If you are short on time but big on ambition, here are 5 easy ways to supercharge your productivity and get more done in your already crowded day.

1 – Wake Up Earlier

I know, I know! Just hear me out. I am not a morning person so I would not recommend this if I didn’t try it first-hand and saw how great it worked. Last fall, I was juggling a temporary job with a deadline-driven freelance editing project. My time was squeezed for sure. I noticed a pattern with my day, though, that helped me finish both the job and the editing assignment on time. I simply started waking up at 5:00 AM. That gave me a solid 3 hours of uninterrupted work in the morning. I would go to bed earlier at night. My evenings are not productive anyway as I am usually too low on energy from a busy day to start anything creative. Plus, the distraction of having my wife home made it hard to concentrate in the evenings. By going to bed earlier and sleeping through the unproductive late-evening hours and moving them to the beginning of my day, I literally “discovered” an extra 21 productive, distraction-free hours a week! Since that experiment, I’ve continued to wake up earlier in the morning.

2 – Never Check E-Mail In The Morning

Checking E-Mail first thing in the morning is a time-suck. Reading messages fragments your thinking, distracts you from important tasks and weighs on your mind with pending obligations and requests throughout the day. It is best to first check off a couple important items from your to-do list before you check your E-Mail. I have found that checking E-Mail twice a day, once at 11:00 AM and the second time at 4:00 PM works well. You might also try avoiding E-Mail until after lunch. If the anxiety of an unattended inbox bothers you, simply use an auto-responder to communicate your E-Mail schedule to clients, coworkers and your boss.

3 – Batch Your Tasks

Batching is a highly effective time-management strategy. Your productivity is affected every time you switch gears and change tasks. Instead of doing everything every day, try scheduling certain tasks less frequently. For example, instead of paying bills as you receive them, check your due dates and only touch invoices twice a month. The E-Mail strategy above is a perfect example of batching since you are only touching it twice a day instead of all day long as each message hits your inbox.

4 – 80-20 Your To-Do List

An Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, noted that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto Principle or 80-20 Rule would later be used in a business context to suggest that 80% of sales comes from 20% of clients. You can take this even further: 80% of your results/revenue are generated by 20% of your efforts. This number isn’t set in stone either. Your ratio might be 75/25 or 90/10.

When you have limited time in your day to get things done, applying the 80-20 Rule to your to-do list is the best way to maximize your efforts. It also allows you to weed out unimportant tasks forcing you to focus your efforts on the 20% of things you do that generates results: revenue, sales, signed contracts, content for your website or blog, artistic output (paintings, sculpture), etc…

Let’s look at a sample blogger’s to-do list with 5 items on it:

1 – Do Laundry
2 – Check website traffic stats
3 – Tweak blog color scheme to something prettier
4 – Write 2 posts for blog
5 – Tidy up desk

If you had only one hour in your day to do any of the items on this list, the 80-20 principle would suggest you choose item #4. Writing 2 blog posts is that 20% of your effort that will generate results for your blog (content, page views, revenue). While the other four items on your list still need to be done, you’ll never launch a business by prioritizing an empty laundry hamper or knowing up-to-the-minute traffic stats for your blog. Find a way to batch the remaining tasks and complete them at a time when your schedule has more room.

5 – Block Time and Set Aggressive Due Dates

Blocking time is an effective strategy for getting things done. Set aside an hour or two to complete a task. Be sure to also set an aggressive deadline. Working within an open-ended block of time in which to complete something is a sure way to take twice as long to finish or not finish at all. This is one of the reasons why the average employee wastes 2 hours of each day slacking off. The 8-hour workday lends itself to the illusion of having “all day to get things done”. In reality, having 8-hours in which to get your work done promotes procrastination and poor time-management tactics. It’s better to break your day down into 1 or 2 hour blocks of time and set a hard, self-imposed deadline. Don’t give yourself until the end of the day to complete a task, give yourself until 10:00 AM!

The above time management strategies have served me well, especially when I was juggling a full-time job as well as a side-business, marriage and social life. My next post will focus on increasing productivity when you have “all the time in the world” when you are self employed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.