Hasta La Ideas

The following is an excerpt from my book Unclutter Your Life in One Week, which comes out next week on November 3. If you have pre-ordered the book, THANK YOU! and also don’t forget to sign up to receive the special PDF bonus worksheets. And, to let you know, the electronic Kindle version is now available for pre-order (still no word on the other e-book formats).

Now, on with the excerpt from the Thursday chapter, “Working While at Work” section of the book:

“… try these strategies for improving your productivity when you don’t really want to work:

• Similar to what you might do when exercising, play music with a fast rhythm.
• If you drink caffeine, consume it in small, frequent amounts instead of just one large cup at the beginning of the day.
• Set time-specific goals in two-, five-, or ten-minute increments. Identify what you want to accomplish in a very short amount of time, and then set a timer and go for it.
• Isolate yourself. Remove the desire to procrastinate by not having any other options but to work.
• Acknowledge that you’re procrastinating. Often, just realizing that you’re putting something off is enough to get you working.
• Challenge a colleague to see who can get the most work done in a set time period.
• Ask someone to help you stay accountable. There are professional motivators who will call you once a day to see how you’re doing, but a trusted and willing friend or coworker can do the same thing for free.
• If the task doesn’t require much though, listen to an audiobook while you work. Agree to only listen to the book when you’re working on the project you don’t want to do. This way, you’ll be interested in hearing more of the story each time you take on the undesirable task.”

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of using 3×5 cards to capture and organize tasks and ideas, but they can be somewhat inconvenient to use. Various cases and Hipster PDAs attempt to make note cards easily accessible, but they rely on carrying around yet another item in your pocket.

Last year, I picked up a Pocket Briefcase, which has now become one of my favorite organizational tools. Instead of carrying around a wallet and a stack of note cards, I’m able to carry just a wallet, because the cards fit inside. This particular briefcase has a pocket for cash, slots for a few debit and ID cards, and two pockets to organize used cards. I recently went on a trip out of the US and discovered that my Pocket Briefcase will even fit my passport.

This works for me because even when I don’t want to carry a notebook, I’m always carrying my wallet, so I’m never without a pen and paper. If you use note cards with your personal information on them, then you’re carrying business cards too!

Levenger’s pocket briefcase isn’t cheap, so if you want to see if this kind of tool will work for you without spending a lot of money, you can find similar items in many stores that carry office supplies.

Keeping track of how you spend your time is a necessity when you’re billing segments of your workday to multiple clients, but it’s also valuable for determining your efficiency and productivity. Lifehacker recently reviewed and rated the Five Best Time-Tracking Applications and awarded Klok (free and usable on all platforms) as the top application:

Built with Adobe AIR, Klok is a lightweight and cross-platform tracking solution. You can create a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects in the task-management sidebar and then track the time spent on each by dragging and dropping them into the workflow for the day. While you can delve into the details of each block of time, simple adjustments like expanding the amount of time you’ve worked on a project is as easy as grabbing the edge of the block with your mouse and tugging it down.

Also on their list are Manic Time (Windows), SlimTimer (web-based), RescueTime (Windows and Mac), and Project Hamster (Linux). All five of the applications mentioned in the article are free to access or download.

If you haven’t tracked your time before, I recommend keeping records for at least two weeks to see how you spend your time. The data you will acquire will give you insight into your most productive hours of the day, your low-performance times, when people tend to interrupt you, and how much time you waste during an average day. Then, you can start to tweak your work habits to get the most out of your time in the office.

We want to again welcome guest author Alex Fayle, the writer and professional organizer behind the helpful anti-procrastination website Someday Syndrome. This is his third post of three in a series on fighting procrastination.

We’ve vanquished the Getting Started Monster, conquered the No Momentum Monster and now all that’s left is to finish up. You’ve uncluttered your space and managed to keep at it until everything is nicely streamlined. You’ve even put things back where they belong.

Well, almost everything. You have a few things that don’t fit in your current storage spaces, so you’ve left them on top of your desk while you figure out what type of storage you need for them exactly.

And then months pass with them still on your desk. A few bits and bobs not done don’t really matter you tell yourself every time you see the pile of things waiting to be given a home.

But it does matter because from that pile of things not put away the clutter starts to grow again, creeping out from that spot to take over the office again.

When we don’t finish projects we leave the door open to chaos. We let the Never Finishing Monster into our lives and everything around the place needs just a few adjustments to finish, but nothing’s totally completed. The baseboard is missing on the living room trim. The bedroom needs curtains. The email inbox still has a few dozen messages from two months ago waiting to be looked at.

Why don’t we totally finish? Because often we leave the fiddly bits to the end, the stuff that we’re not quite sure what to do with, or the stuff that we hate doing.

Dedicating Time

Fortunately, unlike getting started and moving forward, there is a trick to kill the Never Finishing Monster — it’s called the Get It Done Sprint.

I use this all the time with my writing. I’ll start a project and move it forward slowly and steadily but as I get closer to the end of something I slow down to a crawl that wouldn’t win a race against 80 year old snails.

When I notice that I’ve reached this point, I schedule a block of time (for my writing projects a week is usually a good amount of time) where I dedicate several hours a day getting the project done. The Never Finishing Monster doesn’t stand a chance against such dedicated effort.

It’s like the end of a 10km race — you pace yourself throughout the race until the finish line comes into sight and you sprint to the end.

Apply this same thinking to your organizing projects. When you almost reach the end, change your approach to the project and commit to getting it done within a very specific (and very short) timeframe. Schedule a day to go buy the supplies you need and enlist (or hire) help to put in that extra bit of effort to wrap up the project.

And don’t delay. Schedule the sprint as soon as possible. The longer you leave the project unfinished, the less likely you’ll get around to it and the more likely all your hard work will undo itself.

So tell me, what’s left to get finished in your house and when will you schedule the Get It Done Sprint that will squash the Never Finishing Monster flat?

Today, Ali Hale has a wonderful post on goal setting over on the blog Dumb Little Man. The post, “How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want,” talks about how to set goals for the less-ambitious things in life.

We’ve written in the past about how determining what matters to you most is an important aspect of uncluttering. Not only does focusing on what matters most to you keep up your motivation, but it also helps you to decide priorities for your time, energy, money, and space. “How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want” is a great resource for getting you thinking about the day-to-day things that are important to you.

A “goal” is simply something which you’d like to do or achieve. It could be buying a house or a car, yes, but it could also be something which might matter to no-one in the world except you — perhaps your goal is to learn to bake cakes as good as the ones your grandma used to make.

Goals aren’t things that you feel you “should” do, and any good life coach will steer you away from goals that have been imposed upon you by other people.

Spend 15, 20, or 60 minutes working on determining what matters most to you. Uncluttering will be easier and more productive when you know why you’re simplifying your life.