Example. Let’s say you decide to buy a million dollar house. Thoreau would say that the real cost of the house isn’t one million dollars. The real cost is the number of years of work required to pay it off. So if it takes you 40 years of long hours working a job you hate to pay off that house, then it’s real cost is not one million dollars, it’s 40-years of life.

How can we apply Thoreau’s “life calculation” to our daily lives? Here are three steps that might help:

1. What’s Your Work Time Worth?
   The first step in applying the “life calculation” is to calculate the value of your working hours. Let’s say you make $50,000 a year working 40 hours a week. After taxes, you end up actually seeing $35,000 (this will depend on where you live, number of dependents, etc.). Assuming you work 50 weeks a year, the monetary value of each working hour is around $17.

 

• The Shift From Dollars to Life.
  Once you’ve nailed down the rough value of each working hour, you can begin shifting away from thinking dollars to thinking life. You do this by calculating the life cost of all those things you wish you could buy. So that new MacBook Pro you wish you had no longer costs $1,800. If each hour of work is worth $17, it now costs 105 hours (almost three weeks) of life. That new house you wish you could buy no longer costs $500,000, it costs 29,411 hours of life (roughly 14 working years of life, and that’s assuming that the house is the only thing you spend your money on).

 

• Consider trading things for life.
  Once you’ve calculated these actual life costs, think seriously about the trade-off between things and life. For Thoreau, the trade-off was simple. He always chose life over new things. As he says, “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” But you may decide that certain things are worth the life sacrifice. This doesn’t mean you’ve failed at spending less and living more. Quite the opposite. It means that you have made a reflective choice to sacrifice a portion of your days and hours for the things you own. You’ve made a conscious choice. The real danger Thoreau points to arises when we lose consciousness of this choice, when we buy without ever considering the amount of life exchanged for our latest purchase.

 

Of course, many of us work on a fixed schedule. We cannot call in one day and decide that we are going to exchange the next month of earnings for a month spent walking through the woods.

This may be true. But it’s also true that employers are becoming more flexible. I just had lunch with a CEO who told me, “I would be happy to let an employee take a few more weeks off for a cut in pay. But nobody has ever asked for it.”

What do you think about Thoreau’s “life calculation”? Would it help you spend less and live more?

Even in my personal life, I experience rejections too. For example, my family members are private individuals – they don’t like to talk about themselves. There have been times when I try to connect them on a personal level, with limited results. Some of my friends can be quite nonsocial – Often times I contact them to arrange for a meet-up, only to receive lukewarm responses. Here, their rejection comes in the form of non-reciprocated efforts.

Needless to say, rejection can be quite a downer, especially when you’re banking your hopes on a positive outcome. No one likes to receive a “No”, when it’s so much better to get a “Yes”.

The thing is, rejection is part of growth – be it in work, relationships or life. In the past few years of actively pursuing my growth, I’ve learned it’s not possible to avoid rejection if you want to truly develop as a person. Rejection helps you to uncover blind spots, to learn more about yourself, and ultimately to grow.

The only way to avoid rejections is to box yourself tightly in your comfort zone, in which case you fail to live by default. This is not how you want your life to be – You’re capable of so much more.

While rejection isn’t easy, there are ways to deal with it and make it manageable. Here, I’d like to share with you 5 key steps that have worked very well for me:

1. Don’t take it personally
   When you approach someone, you open yourself up, so getting a rejection naturally makes you feel like they’re rejecting you. That’s why most people tend to take rejections personally.

For example, when I get rejections on things that are very important to me, I feel hurt. I’d wonder if there’s something wrong with me or if I’m not good enough. I’d also wonder if there was something I could have done to make things different. This puts me in a state of self-doubt.

Of course, such thinking doesn’t help. It only makes you feel bad about yourself. For whatever rejection you’ve faced, recognize it’s a rejection of the request, not you. Your request is merely an extension of your thoughts; it does not represent you as a person. Both are two entirely separate things.

