Article Contributed by Patrick Jobin from Storagepipe Solutions

Sometimes, when you’re juggling many tasks at once, it can seem like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. If only there was some way that you could make a bit more time for yourself.

Imagine that you’re working on an important project, and the ideas are just flowing out effortlessly. Then suddenly, you stop to take a quick phone call. Well, although the call may have been short, it completely threw you off your train of thought and it will take a while to get your momentum back.

In a typical day, you may encounter dozens of such small interruptions. Although it may not seem like a big deal when you’re in the moment, these little “time vampires” quickly add up to hurt your productivity and (more importantly) suck the life from your valuable time.

In order to get more work done in less time, you need to eliminate all minor interruptions from your day.

High-powered executives are acutely aware of this. That’s why they have personal assistants, receptionists and other gatekeepers to prevent interruptions. This allows them to focus all of their energy on only the most critical business tasks.

In fact, many time management experts estimate that it can take up to 30 minutes to recover from a single interruption.

In other words, if you can eliminate just one interruption from your daily work, you can get an extra 30 minutes of personal time without negatively affecting your productivity.

And with this in mind, I’d like to propose a challenge:

Here’s Your Mission

Over the next week, I want you to keep a diary of all the workflow interruptions that happen in your work life. Then, pick just one common daily interruption and take measures to ensure that it will never happen again. Some easy ways of doing this include:

+ Putting a do-not-disturb sign on your cubicle or office door
+ Ignoring calls for 1 hour every day, then returning the voicemails
+ Blocking Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Digg from your web browser’s security settings
+ Bringing a large water bottle to your desk instead of heading off to the water cooler for a cup
+ Using a fully-automated online backup solution instead of switching backup tapes at the end of the day

If you can eliminate just one interruption per day, you will have more free time and be more productive.

Effective time management is especially important for entrepreneurs who need to maximize the profitability of every second spent on their business. Having more free time opens up more opportunities to expand the business.

Try this challenge out for a week, then post your comments below and let us know how this has affected your life, and what you’re doing with the extra 30 minutes that you’ve just added to your day.

About The Author:
Storagepipe Solutions is a leading provider of online backup and e-mail archiving solutions that helps businesses save time and money by automating their backup and business continuity process.

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