How to Stop Wasting Time at Work
How many hours a day do you work? Eight or so, you say? Hah. Liar. I'm talking about actually working, not chatting with friends, surfing the Web, checking e-mail, grabbing lunch, taking a bathroom break ... you get the picture.
I was mulling the work/not work divide the other day, when six hours of office time magically evaporated without me having written a single word. Clearly, I have some productivity problems. (Either that, or I have a black belt in procrastination.)
But blog posts from Steve Pavlina, Stephen Smith and Phil Newton suggested an easy way to wallop my time-wasting: Keep a time log. It's simple tool to both measure your sloth and identify where you're getting off track, thus enabling you to make changes that boost your efficiency.
I tried it. It worked -- partly because I was embarrassed that I wasted 48 cumulative minutes reading TMZ.com. But I also realized that I keep killing my own momentum and focus by giving in to distractions like ringing phones, e-mail alerts and the lure of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer (oh, the perils of having a home office).
So my new M.O. is to shut down my e-mail and send all calls to voicemail when I'm on deadline. As for the ice cream, I solved that problem the old-fashioned way: I ate it all. No more distraction.