Achieve-IT!

Multitasking is Madness. 10 Tips to Stop

“If you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the circus.” - American Proverb

Barbara Bartlein from the People Pro posted an article about the harmful effect of multitasking on your productivity. She points out how researchers warn of several problems with multitasking aside from decreased productivity including increased stress, stomach aches, and headaches

University of Illinois study of Microsoft workers reports that each time a person gets distracted, it takes a full 15 minutes to get back on track. Put another way, for each time your email dings with a new message, whether it’s a dire emergency or a picture of a cat with a melon skin on it’s head, it costs you dearly in lost time.

With the productivity losses incurred from multitasking, Barbara listed out 4 main ways to combat it:

• Accurately estimate the time to complete tasks. For one day, write down all the tasks you have to accomplish and estimate the time needed. Then truthfully time yourself. You will be able to find the percentage that you routinely underestimate and can adjust your work schedule.
• Use external memory as much as possible. Albert Einstein once said that he keeps nothing in his mind that can be easily retrieved from paper. A cluttered brain makes it much more difficult to be creative and productive. External memory can be as simple as a pad of paper or using technology more effectively. Use the calendar on your computer to remind you of important dates or appointments and quick lists to organize your tasks.
• Batch your work. Rather than checking e-mail multiple times per day, set times for reading and responding. Let your phone go to voice mail, if possible, and return phone calls during a specific time. Put similar tasks together, like paying bills and balancing your checking account, to increase efficiency.
• Remove distractions. Control interruptions and noise. If the workplace is loud, discuss with co-workers ways to control the volume. Set times for consultation or questions rather than allowing unlimited access to your time. And make sure you don’t “interrupt yourself” by running to get more coffee or making a quick phone call. Use “butt glue” until the task is completed.

They are all very good suggestions, however, I am torn on using the external memory as much as possible. I think it’s important to use both your brain’s memory as well as your computer’s memory. We are becoming so used to looking into the Google oracle that we might be losing some of our natural memory ability or at least sending it into hibernation. To combat this, I still use flashcards to test my memory on an almost daily basis.

Here are 6 of my own tips from my goody bag of staying focused and productive:

1. Repeat a Productive Mantra - As you work, try repeating the phrase “I will complete this task 100%” or you might choose “100%” as your mantra. Drive a wedge deep into your brain about how important it is to achieve 100% on a task. Five tasks 1/2 done are useless compared to one task completed 100%. This is also a good visualization strategy. When you are thinking about your goals and the steps needed to complete them, think “How can I complete task A 100% today?” It gives you a direction and focus.It may sound corny, but there’s the old song “One day at a time sweet Jesus”. Sometimes I find myself humming “One task at a time sweet Jesus.” That may not be for everyone, but it is a powerful reminder to keep my eyes focused clearly ahead.
2. Get back in the game faster - If you fall of track as the Microsoft workers did, do you really need to be off track for a full 15 minutes? Of course not. You can get back on the horse in 30 seconds if you stay alert. Therefore, make a note to yourself to be alert to when you are off track and then get back to the original task as fast as you can. Make it a game. Shoot for 100% completion. This will require some dedication on your part to develop it as a habit. But as time goes on it gets easier with practice.
3. Seal your environment - I like to call this tip sealing the environment. This means closing off all distractions by arranging your physical environment. What works good for me is to seal myself off from distractions with these 4 steps:
   1. Close office door - Nothing distracts like other people busting in with their immediate demands. I’m as guilty of doing this others as others are of doing it to me. But one universal symbol of DND (do not disturb) is a closed door. At least with a door closed, they typically knock, allowing you the freedom of finishing up a thought or setting a reminder to get back on task in 5 minutes.
   2. Adopt an earplug strategy - Noise gets me every time. Whether it’s my daughter singing Going to the chapel at the top of her lungs or a server fan going bad, noise can take the wind out of my sails. For these occasions, I keep earplugs nearby so I can pop them in and get to work. Sometimes in-ear headphones will do the trick too as long as the music isn’t too distracting. It might surprise you that I can still carry on a brief conversation while wearing earplugs. They also send a visual cue to my people that I am busy and don’t want to be distracted. So when they see me wearing them, they often turn and go the other way - or they at least keep our impromptu meeting short.
   3. Sit at a different seat - If I really need to get in the zone and my mind isn’t cooperating, I change my environment entirely. I will turn my chair around facing the opposite direction. I’ll stand at a countertop or place my materials on a bookcase and work from there. I’ll go work in my car with the radio off if I have to. The important thing is breaking the cycle of distraction through environmental change.
   4. Turn off gadgetry - Set your phone, computer and PDA to the off position and prepare for takeoff.
4. Shoot for 100% completion of each task before moving on - When did it ever become acceptable to 1/2 finish a task before moving on? For as long as I can remember, my family called that doing something half-assed. Sure, that term doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it is motivating in a way. From now on, shoot for 100% on any task you start. Following Barbara’s tip from above, see if you can estimate how long your task will take before you start. Based on that estimate do you have enough time to finish 100%? If not, pick a task you can complete in the time you have and don’t stop until it’s done.There’s something wonderful about 100%. It’s the relief of a job well done - a job done completely. Shoot for 100% and you can look back at your days feeling as though you were successful.
5. Keep your eye out for boring - All tasks can get boring or tedious. At the point of boredom it’s easy to move on to something else. When you get stuck or bored, try to work through the problem instead of jumping on email or something easy. Not everything you do can be easy - especially when your goals get bigger and brighter. There is some hard work ahead, some of it is boring. Just be aware that boredom can be a trick - don’t fall for it. Fight your way through boredom and there is light on the other side.
6. Unplug Your Internet connection - Internet take me away! Surfing, Facebook, Google; they can all take you away from what you are doing. Remember the Microsoft study - all it takes is a beep or boop and you’ve lost 15 minutes. Solution? Unplug your Internet cable. Granted, this can be difficult for some IT workers. But by disconnecting the Internet connection over a “break” and turning off your phone for an hour during lunch can be some of the most productive time you have all day.

If you like this post, please share it with others by book-marking it to del.icio.us, Digg or StumbleUpon - Thanks!!

Don’t Complain, Wallow or Whine - Get Educated!

Think about your most pressing problem or challenge for a second. Unless it is health related there is most definitely a solution out there.
Read everything you can on the subject. Take a class or two if you can find one. Join a local “enthusiast” club dedicated to solving your problem.
The fringe benefit of self education [...]

A Great Way to Study - No Scheduling Required

Many of us have 3 or more hours per week in forced idle time. 
We might listen to music or jibber-jabber on the radio.    It’s time that once gone is gone forever.  Yet, this is still our time.  So it’s up to each one of us to decide how we spend it. 
We can stick [...]

Master Time & Money By Accounting for It

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” ~ Edmund Burke
An article by Melissa Raffoni asks if you are spending your time the right way. Well are you?
It’s a good question.
Her concept here is mainly geared toward managers, but I think some of the points are good for anyone who wants to [...]

Finding Your Most Important Task of the Day

If you have ever struggled with what you should do here’s a simple tip that can help.

We know we are supposed to first focus on our top priority.  But sometimes determining which is the top priority, that’s the $1,000,000 question.  

I know when I’m stuck between two or more top priorities, I get stressed and often it takes much longer to start.  So here’s a trick I use to sometimes find out what I should be doing so I can get to work.

It’s pretty simple really.

1.  Take the tasks that are on your immediate mind, write them all down.   You don’t have to spend an hour doing this, spend five minutes if you’ve got it.

2.  Rank each task for DIFFICULTY:   You might say that taking out the garbage is a 2, while sitting and writing 3 pages of your book is a 9.

3.  Then, simply pick the most difficult task on your list and get to work.

Odds are, the task you feel is most difficult is also your most important. We have a tendency to put off tasks that we feel are most difficult. But tough work is also what brings the highest value. We get more rewards for completing the tasks other We get a lot of benefits from doing the most important tasks on on our list. We might be paid higher, we might receive more love or more commitment or more energy.

