Work Smarter – Not Harder

It's very easy to get sucked into routines, or habits, such as: checking emails, browsing forums, visiting social networking sites, checking out your favourite blogs (Thanks!), interacting with others through instant messaging or VoiP and a myriad of other potentially time sucking activities.

The challenge is to continue to do all those things with a simple twist.. Have a purpose in mind.

Is it neccessary to check your emails every ten minutes, or would it be more efficient to check your emails every 4 hours?

I use GMail and I use the GMail Checker addon for FireFox which shows me how many emails I have in my account. If I hover my curser over the GMail icon it also shows me the email subject line, so I don't need to waste time checking emails until there's something important in my inbox.

When browsing forums I look for information that might help me grow my business, topics that I can contribute to and trends and patterns that may point to a potential product opportunity.

I happen to enjoy participating in forums and I use that to my advantage.. When I'm working on a new product, article, blog post or whatever.. I set targets. For example I'll give myself ten minutes forum browsing when I've completed this blog post. You can do the same with social networking sites and blogs. There's nothing like a bit of motivation!

I use Skype quite a lot and it's easy to allow instant messages and Skype calls to interrupt your workflow or concentration. There are two easy solutions.. Log out. Or, simply change your status to "Do not disturb" or "Invisible" and train your contacts to respect your time.