Recognize that many rejections are rarely personal. They usually reflect more about the other person and how the request doesn’t meet his/her needs, than about you. By taking yourself out of the equation, you’ll realize a lot of your emotional responses with the rejection are unnecessary.

 

• Expect rejection
  Anticipating rejection helps me in 2 ways.

 

First, it challenges me to set a high benchmark to what I do. Since I’m expecting a rejection, it forces me to push my boundaries and put my best work forward, so as to increase my chances of a “Yes”. Secondly, even if a rejection does arise, it helps me to handle it better, since I’m already prepared for it.

This doesn’t mean you start going “Oh the world sucks and no one will accept what I do/say” and adopt a doom-gloom view. The underlying principle here is to do your best, while preparing yourself to handle the worst.

Make sure you don’t end up procrastinatinginstead. The point is to use rejections as a driving force to become better, not as an excuse to put off the work.

 

• Maintain your focus of control
  There are 2 focuses of control in life – External focus, which refers to anything outside our sphere of influence, such as our environment, colleagues, society and the world out there. Internal focus refers to what’s within our sphere of influence – our thoughts, feelings, actions, behaviors, etc.

 

Someone with an external focus of control sees the world as the main controller of his/her universe – He/she feels that he/she has no say in his/her life, and everyone has power over him/her. On the other hand, someone with a high internal focus of control sees that he/she is the sole determinant of his/her reality. He/she recognizes he/she has the power to do what he/she wants.

Most people will adopt a high external focus of control in the face of rejection. They lose self-confidence and see themselves as incapable, lousy, or even worthless.

Yet, doing so does not address the situation. It only sends you on a downward spiral, which serves absolutely no purpose other than to feel like crap about yourself. Not only that, you’re also relinquishing your power to others. That’s not good at all, and you definitely don’t want that!

The best way to handle rejection is to maintain your focus of control. In life, there are always going to be naysayers – the key is to learn to tackle the naysayersvs. let yourself be beaten down by them. Focus on the things you can action on. What can you do about this situation? What have you learned about it? (See point #4) How are you going to apply what you’ve learned? What are your next steps? The more you focus on actions you can take, the more you empower yourself.

 

• Learn from the rejection
  There’s always a reason behind each rejection. Sometimes it may be a lackluster idea, a mismatch of needs, bad presentation (of the idea), bad approach, incompatibility of values, misunderstanding, and so on.

 

If you can understand the reason behind the rejection, you can do things differently next time. This will be immensely helpful in your growth.

One easy way is to follow-up and ask why. This can be done for almost any situation – interviews where you were rejected, client proposals, suggestions your managers turned down, and business meetings. Let them know you accept the rejection and you sincerely want to learn what went wrong, so you can improve. When done in an appropriate and sincere manner, the other party will often be more than willing to share and help you to improve.

The second, less direct way is to objectively analyze the situation and troubleshoot what went wrong. Why did the person reject this? What was the person looking for? Did the request not meet his/her needs? What could I have done better? By way of self-questioning, I’m able to uncover a lot of learning points that I was not privy to before.

 

• Realize rejection is progression, not regression
  Most people dislike rejection because they associate it as regression – moving backward. To get a rejection means to face a dead-end in your goals. It means you have wasted your time and effort on this for nothing.

 

Right? Wrong. Contrary to popular belief, rejection is progression, not regression.

It took me sometime to realize this, but I finally did so a few years ago. It wasn’t a sudden a-ha moment, but more of a gradual realization over time. I realized all the fears about rejection are just mental, and rejection is actually a step forward to knowing what people want, what’s out there in the reality, and how to improve ourselves to achieve our goals.

In fact, the more times one gets rejected, the better – because then you’ll have such an extensive understanding of your blind spots and what people are looking for that nothing can take you by surprise anymore. In which case, rejection becomes your best friend and partner in growth.Learn to handle rejection, and it’ll become your vital tool to your growth and success. Today, I integrate rejection as a part of my daily life, where I constantly challenge myself to new opportunities that may well result in rejections.

