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For so many people, productivity appears to be a lofty goal that always seems just out of reach. I’m sure we all want to be more productive, so we can achieve more every day and hopefully reach whatever goals we are aiming for.
The problem is that the modern world and workplace has so many distractions trying to pull you away from the task at hand. Add that to the decrease in attention span of many people today, and it’s amazing that we get anything done at all!
Is clutter standing in the way of you doing your best work? Likely it is. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges to your productivity. Don’t believe me, well read on.
When your environment is filled with clutter, you may feel like you’re constantly reacting rather than responding. You may feel a general sense of unease or anxiety. You may feel mentally exhausted even though you haven’t yet started your workday.
Are you constantly searching for client files, notes, or even something to write with?
Is it a nightmare to find a file on your hard drive or the cloud because you lack an organizational structure and/or an effective file-naming convention?
Do you have a dozen tabs open on your computer at any one time? Yes, that’s a form of clutter, too.
Are there stacks of books, papers, or even coffee cups or dishes sitting on your desk?
Are your file drawers crammed with paperwork that’s no longer needed and which belongs in the trash can?
Across the board, clutter is often fuelling these uneasy feelings and your lack of productivity. It has a way of sucking the life out of you, distracting you from what’s most important, and derailing your success.
Yes, simple clutter can be that much of a distraction and you need to reduce or eliminate it from your workspace as quickly as possible.
Try it. What have you got to lose?

You can’t increase your productivity by reading a book or taking a class. You actually need to take action. The first thing you need to do is to “set the stage.” Nothing’s going to happen until you do.
Let’s focus on some basic components of your work environment. A cluttered and messy office is no place to expect your best work. And, while some people believe that’s where they get their best work done, imagine what they could accomplish if working in a completely upgraded environment!
Here are some simple tips for helping you to create an environment for success.
Put away everything that belongs in your desk drawers or file cabinet.
If you find things that don’t belong in your office, then take them to wherever they belong and put them away.
Remember the old adage, “Out of sight, out of mind.” In this case, that’s a good thing!
Bonus tip: Discard anything you haven’t used in the past year. Odds are you never will. I know this can be difficult for hoarders, but just let it go!
Clear everything from the top of your desk and wipe it down.
Reduce visual distractions as much as possible.
Bonus tip: Wipe down your desk phone and/or smartphone. They’re a haven for germs.
Gather all your Post-It notes and scraps of paper. Review them and discard what you can.
Bonus tip: If they include items you need to reference, keep the one-page document easily accessible on your desktop or stored in a top desk drawer.
If you have boxes or stacks of items on your office floor, go through them and discard everything you can.
Bonus tip: Go through your bookcase and get rid of any books you also own digitally. Box up any others that are outdated and either give them to the library or recycle them.
Technology produces its own brand of clutter. Close down any tabs that you have open on your computer except for those that apply to your current work.
Bonus tip: Turn off any gadgets except the ones you need to do your core work tasks. You’ll get more done faster and easier without added distractions.
By implementing these simple tips, you’ll be well on your way to clearing the clutter in your office and reducing distraction. You’ll love the result. You’ll be more energized, less anxious, and more focused on your work. Investing a little bit of time today to prepare your work environment will make a noticeable difference in your productivity!
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Everyone has different sweet spots that help them focus or be more creative. Essentially, different locations or times of day can either be more conducive to daydreaming and creativity or more conducive to focus and continued hard work.
If you try to do one where you succeed better in the other, you can either become unfocused or uncreative, so it’s important to keep them separated. For example, you may be most focused and hardworking late at night.
Sweet spots aren’t just times of day, though. You may also find that different locations that you choose to work at may help or hinder various things like focus. Some people have dedicated office spaces where they find it really easy to focus, while others may find it best to focus out at a café.
You might be really creative being outside, or laying comfortably in bed. Regardless of what your sweet spots are, you should utilize them to the best of your ability. Studies have found that location and time of day can greatly affect mood and productivity, so if you’re in the right sweet spot at the right time, you can get a lot more work done.
