Increase Productivity with One Little Habit

I recently read Tim Ferriss' 4 Hour Work Week. He talks of batching your work. For example, don't check email so many times a day, try once a week. I think email checking a nasty habit for almost all of us. Since I work from home, I have no one to blame but myself.

When I gave up television, it was such a relief. I felt I had come clean of a nasty addiction. I was lucky to learn ways to moderate my television watching after a season of abstinence. (Thank you Netflix!) Now that the cable and satelite are turned off though, my productivity is better, and so is my own sense of personal power. I will probably never have television like that in the same building as my work-space ever again.

But a new addiction has reared it's ugly head... checking email and web surfing. So here is what I've done to reduce "web crawl" and "email crawl" into my Productivity Zones.

1) I scheduled time for answering emails in a large weekly batch.
2) I created 2 logins on my computer: one for work and one for play.
This makes it annoying and inconvenient to "play." But if I want to, it is not impossible. This is also useful for checking email, as you will see in the later steps.

3) In my work login, I downloaded the BlockSite Add-on for my Firefox web browser.
4) I blocked Youtube, Myspace, and any other tempting site on the work login.

5) I also blocked "http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox"

This still allows me to still visit "http://mail.google.com/mail/#compose" and write new messages. It also still allows me to browse message archives. I now lose access to almost nothing, except those pesky "new emails" that draw my attention away from work.

It has already helped several times! I am definitely less distracted. I love it!!

Leave me comments below with your own work-from-productivity tips!