Last week I had one of the most productive weeks I’ve had in a long time, and I know because I was keeping track of my activities using a time log. By recording how much time I spent during the day on each activity, I was able to calculate (1) how many hours of actual work I did and (2) what percentage of time spent at the office was actually productive.
I didn’t keep track on Monday, and Friday was more of a personal day for me, but here are the figures for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday:
Tuesday: 5.5 hours, 49% efficiency
Wednesday: 6.5 hours, 58% efficiency
Thursday: 8.5 hours, 70% efficiency
As you can see, I was picking up steam as the week rolled along, which left me feeling pretty good by Friday.
I attribute my increased productivity to two factors:
Using a time log. This was an idea I picked up from Steve Pavlina back in the day. There’s something about knowing where each minute of your day is going that can kick your butt into staying on task. This is related to the “use a timer” approach I wrote about a couple weeks ago.
It also helps to have objective measures of hours worked (or articles read, pages written, widgets cranked, etc.) if you want to improve your performance. Since I don’t have too many time logs from the past, I’ll be using last Thursday’s efficiency rating as a “personal best” to compete against.
A good primer on all of this is Steve’s post on time logs and boosting personal efficiency.
Making the place where I study Internet-free. Last year when I was preparing for my general exams I studied in the Sociology Study Room in Princeton’s main library. Besides being quiet, the room had no working ethernet jacks to connect to the Internet. I was using my old laptop that had no wireless card, so the space was a sanctuary from procrastinatory blogs and YouTube videos.
This year my new laptop had to go and ruin all that by having wireless capabilities. I would still try to study in that room, but the magic of not having the Internet disappeared.
Last Monday I mustered all my ingenuity and had an idea. I decided to keep wireless off in that room no matter what.
Need to Google something real fast? I’d write it down and do it later. If it’s something urgent (and that hasn’t happened yet), I’ll step out of the room with my laptop and turn wireless back on. But under no circumstances would I turn wireless on within that study space.
This worked like a charm last week, so I’m going to stick with it.
Lead me not into temptation…
While either of these techniques could aid procrastinators and non-procrastinators alike, I’m not surprised that they jive really well with the recent Psychological Bulletin article on procrastination that Jeremy Freese has summarized.
In particular, there is research supporting the value of reducing temptations in your immediate environment. Keeping your email program closed and out of sight (so you can’t see how many new messages you have) is one simple strategy, but for me, going a step further and preventing the Internet from being so accessible seems to help immeasurably. (Well, with the time log, measurably.)
Has anyone else tried to maintain a workspace that is strictly Internet-free?
9 comments ↓
Excellent post. I do a similar thing at home. I treat the dining room table as a dead zone. Most of the time, I sit down their to read – no distractions, because the room is pretty uncluttered; I can look at the back yard, which is soothing, but there are no toys to play with. Sometimes I bring my laptop there if I have to organize notes, or write, but I pretend that the wireless signal doesn’t work there. It gives me the same feeling as being in the library a few years ago.
As an aside, the last time I tried to get work done in the library, I foolishly turned my wireless on to check my mail. Four hours of my life that I will never get back!
Hey, thanks! Sounds like we’re on similar wavelengths.
Congrats on the very productive week! I recently discovered a charming dive – taquería/coffee shop – that doesn’t have wireless (very rare for this city) and have put that place into my rotation.
Here’s something that’s been effective for me at home – I work from home most of the time. I started turning off the wireless router for a few hours in the afternoon – from 1-3 – during my scheduled writing time. On several occasions I even forgot to turn it back on! It’s not an internet free “space” exactly, but this time of day has become internet free to me as I instituted this as a matter of habit. Now I don’t even turn the router off – I just close firefox and outlook at nearly the same time every day.
Thanks, JT! I like how you’ve boxed out a certain time that’ll be internet-free. Sounds like a good idea.
I’ve tried closing email and it did help with productivity (i’ve been keeping daily time logs for many years), but now I think about switching to 2-monitors layout.
Hi Early Riser, how were you thinking of using two monitors to increase prodcutivity?
Few people in my office use this layout and speak high about it. The goal is to keep focus on your primary thing and don’t switch from it. Switching between mail/word/icq/AIM/FireFox etc is a major distracting thing when it’s all on the same screen. So on your first monitor you open your primary application (eg. Word), maximize it, and do not switch from it. On second monitor you keep running email, chat, browser etc. You can glance once in a while on secondary monitor, or even turn and do something there, but then you turn back right to your primary task and keep working on it.
For example, I have mail running on second monitor. I see email from boss coming, and I reply to it asap. If email comes from a buddy – it takes me one glass that it’s something I shouldn’t be opening now, and I keep working.
Since I’m supposed to reply to important emails within 20-30 min while in office, this works fine for me. If you are lucky enough to work from home and can avoid email for half a day – then you’re lucky and very likely don’t need second monitor. Actually, I have this layout at home and watch movies on my laptop while typing all this
Another sample is when I need to look at one document while working on another, second monitor is a big help.
Wow, if you can pull that off, more power to you! It’d be tough for me to have all those stimuli at once, though it sounds like your boss’s email is something you have to be watching for all the time.
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