The result? It has made me a more active participant of life and I’m totally loving it. Rejection has turned into one of my best tools for growth, just as it will for you too as you embrace it into your life.

Another way to look at this is to think of effectiveness as the big picture. If you want to be truly effective, you need to think about what your values are and what you want to achieve in your life. This is hard work – and it’s the sort of work where you don’t get to show off an empty inbox or a neatly filed set of papers at the end of it. But it’s absolutely essential to do this big-picture thinking if you’re ever going to accomplish anything meaningful.

Your efficiency comes after this. Because, frankly, however efficient your system for organizing your MP3 collection, it’s unlikely to be particularly effective in contributing to your wider goals. You want to concentrate on being efficient at the tasks which really are significant. This might mean, for example, coming up with a system that saves you time and wasted energy when you take on a new project.

Increasing Your Effectiveness
So if being effective is more important than being efficient, how can you go about improving your effectiveness?

One way to start is to write down a list of all the commitments that you have in your life. Try dividing them into categories like your paid work, your relationships with family and friends, your community or church groups, and your education (if appropriate).

If you’re anything like most of us (including me) you might be surprised and even horrified to find out how much you’ve taken on. Do you really have the time and attention to carry out each of these commitments effectively? And which of these commitments is effective for you – do they add to your life, or just take up your time?

It’s never easy to say “no” to people, or to quit an activity that you’re currently engaged in. Sometimes, though, you’ll realize that to become more effective, you can’t simply keep ramping up your efficiency – you have to let something go.

Another great approach is to look at your values. What matters to you most in life? (You might want to list several things.) It could be your family, your health, your career, your church, your bank balance, your free time, your education, a particular cause or all sorts of other things. There are no “right” values – everyone’s will be slightly different.

One of my highest values is significance – I want to feel that the work I do matters in the world. Whenever I get caught up on trying to get ever more efficient at tasks that really don’t matter at all, I take a step back and think about where the significances lies.

(If you want some help clarifying your values, I strongly recommend the life coach Tim Brownson. He really helped me wrap my head around what matters to me – and it’s made my freelancing career go much more smoothly as a result.)

You can also look at people you admire. These don’t need to be celebrities or famous business people – you might look up to your parents, a teacher or mentor, or a colleague. Why are they worthy of your admiration? It’s probably not because they know every keystroke shortcut in existence – it’s because they live effective and meaningful lives.

How do you make sure that you’re effective, not just efficient? What tips do you have for focusing on the big picture, rather than getting bogged down in rushing through the day-to-day stuff?

 

1. Goals
   Make it simple and easy for your team to understand the mission and to understand their part in achieving it.
   • Concise Goals. Keep them simple and easy to understand.
   • Focus your team on as few goals as possible.
   • Communicate the team’s goals often and through various means (team meetings, individual meetings, emails, posters, slogans). And then do it some more.
   • Track progress on goals.
   • Involve team players in tracking the goals so that they own the results.

    

