24 Ways To Be Productive Today – Secrets From a Temporary Staffing Professional by Karen Rehn

Let’s face it we all want more time in our life to get more done, be more, do more and have more.  The thing is, we are all given the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else.  So why is it then that some people are just so much more efficient at squeezing more out of every moment of every day? 

Below you will find 24 great strategies you can employ today to save you more time – if you implement them, of course.

1. Get up an hour earlier.

2. Use Sunday evening for planning the week.

3. Say no. (the power of constraints). Ignore. Focus only on the thing you’re looking to achieve.

4. Get a cleaner and stop spending your precious hours on this task each week (your time is worth a lot more)

5. Turn off your emails on your phone

6. Use a simple to-do-list like TeuxDeux  and only put THREE things on it to get done each day

7. Plan your day according to the most important, biggest task, not the smallest and easiest.

8. Avoid meetings at all cost. If you have to go  have one specific outcome in mind

9. Know what the next step is at the end of every conversation

10. Use Leechblock (Firefox Extension) or Nanny (Google Chrome) to block out times when you can’t access social media and other distracting sites

11. Set a timer to go off at 30 minute intervals to focus on one activity and take a short 1 minute break to refocus

12. Take a proper break after 2 hours for 10-20 minutes and dance to your fave song, do some pushups, get out in the fresh air

13. Ask yourself “is what I’m doing right now getting me closer to what I want to achieve.

14. Know what you’re looking to achieve – what does finished look like?

15. Play motivating upbeat music while working to keep your energy levels high

16. Keep an idea book to dump your distractions in, and come back to them a week later

17. Keep a journal of WHAT you have achieved – either in a notebook or I recommend online journal Penzu

18. Work out what is important and what isn’t

19. Stop procrastinating and just DO it!

20. Throw out the TV – literally bury it in your back garden

21. Turn off the internet. If you’re writing or creating go to a coffee shop that has no internet

22. Outsource – get help using oDesk and Elance, and have someone else design your blog in 2 days instead of you taking 3 weeks

23. Don’t say should, say “I will”. Think like Yoda `There is no try, there is only do or do not’

24. Don’t answer the phone. Literally. If it’s important they’ll leave a message.