I can bet about 80% of my readers check their email every time the new message icon pops up, read their RSS feeds or visit YouTube because they “don’t feel” like starting a project, and chat with people that have absolutely no connection to the project their working on. If you’re one of these people, read on…

Now I’ll make a confession to everyone. I used to do this every single day and it was tough because I would sit till midnight “working” on a design that should have been finished by the time my work day was over. I saw my productivity levels drop to very low rates and my designs were not as thought out as I would have liked. I knew I had to end this habit and I did by eliminating things that distract me from work:

• Email: I run Windows Live Mail and about every 2-10 minutes a new email comes in which I just had to read. I got around this by changing my email settings and getting WLM to check for new messages every 30 minutes (instead of every 1 minute).
• Feeds: RSS feeds may take up hours of your day and at times they did take up that much when I had an unspecified large number of subscriptions. Especially if you’re reading something like Engadget that brings in100+ new posts a day, then this is definitely a time waster. I have removed feeds that don’t really improve my knowledge and productivity and now I only have 34 essential feeds that I watch (although at times even this is too many). So remove feeds that:
  1. You don’t really need: Sure, Engadget was interesting, but is it that important?
  2. Too big: Reading a feed that has 100+ new posts a day is not only distractive, but unhealthy. It’s better off to sign up somewhere that brings in about 5-10 new posts each day because the fewer information you read, the more you can analyze it, think about it, and apply it.
     Note: Don’t unsubscribe from this site though
  3. Outdated : We’re after unique and new information, not the same boring stuff!
• Chat: More often than not, I get friends that have a “quick and urgent question” that they need solved. Their quick question often becomes a time waster that leads to other things resulting in less production time. I now like to set my status to “Busy” or “Working” depending on which IM clients I have running.
• Twitter: All the cool people use it right? I guess this is one time where its best to not be part of the cool crowd. The Twitter Tweets are fun, but they are very distracting, so the best bet is to just shut them off.
• Multiple Project At Once: Several years ago, this has been a major deal for me when I tried to work at different projects at once. This brought me to a point where almost every time I would sit and try to decide which one to do first. Since then, I have organized myself on working on projects on a first-come-first-serve basis and tell clients how much time to expect before they see any first hand results.
• StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is great. Especially for wasting time. Honestly, I still find it hard at times to stop clicking the Stumble! button, but disabling it for a while has been helpful.
• Other Distractions: TV, Kids, (Wife), Various internet browsing activities, can all be part of your distractions. The above 5 things were my personal time-wasters which I now overcome with ease. Freelancers especially may have a hard time with these, but one thing I can say is this: Getting rid of these time-wasting activities will boost your productivity, career, and client base by at least 150%!
  

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