It also helps to separate areas that you work in and relax in. For example, if you tend to spend a lot of time on your couch relaxing, if you sit there to go and work all of a sudden, you probably won’t feel like focusing very much.
Your body can easily become accustomed to locations and will default to whatever you typically feel there, such as relaxation on the couch, and it’ll be hard to switch from relaxing to hard work.
The variations in these sweet spots are why 9-to-5 jobs don’t work well for many people. If you need to be focused throughout the time you spend working, but you don’t focus well until the wee morning hours, then the entirety of the 9-5 time slot is going to throw you off and make you less productive.
By allowing yourself to get things done where you feel is best, you’ll benefit yourself by enjoying the work a bit more, and also benefit your business by being more productive. It’s all about personal preferences and wielding them effectively.

There are two main “settings” you’ll work with throughout your career. Typically, you’re either doing productivity-focused work, or creative work.
You need to be able to separate the two into different periods of time. The reason they need to be kept separate is that each one requires you to be in a different state of mind. While creativity lets your mind wander and come up with new and exciting things, productivity and focus require you to home in on one specific thing and do it as well as you can.
When you’re trying to be creative, it’s fine to be unfocused. This doesn’t mean that you can be outright distracted, of course, but more so blurred while still looking at the project you’re working on.
It allows your mind to have room to experiment with different ideas and fresh, new ideas. When you need to be productive, you need absolute focus to get things done. You should follow your strict methods that work, and that you know work.
Don’t experiment with different things – just keep working with what works best. At this time, you don’t have room to maneuver very much, and you’re probably really locked in to whatever it is that you’re doing.
Depending on the job you have, each of these modes might have different times spent on them. For example, a construction worker or someone working in engineering might not want to experiment and be creative too much, but rather they want to work with what they know will work well and be effective.
You need to have separate times of the day for each one to take place. You might be more focused in the mornings, but more creative at night, or vice versa. If you try to force the two together, you won’t be happy with the results.
You’re either going to end up stifling your creativity with an over-focused mind, or you’ll have a mind that’s too open that ends up hurting your productivity. Test your timing and strengths and see what works best for your schedule and planning.

It’s very easy to get distracted these days. In addition to the normal situation of people trying to get you to do different things, you also have the distraction of technology that allows you to focus on all kinds of things at the same time.
This can be a big problem for your creativity, and might end up being the reason that your creative projects are taking longer. Multitasking is usually seen as a beneficial trait. In many work-related situations, it is.
You’ve probably encountered times when you’ve gotten into a creative flow, where you’re working well and you’re quickly moving along with your work. This flow is key to quickly finishing good creative projects, because it’s the time when you’re working at max efficiency.
The only thing is, this flow requires focus on the project at hand only, and if you’re getting distracted by other things, then you’re not going to be able to maintain that flow. You may not even notice that you’re multitasking when it happens.
You might see it as a normal part of your work day, where, while you’re working on a project, you stop for a short bit to work on something else before quickly getting back to the project at hand.
It might also be a situation where you’re doing something congruently with the project, such as making a phone call or reading some emails. Multitasking forces you to break your focus, even if just for a moment, and your mind has to quickly play catch up to get back to where you were.
Going through the movie all in one sitting without any distractions is like cutting out multitasking. It goes fast, and is also the best way to do it. You can pause the movie and do other things in between scenes, or you can mess around on your phone while it’s running, but that’s going to cause you to lose focus and make the whole process take longer.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊

We all have goals. We all have ambitions. We all have things that we’d like to have happen in our lives. The good news is that all of those goals, ambitions and positive occurrences are possible.
All we have to do to achieve them is start doing the work that needs to be done in order to make them real.
You need to begin seizing the day and using your time productively so that you begin building the future that you want to live in.
