have to. And if you don’t, nobody else will. But if you do, you’ll take your work seriously enough to do it.

17. Calculate your hours in terms of what you earn (or what you don’t).

If money motivates you (hey, it motivates me; just being honest here. I want to pay bills and buy food. Maybe take a vacation…), then put your hourly rate where you can see it. Calculate how much time you’re wasting when you let yourself get distracted with something unimportant… Something which isn’t paying work.

18. Use paper and pen.

Computers can be great tools. They can also be great sources of distraction. If you need to just get some brain work done, shut down the computer and force yourself to think via pen and paper. Transfer it to computer when you get far enough in.

19. Only sit at the computer with a specific goal and a specific time limit.

Don’t do anything but work toward that specific goal until your time limit is up.

20. Separate online networking and marketing from the other tasks of your day.

Why? Because it’s too easy to leap frog from one link to another, waste an hour, have nothing done, get discouraged, give up, lose the whole day. Block time for online networking and don’t bother with it except during that blocked-out time.

21. Don’t freak out at the ebb and flow of creativity.

Sometimes you’ll be full of great ideas; sometimes you’ll be dry as a bone. This is how creative work feels. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost something, you’re no good, your inspiration has fled. Go ahead and do the work. You’ll have something you can go back and fix, and chances are you’ll go back to fix it and find that it’s pretty good after all.

22. Don’t buy the “creative block” mythology.

Train yourself to put the effort into creative work even when you don’t feel like it. The more disciplined you are, the more compliant your creative muse will become. Strange how that works…

23. Give yourself more time for the stuff you enjoy.

If you have projects you love and projects you hate, give yourself shorter time blocks for the less appealing projects but schedule them in front of the longer time blocks for the fun work. You have to get through one to make it to the other. Work fast on what you don’t like so much, then you can slow down and enjoy the work you do like.

24. Make yourself begin.

Just get started. Put in five minutes. Put in five sentences. Put in the first ounce of effort. Do the first step.

25. Have a place to collect the randomness so you can deal with it later.

Keep a notebook or a planner or have a system on your laptop or iPad or phone, whatever works for you. Just don’t get distracted doing all the randomness (phone calls, emails, great ideas, websites you must see!!!, and the like) while you’re working. Collect it in one place, give yourself time later to look at it.

26. Don’t answer the phone.

Ah! Time suck! This is why we have voice mail, people. Take advantage of it.

27. Percolate.

It’s a good idea. But don’t take my word for it...