2. Motivating People
   What you reward gets done. It’s that simple.
   • Incent team players to do the tasks that are most critical for reaching the team’s goals. Make sure the rewards are meaningful to people. Understand each player and what they want from their job and in life. That’s how you’ll know how to reward them.
   • Praise, Thank, and Recognize big and small contributions by individuals. Do this often and then do it some more.
   • Set High Expectations. People will live UP to or DOWN to the expectations you set. Set them high and you’re saying, “I believe in your ability to do great things!”
   • Empower people by delegating responsibility.
   • Celebrate team accomplishments often.
   • Encourage Fun. Make the work place a fun place to be. Yes, work needs to get done but short fun breaks can make all the difference in the culture of your team.
   • Pride. Foster a sense of pride in your team. As a team you could establish a mascot, create a team chant, and have a meeting that is focused solely on each individual’s strengths and the team’s overall strengths.
3. Walk Your Talk
   You need to practice what you preach. This is how you establish trust and credibility.
   • Model the Way by participating in the team’s tasks as much as your position allows.
   • Be Honest. Deliver on your promises. Actions speak louder than words.
   • Challenge Yourself. Do your best (and then some) just like you ask your team to do their best.
   • Speak Up. Just like your team members sometimes need to let you know what they’ve done in order for you to be able to recognize and praise them. They, in turn, need to know what you’ve been working on and what you’ve accomplished. So find ways to communicate this, modeling this key behavior.
   • Stay Sharp. You need to be competent for others to follow you. If you’re not improving, you’re falling behind. Always be learning and keep on top of the latest skills, technology, and knowledge in your field.
4. Inspirethrough a combination of
   • Unwavering Positive Future Vision
   • Commitment to Improve things along the way that will make that positive vision a reality.
   • Ability to Bootstrap as necessary when resources are tight.
5. Process Power
   Good process is like having a high performance machine. Sloppy process makes things fall apart. So be sure to establish these key habits with your team.
   • Establish Routines. Do this for the team and also work with each individual to come up with their own high productivity routines. These are routines that dictate what work is done when.
   • Establish Processes for all the tasks that are done repeatedly. It takes time to set up at first, but after that it will pay off in saved time and less errors. Processes describe how work is done and might involve systems for doing the work.
   • Task Assignment. As much as possible, assign tasks according to the strengths of each teammate.
6. Change
   Embrace change by seeking it out. This will tread a path for your teammates to follow.
   • Change Routines Quarterly. Look for better ways to achieve the team’s goals.
   • Take Risks. Don’t be afraid of failure. No one ever reaches great heights without a few failures.
   • Learn. Learn as a team from failures. “How can we improve it the next time?”
   • Encourage team members to take smart risks too by making it safe to fail. Focus on learning from past experiences and building upon them to find better solutions.
7. Advocacy
   Support your team and they’ll support you.
   • Promote your team members. Make sure others outside your team know about the individual team members’ successes. You want your team members to excel and even graduate away from your team possibly. Don’t worry. If your team is great there will be plenty of others who will want to join! This natural turnover of team members is like the renewal of cells in your body. It is necessary and healthy.
   • Promote your team. It’s your job to market the great accomplishments of your team in order to get the rewards, recognition, and resources that your team deserves.
   • Fight for the most important resources and changes that will benefit your team and the organization overall. Remember to pick your battles wisely.

    

What else do you think is essential for a good leader? Got a good story? Please share in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

 

With a song stuck in my head for 6 months straight I had two options:

1. Punch myself very hard in the face and hope a different song would start playing in my head, or
2. Analyze the lyrics until I learned something useful.

That’s how Cee Lo Green taught me to achieve. Let me explain…

I’ve never been all that productive of a person. You see, I’ve always waited until I was “good enough” until I started taking meaningful action. I would do tons of work trying to become “good enough,” but since that’s a pretty vague goal I tended to get stuck always preparing to take real action. I would rarely accomplish something meaningful.

Luckily Cee Lo stepped in. You see, in “Forget You” he tells a beautiful story: guy loves girl, guy sees girl in a car with a rich dude, guy gets angry that he wasn’t rich enough for her, guy says screw this. He sings, “I guess the change in my pocket wasn’t enough I’m like, forget you!” And moves on. He could have sang, “I guess the change in my pocket wasn’t enough I’m like…well, I guess I’ll get a second job, try to invest wisely, and eventually win you over.” Not quite as catchy.

The wise Cee Lo realized that it wasn’t worth wishing he had more money, or waiting until he got his Ferrari. If that girl wasn’t going be with him…forget her. Realistically, even if he did wait until he got that cash, car, and xbox, that girl still wouldn’t want him (or by then he would have been over her). So he started from where he was, not from where he hoped to be one day.

