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Good day to all AffiliateCoffee.com readers. So, we haven't been really active with our blog, and sincere apologies for that. We promise to be more active from now onwards, and deliver you the best possible content every week. So, we were brain storming on what would be the ideal way to kick off the new year? Well there are certainly a number of ways, but this time we've chosen to focus on "Productivity".
What does being Productive mean to you? A few weeks back I received a really encouraging response from a fellow twitterer about a tweet I posted about dividing the day into a number of blocks and completing "x" number of productive blocks per day to label your day as a "Productive Day". I want to dig a little deeper into this with the blog post, and talk about a really useful desktop application that lets you make your day really productive :-)
What the hell are Productive Units/Blocks
John Reese talked about something similar in his blog post How To Get Everything You Want In 24 Hours. Lets dig a little deeper and figure out how we can really incorporate the system of productive blocks into our daily routine. Of course, we all know that "goal setting" is extremely important towards achieving success. But, goal setting is not only for the long term, but we can rather divide any large goals into small micro goals.
To-Do lists for the day are micro goals we create almost on daily basis at our work place. However, we often find ourselves struggling with our to-do lists simply because our actions are not aligned with the goals we set. Dividing your day into productive blocks is bound to fix that.
An example, on how we do it. We can commit to ourselves that in a day, we will complete 14-16 productive blocks per day of 30 minutes each. During the completion of these productive blocks the following activities are prohibited:
- Reading News/Blogs
- Engaging in Social Media Conversations
- Instant Messaging Conversations
- E-mails
- Insert More...
Productive blocks are only meant for action activities that produce results. No science in the fact that by being focused on our actions, we see results! It takes some time to get used to working with productive blocks. And, if I were to go a little deep about it - I keep track of 30 minute productive blocks by activating the timer chronograph function of my wrist watch. After completing every block I write down what I worked on. And, at the end of the day enter into a database (Use Zoho dBs or Microsoft Access for this).
This way, I have a complete record of my time, and accurate reports of how many hours were spent on which project at all times. Heck, you can even do some fancy graphs, and reports such as comparing two weeks, and seeing reports such as Project 1 brought you $xxxx in revenue with "x" number of hours, while Project 2 brought you $xxx. This further enables you to really manage your time well and focus on income producing projects and activities. Can you begin to see where we're getting with the"Productive Blocks" now?
Rescue Time with Rescue Time - No Literally!
Now lets talk about a handy little application that can help us further see where our time goes. Rescue Time is an app I've been using for the past several months to well....Rescue Time! Rescue Time is a web based application that installs a small application on your PC that collects data on where you're spending your time. Here's how Rescue Time Works
- Sign Up and Install Rescue Time (100% Free)
- Let Rescue Time run in the background on your PC (Uses very little system memory)
- Let it collect data
- Log on to the Rescue Time Website and See Reports on where your time has been spent
- Set Categories and Tags on the website, and define productive and unproductive activities
- Set Goals (We'll talk below about this)
- Let it send you weekly reports on how efficient you were
- Done...
Now that's easy isn't it? One feature that I absolutely love about Rescue Time is the ability to set goals. For example, setting a goal that "No More than 30 minutes on News/Blogs per day". Rescue Time would remind you if you're missing out on your goal.
You can log on to Rescue Time every day/week to track on how well you've spent your time, and to check if your actions are aligned with the goals you've set for yourself or not. If you're not keeping a track of your time, you could be wasting it. Improve your time management and you'll increase your productivity and if you're really productive in that time you'll dramatically increase your profits!
That's all we had to share for today. Hope you enjoyed this post, and we wish you luck in your pursuit to increase your productivity and profits.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this post, and your tips on how one can be more productive. So don't forget to drop us a line.
Cheers!
