This past week I have been crazy busy with meetings, calls, projects, contracts etc. Busy as hell! I decided to get off Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. I tried to keep these things very minimal when it came to my work. I had a lot of other priorities and I didn't want any distractions. By removing some of the social distractions I think I definitely improved on my productivity.
The things that took the most time out of my day was Twitter, Skype, and Facebook. It is definitely an attention grabber with status updates, skype calls, and video shares. It just breaks my concentration and I end up clicking on the link and looking at everyone's statuses. I even found myself on youtube for almost an hour.
Not good when I got a whiteboard filled with things to do. So this week experiment was born and I think I did pretty well. I got a lot of things done, contracts reviewed, offers going up, products needing traffic, research keywords etc. I did a lot of things. Instead of me reading DamnYouAutoCorrect.com or finding new mixtapes on Datpiff.com - I was full productive on what I had to do.
... and yes the occasional cat pictures.
Here are somethings that has helped with my productivity....
- Every morning I write my goals for TODAY and what I want to accomplish for today. This puts me in a goal oriented mood where I want to cross one of those task off the white board, and it feels good doing so.
- LeechBlock, is one Firefox plugin that I used to help stop myself from going to WorldStar, Facebook, Datpiff, Youtube, and all these other sites that I tend to randomly go to.
- SimplyNoise, replace my Winamp player and Grooveshark.com because I notice myself picking and choosing songs I want to play and listen to. This actually helps a lot and relaxes my brain actually as well. It did take me getting use to but it definitely is worth it to have playing in the background.
- Close out Tweetdeck and try not to open it. Twitter, I do not know why I find it so interesting maybe because of what certain celebrities say that interests me or the funny remarks from music artists. I did manage to not look at twitter on my PC but did tend to look at my iPhone twitter app - but not as often - so that is a plus.
- Closed out my email. I started responding to emails more so towards later in the day and via my iphone especially if it was important. This help a little with more screen real estate, allowing me to move more windows around when necessary.
I think that was it. Just these things alone definitely helped with my daily productivity and how I manage things. It s a good thing that I have workoffice to help with managing my VAs and partners. In all I think I had a hell of a week, so cheers.
enjoy your weekend!