What does any of this have to do with real world achievement?

On one hand, most of us want our life to change in some way. On the other hand, most of us are waiting for something before we can really take action. We’re waiting to finish a class, get a promotion, have a new situation, or find a direction. Many of us think that if only we had that one thing in our life happen, then we could start making progress.

• I need a perfect outline before I write that essay or blog post
• I need the perfect work out and diet plan before I start exercising
• I need the perfect website, traffic, blog, or product before I can start an online business
• I need to wait for the right time before I quite the job I hate

I know what I did for the longest time is either:

1. work my butt off trying to be prepared enough to start making progress, or
2. pout and feel sorry for myself.

If only I had asked, “WWCLD?” (what would Cee Lo do?). He would have said, “forget being ‘good enough.’ I am where I am. I don’t need to wait until I’m ‘good enough’ or ‘ready.’ I am going to start moving forward from where I am right now.”

Start achieving like Cee Lo

I’m not telling you to go record a hit record (although if you do, referencing Mr. T’s catchphrase like Cee Lo does in “Forget You” is always the right choice). Instead, pick the one biggest goal you currently have in your life. Got it? Okay, I don’t care if you’re starting at zero in pursuing that goal. I don’t care how much you have to learn before you can really do it. The most important thing you can possibly do is to say “forget you” to whatever you think you need to do before you act. Figure out how to take your first step now.

Don’t be like Cee Lo was before his “Forget You” kick. He had to “borrow, beg and steal and lie and cheat, trying to keep” the girl. In the same way, you’d have to work your ass off to get to a point where you are “good enough” to start taking real world action. Screw the ideal. Start from where you are right now.

P.S. I’ve not consulted Cee Lo, but I’m pretty sure we’re best friends and he probably agrees with everything in this warped interpretation of his catchy song lyrics. Sorry Cee Lo if you’re being misrepresented here!

We are made for adventure, growth, and facing our fears. We are made to overcome challenges…to win.

The purpose of this article is to try and measure the real, hardcore work we do every day and to find out ways to eliminate the distractions that stand in our way of accomplishing actual work. Lets check out the methods I suggest, and then you could suggest similar methods in the comments.

What’s Work For You?
It is very important to answer the above question correctly. What’s work for you might not be work for me and vice versa. For example, for a social media manager, spending time on Twitter and Facebook is very much part of actual work. She is doing that to track audience engagement and to promote her client’s site. But that might not be the case at your end.

So you need to have a clear picture of what’s work and what’s fun. I think one way to figure that out is to know if what you are doing makes you money in the short or long term. If it does, it’s work. If it doesn’t, it may or may not be actual work. But it’s definitely something that can be done later.

Using Separate Devices
Once you know what’s work for you, you need to know how much of it you are able to accomplish each day. Seth Godin talked about the two-device solution few days ago. He proposes that you use your computer only for actual work, and a second device – like your iPad – for everything that doesn’t fall in the domain of actual work. It’s definitely an easy way to track the time spent doing actual work every day.

Using a Timer
We just had a post on how a simple timer can go a long way in making you more productive. Yes, timers work. And you can make use of them to measure the amount of work you do.

I’d also take an opportunity to mention one of my previous DLM posts on time management tools and apps. Some of the tools mentioned in the list, like RescueTime, can effectively track the time you spent doing different things on your computer.

Using Separate Logins or User Profiles
This is something I talked about on my personal blog sometime back. I took cue from Seth’s article on using separate devices, and suggested that we create separate user profiles for work and fun. You can also make use of this neat tutorial to track your login and logoff times using scheduled task in Windows. That would tell you exactly the time you spend in a particular user account.

So, what do you think about the above methods? What else do you think can help you track the amount of actual work you are able to complete daily?

Cheers,

Abhijeet

 

It must remind us that the secret to productivity is a proper balance of work and rest, tension and relaxation.

