Are You As Productive As You Can Be?

Working from home is fantastic. I choose my own working hours. No wasting time sitting in traffic. My commute is only 30 seconds from my bedroom to my home office.

But…it is also very easy to slack off when you are the boss. And there are a lot of distractions at home as well. My younger son is not in school yet and I need to constantly remind him not to interrupt while daddy is working. The wife walks in every now and then wanting me to do something around the house…

Then, there are constant distractions even when I sit in front of my computer. There are emails, instant messages, and the biggest one is checking stats – I know this is a huge time waster but I just can’t help it.

I used to hit “refresh” button every couple of minutes to check my Adsense account, 5 or 6 accounts form CPA networks, and Clickbank accounts. I even loved to refresh my Tracking 202 stats just to watch traffic coming in.

So, I have been looking into time management and how to increase productivity and made a few changes. First, I got rid of instant messaging. I no longer see those pop-ups telling me who is online.

Then, I implemented time boxing, or time blocking. The concept is simple. You dedicate a certain time period, say 1 hour, for a particular task. Then you work on that task and nothing else for the entire hour. No checking emails, no surfing the web. Just focus on that one task.

With time boxing I can actually get the important tasks done and not worry about missing emails or having my campaigns gone bad just because I didn’t check the stats – because I can arrange time blocks for those as well.

To keep the time you can use something like a kitchen timer, then just reset the timer for the next task. I actually found a cool tool called Action Enforcer. It lets you set up to 12 timers at once. So in the morning I decide on all the tasks I want to do for the day and set the timers for all of them.

Action Enforcer shows me the total time of all the tasks combined. As I activate the timer, it also tells me how much time I have left.

The first time I used it, I set up all the tasks I wanted to do for the day, but when I entered the estimated time into Action Enforcer, I was surprised to find out that there were only 6 hours worth of work. So I added more tasks to fill the extra 2 hours. Had I not used Action Enforcer, I would have taken 8 hours to do 6 hours worth of work – just by slacking off. I would have wasted 2 hours for nothing.

Action Enforcer (non-affiliate link) is $27 and it’s well worth it.

Another tool I use is EfficientPIM (non-affiliate link). It’s a contact management software with a calendar where you can schedule events and tasks. It helps me keep long term perspective of where my business is going while Action Enforcer helps me with day-to-day tasks.

I used to use AgentOffice – I had it back in the days when I was a real estate agent. It works great but now since I am no longer a real estate agent, I only use 20% of its features. Besides, the software is getting old and I am not going to spend $250 just to upgrade it.

Until I found EfficientPIM, I’ve tried 4 or 5 different free personal management software but they either don’t have everything I wanted or their user interface is not clean or attractive.

In addition to contact management, calendar, events, and to-do lists, EfficientPIM also has a diary that lets me record things I’ve learned during the day. It also has a sticky note feature. I use it to jog down reminders and it works much better than the sticky notes that came with Windows 7 because you can make it stay on top of the screen so it doesn’t get lost or buried under all the open windows.

Another thing I really like about EfficientPIM is the recurring task feature. You can set a task to repeat every x number of days, weeks, months, years, etc. But what I like to do is to have the task automatically re-generated once it’s completed. Let’s say you need to make a car payment on the 5th of every month. You can set up a task, say on March 5th, and have EfficientPIM automatically generate the task every month. So when you have made the car payment on March 5th, mark this task as “complete” and a new “make car payment” task will show up automatically on your calendar on April 5th.

There is a paid version and a free version of EfficientPIM. I actually tried the paid version (you get 30-day free trial of full functioning software) but never had the need to use the additional features. So I just stick with the free version.

Both Action Enforcer and EfficientPIM have become indispensable to me. If you are not as productive as you want to be, I highly recommend you give them a try.

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Tagged as: action enforcer, efficientpim, productivity, time management, Tools