How to get More Done in Less Time

Last Thursday I had one o the most productive days of of bogging/social media work that I’ve ever had. I commented on about 20+ blogs, responded to comments on my own site, wrote 3 guest posts, and did a few other things. I did this all in about 2 hours. In case you’re wondering whether I’m on a performance enhancing drug, the answer is no.  I just took advantage of laser like focus.  Let’s look at how you can do replicate this.

Make your list: One thing I learned from a quick study of the things that Robert Granholm does at the Life Design Project was that you need to know your daily routine. If you look closely at your daily routine, you’ll start to notice that it is quite repetitive. The good thing about this is you can get to a very high level of efficiency once you know that routine. I broke down my list as follows:

• Read and comment on blog posts
• Write new posts and guest posts
• Respond to comments on my blogs
• Hang out on Twitter and chat
• Email

Prioritize: After I made my list I decided to prioritize.  A while back I wrote about the one question time management method. My order of operations goes something like this:

1. Read and comment on blog posts: You might wonder why I would actually put this before writing my own posts. The main reason is that I often will get ideas for my own content from something I read at a particular blog. Sometimes those ideas will come from somebody’s post or from some commenter’s post.
2. Write new posts/Guests Posts: A few weeks back I talked about how to consistently write a blog post in 20 minutes or less. I can still do it, but I’m focusing on longer posts at this point, so I’d say add about 5 minutes.  When I write  I prefer a distraction free writing tool called Mac Journal.
3. Respond to comments: This seems like the next logical step  when you think about tasks that are of high value. Responding to comments is necessary, but not a super high value task.
4. Twitter/Social Media: This is kind of my coffee break. I get on Twitter for about 20 mins and I see what’s going on. I retweet articles and join a few conversations.
5. Email: I decided to see if I could check email only twice that day. That was actually fundamental to my increase in productivity. I also setup some filters so all newsletters went into separate folders and the only things that came into my inbox were emails from people that I could respond to right away. I recommend you don’t check email first thing in the morning. Some of you might disagree, but I say shut it off for at least 2 hours and see what happens.

Turn off Distractions: The ultimate irony of all this efficiency increasing technology that we have created is that we’ve created so much of it that we’ve made ourselves less efficient because of it.  In this short period of time I decided to shut off everything. No email, no Chat, no Tweetdeck. You’d be amazed at how much little distractions will throw off your flow. The reason I can write so quickly is I’m not distracted by the sound of emails in my inbox and Tweetdeck notifications.

Batch Process/Uni-Task: I’m not the first person to say this, so it’s nothing original. But, if you work on one thing at at time you’ll be amazed at how much faster you’ll get each thing done. For me, ADHD gives me a fair amount of challenges with this, so I have to take advantage of a flow state when I  hit it and use it to do only one thing.  Batch processing allows me to get so much more done when I hit a flow state.

Use Music: Depending on the type of person you are, music can help you get into a rhythm when you are doing your work. I prefer using techno music because lyrics of music seem to clutter my mind a bit.  But, throw on some headphones during this period and you’ll see a nice little increase in productivity.

Everybody has different ways of being productive so I’m  not saying this will be  the perfect solution. In fact it can probably be made even more efficient.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you get the most out of your time.

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