What is a proper rest?
We all know that we need to get rest in order to function properly and that exhausting ourselves decreases our productivity. However, it often seems that our tasks drain us so much that we need loads of rest in order to recharge ourselves a little bit – who has time for that? This is how we get stuck – we don’t want to waste time doing nothing, but without getting rest we keep exhausting ourselves . How can we break out of this vicious cycle?

The problem lies in our understanding of proper rest. I loved the way Scott Young explained it, so I will use his analogy. Most people imagine their minds as a battery, which needs to be recharged every once in a while and then it is functional again. It’s not very accurate, though. Your mind is not a battery – it’s much more similar to your own body. Your body is a complex system made of many different muscles, so when you exercise one group of muscles, the other groups can rest. Therefore, in case your abs really hurt, you don’t have to lay in bed for three days – you can let it rest by working on your leg or arm muscles. Our minds work the same way – we don’t have to enter a mindless zombie-like state in order to get some rest. We just have to focus our attention on a different kind of activity.

Feel drained after doing mental work? Exercise!
This is a principle that my martial arts coaches taught me during my teenage years. They explained to me that when my mind works, my body gets rest and when my body works, my mind gets rest. Therefore the quickest way to refresh my mind after hours of preparing for a history exam is to do some push ups or to go jogging for half and hour. It might sound like an oversimplification, but it’s an extremely effective way to increase your productivity. Try it yourself – once you start feeling tired after doing loads of writing, programming, problem solving etc., don’t allow yourself to sit in front of a computer and feel drained. Don’t check your facebook and don’t watch TV – this won’t recharge you after already having spent hours in front of a screen and it will most likely drain you even more. Instead, get up and do some exercise to the point when you’re still comfortable, but you can already feel your muscles as well (try different things to see what works for you – for some it might be stretching, for others jogging, etc.). Believe me, it works like a charm.

What is the reason why combining mental and physical activities is such an effective strategy? It’s because engaging in physical activity which gives your body a healthy dose of stress switches your attention immediately and brings us back to present moment. Once we understand this principle, we can learn to consciously switch our attention when needed, which means that instead of passively waiting for our batteries to recharge, we can simply work on improving a different area of our lives. You’ve spent all day working on a business project? Then call up a friend in the evening and meet up with him or her – you’ll be improving your social life while your mind gets rest from business problems. It’s much easier to sit on the couch and feel drained, but once you’ll get into habit of combining different activities for maximum productivity, you won’t regret.

The Real Power Of Consciously Switching Attention
Once you’ll start practicing consciously switching your attention so your mind can get rest from particular activities while engaging in others you’ll notice once interesting pattern – when you completely forget about a particular problem for a certain period of time and then get back to it once again, you start seeing solutions you didn’t see before.

What usually happens is that once you’re doing something entirely different, for example, playing soccer, you suddenly get struck with an idea how to increase your website traffic dramatically. It’s not a one time thing, I can reassure you – this is reoccurring pattern and the more you learn to switch your focus, the more you get struck with an idea at the weirdest moments. Furthermore, there is a way to consciously take advantage of this strange process.

How? It’s very simple.

Consciously focus on a single goal by asking a question, for example, how can I increase my income? Then forget everything else and focus on it for a while – try to brainstorm as many ideas as possible. Once your mind gets tired, ask a question again and then forget it by engaging into something else. You can do this everyday – for example, on my way to gym I ask a question, brainstorm the ideas, ask the same question again and then go and exercise. It takes like five minutes, but magic happens.

There might be many different ways to use this method according to your beliefs. Some people might imagine that they ask God or their guardian angels to send them the answers, other might give an instruction to their own subconscious mind or ask the universe for help or talk to their guides. I say, do what works for you and your system of beliefs and see the results. And no, I don’t have any scientific explanation for that, but it’s not a problem to me since from my own experience I see that it works, therefore I keep practicing it. You don’t have to take my word, for it, though – try it for yourself, analyze the results and act accordingly.