The leadership guru John Maxwell once said that “You’ll never change your life until you change something that you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
This article is all about helping you to establish “power habits” in your daily routine that will allow you to crank your productivity to eleven.
Adopting some or all of these habits and incorporating them into your day-to-day schedule will crank you into overdrive. You’ll not only begin reaching your goals, you’ll also begin reaching them sooner than you ever thought possible.
When you get up earlier than normal two things happen. First, you have more time in you day to get more things done. Productivity is all about accomplishing tasks. The more hours that you have to play with, them more likely it becomes that you’re going to initiate and complete projects.
Study after study has shown that the most personally productive hours in the day occur before noon. It all has to do with natural body rhythms and cycles. So, when you get up earlier you not only have more time to get stuff done, you also have more energy. It’s a productivity win/win.
Ok, you should have a schedule of what you want to accomplish on any given day. (If you don’t, then start using one.) In order to make the schedule as effective as possible, you need to be places, take phone calls and generally do things on time, as you scheduled them.
Make an effort to be punctual. Get to appointments, meeting and phone calls on time. The more punctual you are, the more you’ll get done.
Besides food and water, your body only has two other absolute needs – sleep and exercise. When you don’t get enough rest, you cannot maintain the mental energy levels that are required for you to be optimally productive.
Make sure that you put enough time aside for adequate amounts of both sleep and exercise. If you do, you’ll find that you have more energy and more energy equals greater productivity.
All positive behavior is nothing more than habit. When you perform a positive action over and over it becomes habitual. You continue making the positive action without even thinking about it. In addition, one positive habit will lead to other positive behaviors which, over time, will also become habitual. That’s why developing keystone habits are so important to increased productivity.
This effect can be enhanced by layering one keystone habit on top of another. So, you not only make your bed every day, you also make it a habit to rinse and stack your breakfast dishes in the sink or put them in the dishwasher.
The point is that when you routinely do what needs to be done, you start to develop a habit of treating everything that you do in a similar way. The end result is that your productivity soars.
One of the major drains on productivity is simply not knowing where to direct your attention. Let’s face it, each day we are faced with information overload. We get phone calls, e-mails, text messages and more.
We use apps that are supposedly designed to make our lives easier, but instead start to compete for our attention by adding their reminders to the mix of information that is already bombarding us.
One of the best ways to combat this problem is with a daily plan. When it comes to any task, ask yourself “What is this?”, “Why am I doing it” and “What do I want to get out of it?”
Simply posing these questions to yourself prior to doing anything will allow you to begin to prioritize what truly needs to be done and eliminate what truly is a time waster. Again, the end result is greatly increased productivity.
There is a tendency to want to remain plugged in and on top of all communications simply because we can. However, to do so is a major mistake. One of the key ways to remain optimally productive is to know when to take it easy and not be productive at all.
You need to give yourself enough time to recharge and rejuvenate. You cannot be fully productive when your batteries are drained and you have nothing left to give. Remember to walk away from all of your tasks on a regular basis.
This means no checking your phone for messages, no answering e-mails, and no quick phone calls. Your time away is sacred. It is key to you being truly effective at what you do. Treat it as such.
In order to be fully productive, you have to be focused on the task at hand. However, in today’s always connected, modern world maintaining focus is increasingly difficult. Studies have shown that, on average, we are only able to concentrate on a given task for three to five minutes before being distracted by social media, e-mails or other things that interfere with concentration.
The secret to keeping focused on what you’re doing is by removing the sources of those distractions. Because social media is one of the biggest culprits, it’s important to install safeguards that allow you to resist the allure of checking for updates on social media sites again. There are now apps that will completely block your ability to access certain sites for specific periods of time.
The less distracted you are, the more you can maintain your focus and the more productive you become.
Each of us spends a great deal of time in the space where we work. Now, that might be a physical office at a remote location or it might be a room or corner in your residence that has been reserved for that purpose.
