This website was a great find and I appreciated the author’s efforts to keep the list focused and concise. (In fact, I appreciated Sam’s efforts all over the site!) My favorite steps were #3: Don’t sleep with unanswered emails and #8 Discipline your waste. I took both of these things to heart and I’ve found that my productivity has increased.

I organize my emails into folders and make sure that I go through everything in my inbox. My email newsletters are promptly put in my newsletter folders – unopened – so when I have some spare time I can easily find what I want to read. Anything that hasn’t been answered during the day that is left in my inbox at 5pm requires followup action – an update for a client, a proposal to be sent out, or even a quick note to say “I can’t complete this task at the moment, let me call you tomorrow to schedule something.” Always let your customers know where they stand.

I am also quite guilty of #8… wasting my time on the fun things. I love to look for CSS tricks, WordPress tips and read articles on writing. I am quite often distracted by shiny objects on the internet and found I have to pull myself back to the task at hand. What works for me is a timer. If I find something in my inbox or through my research that I want to look at later I bookmark it in my “To-Look” folder in my browser. Then, come break time, I pull out my timer and set it for 30 minutes. During that time I take a break from my work and gaze lovingly at all of the shiny objects I have put away. When the buzzer goes off it’s back to work – without the guilt of missing something fun!

Where has my productivity gone?

Despite the creation of To-Do lists, the removal of distractions and the use of different productivity tools I still find myself taking twice as much time as I planned on to finish my writing projects. Because I insist on never letting a client down, I find myself working into the late hours or during dinner and putting my family on the backburner. And I want my family time back. I want to see my 14 month old wobble his way across the floor on his own two feet, and race cars around the living room with my three year old. In order to do that I need to become more productive during my work hours.

Some Suggestions

So I decided I would spend 5 minutes bookmarking sites that had suggestions. Then, after I completed a task for a client, I would go back one at a time and see what tips they had to offer. Here are the top?five tip sites I found:

• LifeHack?50 Ways to Increase Your Productivity
• IncreasingProductivity.org (The name says it all!)
• Freelance Productivity?Do One Extra Thing Each day
• Chrisblogging.com Freelance Writing Productivity
• CopyBlogger What to Boost Your Writing Productivity? Have a Baby!

The last one is a particularly enjoyable read… though I have no plans for more babies at this time! Perhaps you, dear reader, can share some of your productivity tips and we can get over this bridge together? I look forward to overcoming this obstacle with you!