The Importance Of Being Present
The idea of being here and now made sense too, but it seemed like a pretty Zen concept which sounds great in theory but there are not enough real-life benefits to make it a serious practice.

Boy, was I wrong.

The idea of Ying/Yang productivity is to constantly and consciously switch your attention so your mind can get rest from one thing while focusing on another. It shouldn’t be that hard once you discipline yourself to engage in a different activity instead of sitting and feeling drained, right? Apparently, it’s not that easy – you can get yourself to the gym and start exercising, but what to do when your mind is still buzzing with what you’ll have to do next, what you’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow, what will you do over the summer, what a jerk your ex was, what dress you should buy, etc. It kind of ruins the whole point of attention switching, because if your mind is used to running back and forth between past and future, never stopping at this present moment, there’s no Ying and Yang, there’s only a constant noise wherever you go.

Being present is a very difficult thing to do at first (especially if your mind is very stressed out), but the more you practice it, the easier it becomes. An ability to stay present is a very powerful skill which can not only increase your productivity, but also give you a competitive edge in anything you do, since most people are never present.

Final words
Applying the Ying/Yan approach to productivity might not only help you to get the results you want – it can help you to create a more peaceful and happier life for yourself. Don’t believe anything I say, though – give it a shot and decide for yourself.

Here’s how:

1. Look Unavailable
   If you have an office with a door, keep it shut when you don’t want interrupting. It’s a simple visual cue to would-be visitors – and you’ll also keep out any noise from passers-by. If you’re working at home, ask your family or flatmates to avoid interrupting you when the door is closed.

   Of course, you might not have a whole room of your own to work in. Try wearing headphones (even if you don’t have any music playing) – this often makes people think twice about interrupting you. If you’ve got a hands-free headset, you could even pretend to be on the phone while working.

2. Let People Know You’re Busy
   I know this seems obvious, but how often do you actually tell people that you want some uninterrupted time? At home, this might mean explaining to your partner and/or kids that you’re going to be working on your novel for an hour.

   At work, get in the habit of telling potential interrupters, “I’m right in the middle of something. Can I get back to you in fifteen minutes?” Chances are, they’ll be happy to wait – and they may well go and find some other solution which doesn’t involve waiting for you!

3. Set an Example
   If you want other people to respect your time, be respectful of theirs. Try not to interrupt colleagues – and when you do need to have a conversation with someone, start off with “Is this a good time?” If you can see their calender, heck, use that an schedule 30 minutes at some point later in the day. Don’t use work time to chat, unless you want your colleagues to assume that you’ll always be happy to stop what you’re doing to listen to the latest office gossip.

   You might find that several colleagues (or other people in your household) are getting frustrated by interruptions. If so, look for some way to make things easier for everyone – perhaps by spending the mornings on focused work, and encouraging more discussion and collaboration in the afternoons.

4. Don’t Answer Calls and Emails Straight Away
   Most of the interruptions in your day probably don’t come from colleagues or housemates who drop by your desk. They come from people phoning or emailing.

   Unless you work in a job which requires it, there’s no rule which says that you need to answer your phone as soon as it rings. Further, just because they call it “Instant Messaging”, you don’t have to respond this instant! You can let it go to voicemail and you can let your chat window blink for a bit. You can switch off your mobile, too.

   The same goes for emails: you don’t have to leave your inbox constantly open. You’ll work much more efficiently if you process emails in batches, rather than trying to deal with them as soon as they come in.

5. Work Early/Late in the Day
   This is a bit of a radical step, but worth considering. Can you shift your working hours so that you avoid interruptions for at least part of the day?

   If you get into the office at 7am, for instance, you’ll have at least an hour or two to work before most of your colleagues arrive. If you stay up late at home and write your essays after the kids are in bed, you’re much less likely to be interrupting than if you try to work on Saturday afternoons.

What tips and tricks have you used to avoid interruptions when you need to concentrate? Share your ideas with us in the comments…