No matter where your “office” is located, it needs to be inviting, comfortable and welcoming. It has to reflect your personality and your style.
Make sure that the furnishings are comfortable. A desk may be a necessity, but it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. The same thing goes for a chair. Use a chair that makes you feel that your glad you sat down in it.
Lighting, art, music and color all have an appropriate place in your office. Imagine how your productivity will skyrocket when you actually enjoy being in your workspace.
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Humans are lousy multitaskers. Too many people claim to be great at it, but the truth is they are not. They are fooling themselves. If they take on too many tasks, the result is they either don’t get anything done, or they have to cut corners in an attempt to get everything done.
Buddhists believe you should concentrate all your efforts on one task and become great at it. You will do it better than everyone else. It doesn’t matter what the task is or how small. Just do your best to get it done using all of your efforts.
You can get multiple tasks completed in a fraction of the time and depending on the quality of the outsourcers, it will be done correctly.
The good news is you can be selective on who you choose for your outsourcing. If one doesn’t work out, you simply ask them to correct their mistakes, or you don’t use them again. When you find a great team of outsourcers, you become an unstoppable force.
More companies are adopting the approach of outsourcing. Many companies are outsourcing entire departments where this makes sense. Why fund a credit department when there is a company that can do it for you?
The same is true for payroll, IT, and a host of other company functions. You don’t worry about salaries or benefits when you do this. You simply pay a fee for services based on your agreement with them.
Some companies are even allowing their employees to outsource portions of their duties, where it makes sense to do this. For instance, web programmers are not typically known to be good designers. The company either doesn’t have a graphic design department or the group is booked solid with work for other groups. Outsourcing the design can solve this dilemma and give the project the right look and feel.
Of course, you will need to manage the outsourcers, and that often includes getting the specifications right for what you want to be accomplished. But, this is a skill like any other and is something you will get better with over time.

You read that being more efficient will make your company more competitive. That seems to make sense, at least from a theoretical perspective.
You accept the premise and decide to hire an efficiency expert to evaluate and recommend improvements to your business.
It seems like the right thing to do, but how do you go about finding experts who are qualified? This activity seems as though it can contain subjective judgments.
The first step when considering any candidate is to get some information about them. This could take a bit of detective work. It may require you to reach out to other companies who have used the candidates and are satisfied with their results.
This may be easier said than done as many businesses remain tight-lipped about services or companies they use to improve their operations. They either want you to believe they didn’t hire anyone, or they don’t want you to have access to the same people who helped them. Thus, they simply won’t respond to your inquiries.
At the very least, find out how long the company you are considering has been in business. Is the company new? If so, this won’t give you confidence in the company’s experience. When you find companies who have been around for a while, ask them about any special licensing they can show you or high-level certifications they have obtained. Try to find out if these credentials are common for this type of service.
However, if there are many complaints, this could be a good indication to stay clear away from the company.
You want to be able to measure significant efficiency improvements with any expert you decide to use. Make sure you are comfortable with what constitutes improvement and insist on guarantees.
As mentioned, this service is going to be expensive, so you need to be able to recapture the costs through successful implementation of his or her advice.

Do you know what a silo coordinator is? You probably don’t because it’s a made-up title. However, this doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be considered as a job for many companies.
It’s likely the company you work for, is divided into departments or what is sometimes referred to as silos. Departments become autonomous over time.
This can be a problem when departments need to depend on each other to get their jobs done.
While groups manage to get by coordinating activities with other groups, problems can slow the process down, which makes an organization less efficient. For example, what happens when a department with critical resources is booked up and unavailable?
Other groups may complain to their respective managers, but those managers don’t have much pull in helping resolve the situation.
Enter silo coordinators. They can step in and bring up these types of issues to upper management. They will already have relationships with these higher managers, and they will be expected to reach out whenever needed. They won’t be accused of going over the heads of departments because that is their job.
