My consulting company is almost on autopilot due to my fantastic team, and requires only financial monitoring and the usual rain making or memo writing. But we do have a few different projects that are time intensive mostly in marketing.
Before the birth of my daughter I used to work until 21.00 and then have dinner with my wife, read some books or watch TV.
Now, I would like to spend time from 19.00 on with my family (coincidentally, the little girl has an active phase then!). Somewhere, I also have to fit in my dog. :)
So, if I want to get my work done, I have to be more productive during the shorter day. This post serves to remind me of that goal!
- I stopped looking at my Google Reader until the evening. I may even switch to read the feeds on the iPhone. I read quite a few feeds and I used to do it around lunch - but it's so unimportant really that I moved it to the late evening.
- Same for news. I don't need news during the day.
- I noticed I get pissed off when people show me the usual bullshit videos, funny pictures, and other nonsense. I started to just ignore these.
- Facebook is a waste of time. I stopped going to it a while ago and switched to Seesmic Desktop, with notifications disabled. The business we get from Facebook is miniscule, so I'll just keep it at it.
- Same for Twitter, but we use that for business.
- I stopped using all IM except Skype.
- Most "social" business meetings (networking, status updates, etc) can be moved to a lunch meeting.
- I know I'm old, but my primary method of communication is email. I need to unsubscribe from all the BS mailinglists and newsletter that accumulated over the years and that I routinely delete today after a quick glance.
Do you have any productivity tips for information workers?
