One of the biggest drawbacks from my paycheck each month isn’t the hourly rate I am paid while I’m on the clock, it isn’t the way I communicate with my clients, nor is it the quality of work that I provide. No…the biggest setback is the amount of time that I waste.

You know what I mean…checking email 20 times a day, peeking at message boards, instant messaging with friends, checking Facebook, and turning on the TV for a quick “work break.” It happens and it’s okay, but it also needs to be limited.

Are there times when a writer needs to take a brain break? Absolutely. Does that need to happen 10 times a day? Never.

It’s much easier to waste time than it is to stay productive, but if you want to separate yourself from the pack and take your business to a new level, then you’ve got to learn some new techniques to keep yourself focussed. Here are a few tricks that I have used to stay on-task and improve my productivity by over 200%:

1. Plan Your Day: Every night before I go to bed, I write down everything I want to accomplish the next day. An important thing to keep in mind when setting daily goals is that you never want to give yourself too little nor too much to do. If you give yourself an easy list, you can expect to procrastinate until 2pm before you even begin working hard. If you give yourself too much to do then you’ll feel bogged down, possibly give up, and get less done than you would have with a couple less items.I try to stick to 6 things each day that I feel need my utmost attention. This often looks like: (1) 1500 word sales letter for Whoever, (2) one 400 word article for this publication, (3) five bids on Elance, (4) contact 3 clients, (5) write 2 pages for Ebook, and (6) maintain blogs. This schedule is manageable without being too hectic and has a good balance of making-money now, planning for next week, as well as working towards having a passive income.
2. Schedule Your Breaks: We all need breaks, but we often take them more than we need to. Know what I mean? If you were able to schedule your breaks then it would be much easier for you to stay on take while you’re actually working. If you don’t have work time differentiated from break time, then you’ll find that they sometimes accidentally blend together, which is something that you never want to happen.
3. Turn Off Auto-Notifications: If you check your email every time that a new one comes in, then you’re not only disrupting whatever you’re doing for the moment, but you’re likely moving towards a task that will only side-track you further. There is no such thing as being momentarily side-tracked.We all know that five-minutes quickly turns into 30 and before you know it, you forget what you were working on in the first place.If you can resist the temptation to check every email that comes through your instant messenger, that’s great. But if you can’t then you really need to figure out how to turn these auto-notifications off so that you can stay on task and accomplish your goals for the day.

By applying these tips and finding others that help you stay on-task as much as possible, you’ll find that you’ll easily be able to save a couple hours each day and get much more accomplished than you ever have before.

Don’t go by the old slogan, “if you have nothing to do, look busy.” Instead, if you don’t have something to do, find something! There’s always a task that you can find that will help you to move you closer to the success that you dream about. Let’s face it, we all want to be successful, but we aren’t all doing the things we need to do to become successful. However, if you follow these three tips then you’ll likely be closer than you were before.

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