Determining your productive time

How many hours of productive time do you have each day?

Be honest?

There are a few times that spring to mind:

• When the phones aren't ringing
• When the email popups aren't popping up
• When you're not surfing the net, answering the email, making a cup of coffee, going to the bathroom
• When people don't wander by to have a chat
• When you can't hear other people chatting in the hallway outside your office
• When you are so engrossed in a project / task that time stands still

Is it any wonder that your day is fragmented to the point where (when looking at the above list) you wonder how you manage to get ANY work done at all!

I know, it can be like that some days can't it.

So how do you handle the annoyances and time wasting techniques we all have and sometimes utilise?

• Arrive at work a half hour early, turn on your computer - but not your email and certainly not the Internet and begin immediately on the task that you should have completed and haven't. If you have struggled to find the right words, starting with a fresh mind can be just the thing to kick start your day.
• Don't stay back late thinking you will get more done if you do. While some people are regular owls when it comes to body clocks - your body does expect some down time, not to mention sleep and sustenance. Rarely do longer hours mean you get more done, you just spread out the work load to fill the hours you don't want to be home for.
• Turn off the "net" and keep it off during the day. Only turn it on when you need something specific and then turn it off again when you've finished. The problem with the Internet is simple - everyone can be a publisher on the "net" and unfortunately most of them appear to have done so. You really do have to know where to go to find quality information....but then I can cheat - I'm a research librarian!!!!
• Turn off the email too. Have a designated time to check your email. Have a disclaimer advising clients that you are away from your computer and you will respond as soon as you are able to. And before you say "that's a fib" consider this - if you block out time on your calendar to work on a project - you are effectively in a meeting with yourself to do the job you have been assigned, so no  do not consider that statement to be misleading.
  
  So - block out the time to work on a project and when the time comes to do exactly that - then do it. This works especially well at the beginning of the day as late afternoon appointments with one's self can be eroded by other people and other people's inability to manage their own time effectively.

Then once you know what time is your most productive, all you have to do is decide which of the items you are going to tackle first. Remember, if you know where you want to go / reach / be - by the end of a designated time period (end of day / end of week / end of month / end of 12 months / end of goal) then the choices become easier to make.

Bur remember - if you major in the smaller things, you won't have major time for the things that really matter.

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Every day is a new beginning
Stephanie Dowrick
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