Comments on: 7 Simple Productivity Tips

By: Houston personal injury

Houston personal injury — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:30:57 +0000

All the tips are amazing. Maintaining for action list at every evening for the next day which I liked very much because this will help to set priority of the work which is most important.

By: Jim Lee

Jim Lee — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:48:41 +0000

I really liked the mobile voice mail message… (Item #5)

There’s a really interesting article about developing business systems for online marketers here:
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/systems/

Once you put a proper “Freedom Business System” in place, you’ll continually “ratchet your business in one direction… the direction of higher quality, more productivity and higher profitability.”

Cheers,
Jim

By: Brennan Ryan

Brennan Ryan — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:28:18 +0000

I love the phone message one, thats great, i will change mine for sure!

The checking emails twice a day will be hard to break, but could save time for sure.

I know a handyman service who has an autoresponder set up on his email, letting the sender know that he only checks his emails once a day at 5pm to make himself more efficient and offer faster service, any urgent matters should be made by phone.

He ends the email with “Heres to life outside of my inbox!”

By: Will

Will — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:33:02 +0000

Hi Doug — thanks for stopping by.

It also depends on the nature of your business and the role within your business. In my case, I found that very, very few enquiries from clients were that urgent that they required a response time of less than 4 hours.

I’ve given clients a standing instruction that if something is massively urgent they should call or SMS — it rarely happens.

On the upside, I’m saving an hour every day which means I can *do* the client work faster.

If your business model requires responsive support (e.g. web hosting) then it may be optimal for certain people to check email in real time, but for most knowledge workers I still believe that checking less often rather than more often is a good idea.

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:42:45 +0000

I don’t exactly agree with point no.1 – How can you maintain an open communication channel with your clientel if you’re only addressing their enquiries with a maximum of two emails per day? In my experience, clients like to be reassured that they’re being looked after. If they lose that, they tend to look to find other service providers?

By: Will

Will — Sun, 20 May 2007 23:10:28 +0000

Hey Chris – yeah, it’s a good tip. I don’t get a huge volume of mobile calls but I can point to at least 2 times in the past week where my new message has saved me a round of phone tag find out what the call was about. I wouldn’t worry about the “social call” issue — friends call business phones all the time and they don’t expect to hear an informal message with party poppers going off in the background (well, most of them anyway).

Will

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 20 May 2007 07:39:38 +0000

Hi big Will

Thanks for no. 5 – I’ve changed my voice message to be along those lines, almost verbatim

Except I do get social calls on it as well, so it might sound weird… oh well… I’ll see how it goes.

Chris

By: Will

Will — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:03:46 +0000

Hey Nick – you’ll noticed that I’ve changed the “Don’t check email until 11″ tip to “Don’t check until 12″. That gives you at least 3 genuinely productive hours in the morning.

I have to admit that normally around 11.30 ish my email-checking finger starts to twitch. But then I just try to take that as a cue that I have 30 more minutes of productive time available to me.

Re: Action Lists. David Allen talks at some length about why most “To Do” lists don’t work. They tend to become cluttered with all kinds of information that is out of context and distracting. I have not mastered the GTD system by any stretch of the imagination, but I try to keep my daily action list down to a *short* list of action items that can be accomplished in the same day, plus a number of sublists (calls, small “to-do’s” etc.) that can be handled in batches.

I have a lot to learn, but the initial 7 steps are working well so far!

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:13:44 +0000

Hey Will,

Those tips are great. I haven’t tried your “Don’t check email until 11 tip” – I really think that will be a hard habit to break.

Writing an action list for the next day makes it a breeze to start working in the morning, and you’ll have had 12 hours to think about the problem (unconsciously) overnight.

I’ll be changing my voice mail message to include tip 5 as well!

Nick