When there are conflicts and problems between groups, the coordinators will step in and try to mediate the situation. After hearing all sides of the arguments, they can come up with a solution that can help move the groups forward.
If they don’t have the power, they simply are another layer of management that gets in the way of the process.
It’s probably a good idea to have multiple silo coordinators so that favoritism of groups doesn’t become a problem or at least it doesn’t become prevalent. Of course, you don’t want too many coordinators as this can slow down the process as well.
Companies should probably work on coming up with better structures than silos and departments. However, because that’s the way it’s been done for a long time, this is not something that is likely to happen soon.
Until it does, silo coordinators can be a great way to manage these silos so that companies can progress.
Well, there is a lot more to be learnt about outsourcing for efficiency; far more than can be covered in this short post, but if you’d like to know more about this, then click on the featured resource below where you can pick up a free report that covers this topic in more detail. Download it, read it and take action 🙂

Having big goals for your life is exhilarating, exciting… but it can also be utterly terrifying, even paralyzing. If you create daily habits to optimize certain aspects of your life, however, you’ll create a sturdy foundation to take risks from. They add a sense of reliability to your day so no matter how many risks you take, your habits will always be there to depend on and will help you to stay grounded and focused.
It may be tempting to try to develop multiple habits at once, but that could be a recipe for failure; a bit like multitasking, the idea appears to be sound but in reality, it simply doesn’t work!
Take a look at the list and if you like the look of a particular habit, try to incorporate it into your daily life. But you need to focus on one habit at a time.
Focus on creating and building one habit for at least a month before trying to incorporate another one. This should give you enough time to make the habit become ingrained, so you don’t have to work on it so much. Only then should you consider adding another. Just remember that creating good daily habits takes time.
If it takes longer than a month, that’s fine. Some habits will take longer to build than others. Just stick with it until it becomes a habit. You need to be committed to this or it won’t work.
OK, let’s look at the ten habits now to give you some ideas on what you can use to start experiencing life at the next level.

The body needs proper sleep to function, and it should be around 7 to 8 hours a night. Healthy daily habits are a solid foundation to build your life around to give you energy to perform and to enjoy life.
This can be accomplished by telling yourself what time you want to wake up in the morning and constantly getting up at the same time.
Sidney Crosby is considered to be one of the top hockey players in the world. He attributes his ability to do repetitive drills consistently as one of the reasons for his success.
When you have a new habit you want to install, you can succeed by doing the habit repeatedly day in and day out until it is entirely natural.
Reading and learning new skills go together.
Major investor Warren Buffett credits his consistent habit of reading financial newspapers daily with much of his success.
Apple founder Steve Jobs used morning reflection to build his computer company into a powerhouse.
Steve Jobs found that if he answered negatively for a few days in a row, that meant he needed to change something. Make morning reflection a habit to start your day with.
Self-care is a habit we all need. When we take care of ourselves, we can put our best foot forward and take care of our families.
It is also a time to practice gratitude sayings since you are getting ready to excel in your world.
Oprah Winfrey is another very successful person who does not use an alarm clock because they jar her awake.
This is part of her daily routine. When you do morning meditation, you begin your workday focused and with clarity.
Walmart is everywhere, at least it seems that way. Sam Walton started the Walmart stores, and he had a success habit that served him well.
Sam was known to carry a recorder with him to keep a record of everything he observed in a day.
You will see many things throughout the day that you could put into your creative work.
Richard Branson is a famous entrepreneur, and his main company is called Virgin. Richard believes in the daily habit of gratitude for all that he has.
You can even write these things down in a gratitude journal so you can read them whenever you want to give you a boost and to put things into perspective.
Benjamin Franklin was notorious for making lists.
Lists can be great for many things. One good habit is to make a short to-do list before you go to bed, simply stating what your top 3 priorities will be upon waking up.
Tony Robbins has been motivating people for many years. He has a very specific habit of starting his day. Each tiny habit is connected, and you will see major success if you follow this habit:
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