Do you have any unique ways of divining your most important action of the day?  If so, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below.

Links of Late…

Here are some pages that caught my interest in the past few days:

My favorite Text to speech app Text2Go is on sale at BitsduJour today.
RulesofThumb is a Cool site discussing little DIYs, How To’s for just about everything. Information from building you McDonalds to never get into a fistfight, this is a great place to [...]

Power Posts from March ‘08

Today being the number 1 fools day of the year brings to close a cold and windy March. And March, although a tough month, was good for the self-development posts here on Persistence Unlimited. (How’s that for a segue?)
Here are 5 of my favorites:

The Little Roomba That Could; Or 5 Reasons Why Persistence [...]

107 Simple Ways To Turn Your Dreams into Reality

Goal Setting… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.

Many of us never learned how to do it. Others know how but don’t do it. Both are headed for trouble…

Two important questions:

1. Does goal setting work?
2. If it works, is it worth doing?

Answers:

1. Goal setting is something you do every day, whether you are conscious of it or not. You want things, you “set your mind” to having a new TV, microwave or iPod and eventually you get it. That, my friend, is goal setting. If it didn’t work, you wouldn’t have any of the things you want.

2. Goal setting is worth doing because it makes you more efficient at it. Put another way, what good is it to want a new car only to wait 10 years to get it? Increase your goal setting efficiency and you get the things you want faster. You don’t have to struggle so hard. And the confusion surrounding it fades to where you can make success a habit.

And a warning to those who want to dismiss this outright. The difference between those of us who have goals and those who don’t are obvious. Those with goals simply do better financially, mentally and socially than those without a goal to hang their hat. And the gap is widening. With warnings of a shrinking economy, debt at an all time high and other economic woes on the horizon, do you really want to leave your future to chance?

Now is the time to take things into your own hands. Take control once and for all.

Instead of wishing for the outcomes you want, you follow a roadmap that takes you there.
I want this to be the end-all be-all goal setting breakthrough guide. The excuses stop here. When you are done, you’ll have every tool you need to get started and follow through for the rest of your life.

Oh and yes, this is a compilation of the 31 day series I wrote called 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs. I edited it for brevity and it still ended up being more than 12,000 words! And… Oddly enough, there turned out to be 107 tips in the series that are reflected in this post… Hope you like it

Note to Subscribers: I purposefully did not send you this full post because it is so large it would be a long download. You can still read it in it’s entirety here

Become a File Recovery Wizard: 5 Expert Tips

So you weren’t satisfied deleting that project you’ve been working on for 3 days to the Recycle bin you had to choose Empty Recycle Bin too?

Now what? Another embarrassing call to the helpdesk? Or do you just start over?

Don’t worry, you can now have a backup plan.

For those who are in the PC/Server support industry - or people who find themselves accidentally deleting files and emptying the recycle bin, it’s always nice to have a good file recovery software on hand. But you need more than just recovery software. You need to know how to use it.

Recovery software can be confusing to someone who has never used it. So I will cover 5 expert tricks that will make you an expert at data recovery in no time - and I’ll also point you in the direction of some good file recovery software you can get for free - but today only. Soon you’ll be turning back the hands of time and amazing your friends and neighbors with your ability to bring back files from the dead….

First the free software:

Over at GiveAwayofTheDay, they have a program called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard that will do the trick. If you miss this give away, you can get the Recuva which is freeware all day every day.

A few notes on file recovery from someone who has been doing it for years:

1. Names of the file can change - For instance you might have a report called “2008 Cease and Desist Proclamation”. Yet when you search for it in the file recovery, you don’t find it. That’s because it’s either reverted to it’s DOS alias name or - heck I don’t know.. Some of the names are just plain weird.

When you delete a file Instead try searching for dates you last accessed it. You can also search for filetype. (like *.doc) for Word documents.

