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Take 18 Minutes to Keep Your Days on Track

Photo by koyochi

According to the Harvard Business blog, you can organize an eight-hour work day and keep it on track by creating a ritual that'll only take a total of 18 minutes each day.


Harvard Business blog's Peter Bregman outlines three steps on how to avoid those days when you can barely remember what you intended to accomplish by the time you reach for your keyboard:

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day.
STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus..
STEP 3 (5 Minutes) Review.

Basically, you'll start the day off right by grabbing a sheet of paper and writing down the goals which you can realistically accomplish that day. The important part is to immediately assign time slots to those tasks by order of importance and difficulty because these designated times make you more likely to accomplish your goals and give you a way of tracking your progress once every hour. At the end of the work day, you'll take a few minutes to review not just the last hour, but the entire day. Did you stay on track? What can you do differently tomorrow to retain or improve your productivity?


Check out the full details on this time management ritual on the Harvard Business blog and tell us about how you organize your days and prevent slumps in productivity. Do you have a ritual or do you fly by the seat of your pants and hope for the best? Share your workday time management successes (or failures) in the comments.

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day [Harvard Business Publishing]

What Matters Now

A few days ago I happened across a document that piqued my interest. It is concept from the mind of Seth Godin, a famous author, blogger, and public speaker regarding all manner of marketing topics. This document is entitled, "What Matters Now" and contains eighty-two pages of insights from many other famous folks from all persuasions.

As I read this interesting work, specific pages and phrases resonated within me. I took the time today to highlight those special passages and insert bookmarks in the PDF linked in the previous passage. A few of my favorite segments are shown below:

Enough by Merlin Mann

How do you know when you’ve had “enough?”
Not everything, all the time, completely, forever.
Just enough. Enough to start, finish, or simply maintain.

Productivity by Gina Trapani

Don’t worry too much about getting things done.
Make things happen.

Strengths by Marti Barletta

So quit diligently developing your weaknesses.
Instead, partner with someone very UNlike you,
share the work and share the wealth and everyone’s happy.

I hope you enjoy flipping through these pages as much as I did. And thankfully, letting you have free download access to this excellent work is sanctioned by the authors on page two, "feel free to share this."

~SP

Track Your Computer Usage

Productivity Meter is a time tracking tool from Fruitful Time, makers of the task manager we reviewed earlier this year.

Once installed the software sits in the background and keeps tabs on your activity. Productivity Meter tracks the active versus idle time, how your active time is split among applications, which applications were used the most, and which websites you browsed and for how long. You can review the stats for the last day, week, month or a user defined block of time. One of the most useful features is the ability to tag programs, windows, and domains.

It would be entirely useless to many users?myself included? if the program simply told you when you'd been using a web browser and time spent on certain domains. I use a web browser for nearly all the work I do on my computer. By using the tag function I can tell Productivity Meter which domains I access for certain tasks and jobs. It's tracking for how much time I spend doing Lifehacker related work became significantly more accurate when I tagged all the domains I use. Another concern was that with a triple monitor setup and a huge number of windows open at any given time it wouldn't accurately track what I was really focusing my time and attention on. After testing it for the better part of a day it does a fantastic job tracking what I'm actually working on.

The program is free for personal use, with the small caveat that after 30 days the ability to generate time cards is removed. If you don't need to generate time cards to show a boss or client how your time was spent on a give project it shouldn't matter much. All the graphs and information in the main dashboard is available even after the 30 days window. Productivity Meter is freeware, Windows only.

Controlling Your Attention is the New Work Ethic

Tech writer Mike Elgan brilliantly argues that while our parents taught us hard work and long hours will lead to success, in the internet age the ability to control what you pay attention to is the key.

A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It's time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we're living in, not our grandparents' age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention. Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?

His points about the merging of work and play onto our computers?which we are on all day, which can make play look like work?are well-outlined and spot-on. Read this whole article; it's a great kick in the pants for getting focused in the New Year.

the new work ethic: just paying attention at intellectual properties [via ]

Limit Your Input to Increase Productivity

Chris over at the productivity blog The Art of Non-Comformity wants you to say no. Frequently. So frequently in fact that the quality of the things you say yes to rises exponentially.

Chris advocates radical exclusion as a solution for overwhelming demands and new inputs. Rather than stretch yourself thin saying yes to everything and ultimately failing to deliver you should focus on the commitments and projects you really want to make something of:

I may or may not have a good excuse for why I failed to honor the commitment, but one thing?s for sure: if I make a habit of it, I will soon lose the trust of the person who had relied on me.

To prevent this from happening, I sometimes practice the fine art of radical exclusion. This is where I deliberately ignore or decline any number of inputs, messages, or requests for my attention in order to focus on what I decide is more important.

By using his limited reserve to energy and attention to tend to the things most important, the quality of the time he spends on things in turn rises and creates a superior widget?whatever that widget may be: a product, a design, time spent with family. Having spent most of my caffeine fueled 20s taking on mountains of projects, I found I too have embraced his notion of radical exclusion. How do you deal with tactfully declining some commitments and negotiating others to be more manageable? Photo by Dave Parker.

The Art of Radical Exclusion

How to Kickstart a Low-Productivity Day

Editor: Welcome guest author Jason Womack who's got some advice on how to get back to work on a slow day.
You just don?t want to do it anymore. No more task folders, no more email labeling, no more index cards in your back pocket. You just don?t have the energy today; the power of your productivity is at a low ebb. What do you do now? How do you flip that switch to get going again? Photo by Stewf.

Here are five simple things you can do, not related to making lists or reworking your system (again), which will inspire you to get back on the right track.

• Walk around. Anywhere will do. You can walk around your office. Visit a floor you haven?t been to before. Or maybe you have time to go around the block or visit that park down the street. It?s all about looking for something positive you have never seen. Taking time is smell the roses may be just a clich?, but those roses could be anything. A restaurant you?ve never seen. A friend?s cubicle. Some kids playing ball. Life is going on in the world around you. You just need to notice.


• Set an alarm and work on just one thing for that period of time. Maybe it?s just 5, 10 or 20 minutes. Maybe it?s two minutes. But at the end of the time, you will notice what?s it?s like to experience real focus. And if you complete the task, you have something to anchor your day around. You?ve gotten at least one thing really done.


• Open up a best-selling business book to a random page and read for five minutes. Let you mind apply whatever your reading to whatever you are working on. There is bound to be inspiration for a great idea or a new way of doing things.


• Contact someone you admire. If the internet has done anything, it has flattened the world and enabled us to contact people we respect in many different areas?your business, entertainment, politics or writing. Like an author? Find their web site and drop them an email. Make a list of all the people you want to meet someday and see how many of them you can find on the web. You?d be surprised how many respond.


• Send postcards to two friends you know you live out-of-state. It will make you appreciate where you live more than ever.

In short, here are some things that will get you going again:

• Appreciation of your surroundings.


• The accomplishment of a job done well.


• Connection with others.

That formula may not take a long time to finish, but at the end, you?ll feel brand new and be able to tackle the toughest tasks you have around you with more energy.

What are the switches that flip your energy back on on an unproductive day? Let us know in the comments.

Jason W. Womack, MEd, MA shares productivity tips that make it possible to do more without the added stress of working harder. For more productivity ideas and up-to-date posts, visit www.JasonWomackBlog.com.

Courtesy of Lifehacker