2. Deep Search for Prior File Edits - Have you ever worked a day on a project and realized you overwrote 2 days worth of good work? It’s happened to us all. When you wish you had a backup, this could be your safety net. Deep search will list multiple files of the same name but prior dates. So you can go back to Tuesday’s build.

I did this once for a software development project. I back up every day, but found my backup was corrupted, so I used my other file recovery software to go back 2 days and I recovered that build. - Saved me not only time, but the headache of tracking back what I had changed.

3. File Recovery on RAID Disks Requires Special Care - Listen up Network Admins. If you attempt to recover files on a server or workstation with RAID arrays or mirroring, you need to take special care.
Disconnect the server from the network
Turn off disk shadowing
Turn off virtual memory or move it to another (separate) disk

What happens if you attempt file recovery on an array that is currently accessed and written to is you get garbage results. It can also cause for more lost files. And in some cases death from angry clients… I’m kidding!

The key point is you want only the recovery software to access your array - nothing else.

4. Restore Files to DIFFERENT Drives - When performing a file recovery, never restore a file to the same drive it came from. In other words, restore a file off a C: drive to a memory stick or out to a server. Why? Because when recovering multiple files, you could actually be overwriting files you are trying to recover.

Look at it this way - when you restore a file, it requires hard drive space. You don’t know which hard drive space it will use. Since prior files were deleted, that hard drive space becomes available for use if needed. Supposed you are trying to restore files 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and when you get to file #4 it overwrites #5? Then you’d lose the ability to restore file 5 forever.

So always restore to a hard drive or disk other than the one you are recovering.

5. Back Up Your Files! - File Recovery is your last hope when everything else has failed. It is not a replacement for backing up your files. Make sure you back up regularly. The way to think about it is this - which would take you longer, to recreate a file or restore it from backup to CD, DVD, Tape, Memory Stick or separate hard drive? Typical restores take 15 minutes for an expert. So can you rebuild from scratch what you are working on in 15 minutes or less? If not get to backing up!

Backing up is also a good habit to develop for computer use. As the sheer data increases, the tendency to lose files and misplace them becomes easier. A backup lets you sleep better knowing that you can get the important stuff back if and when you lose it.

What if I can’t recover?

Hopefully, this will help you get back your files. But if not, treat it as a learning experience. If you feel enough pain of having to create or buy the files again, you are more likely to backup in the future. Backing up is a good thing and it’s no longer just for geeks in the back office anymore. We all should backup and backup frequently.

Good luck in getting your files back .

Feel free to send this tip to a friend or bookmark this article on StumbleUpon or Del.ici.ous so others can find it.

Increase Your Monitor Size - Increase Your Productivity

Researchers found that if you increase the size of your monitor or added on another monitor, your productivity would increase by 40%. If you buy an additional 24″ LCD Screen to go with your already existing one, your productivity will go up on average 52% above those who use 18″ LCDs.

Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones. There is an upper limit, however: Productivity dropped off again when people used a 26-inch screen. (The order of the tasks and the order of computer configurations were assigned randomly.)

So if I am doing the math correctly, the 40 hour per week worker would add 20 extra hours of work. This is provided he is both productive during 40 hours AND someone who is on the computer for all that time. So the cost of the additional screen - even at over $400 would more than pay for itself in the first month.

If you were considering justifying it for your home based business, you’d simply calculate how many hours you spend really working on your business. Then multiply that by .50. So if you put in 20 hours per week, you’d squeak out an additional 10 hours with the larger screens. Now, how much is that additional 10 hours per week worth?

Let’s say for argument sake, you are making $10.00 per hour in your side business. That would be an additional $100 per week - or $400 per month

100 x 4 = $400

So your extra monitor would pay for itself in 1 month, give or take.

As someone who does use 2 monitors, I can say two monitors do increase my speed and productivity. Especially when copying from one document to another. Also when doing a complex install or configuration, I can read procedures on one screen and configure on the other. It saves screen minimizing and expanding…

What’s your monitor set up? Do you use more than one? More than two? I’d be interested to know how adding monitors has increased or decreased your productivity.