As I’ve written before, the fact is, you cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself in time.  Time management techniques are intended to help you gain focus so you can provide your attention where it is most needed in order to meet your goals.  It is the dilution of your attention away from these priority activities that ruins your personal productivity and spoils your success.  Before you can apply time management techniques to strengthen your focus, you must first understand the problems which weaken your focus.

Problem of “Overwhelm”. Multi-tasking is probably one of the biggest myths ever in personal productivity.  It was popularized as a way of dealing with numerous stimuli simultaneously, particularly today’s rich multi-media, such as email, Tweeting, blogs, texting, phone interruptions plus others.    If you feel overwhelmed by the volume of communication you are called upon to manage and respond to, if you feel like you are unable to focus on your priorities because you are constantly diverted by multi-media messages, then you need to take decisive action.

So to overcome “overwhelm” you must learn a new skill.  You’ve got to get comfortable with a new situation.  A sense of being overwhelmed precedes growth.  Mike Koenig, the video marketing guru and co-creator of Traffic Geyser, and video marketing coach to Anthony Robbins said that the sense of being overwhelmed is a sign that the neurons in your brain are forming new connections to manage the new stimuli and problems your are encountering.  In other words, the sense of being overwhelmed can be seen as a sign that help is on the way.

Problem of Distractions. Distractions are real vampires.  They siphon off your energy and distract you from your tasks.  It is estimated that after a distraction it takes 15 minutes to get your mind completely refocused onto a task.  That’s a serious dilution of focus.  Most distractions are made by other people.  Someone knocks on your door wanting to talk about the game last night.  If you work at home it might be a spouse or a child or a neighbor.

So how will you deal with it?  Well, first you’ve got to assess it and ask yourself whether it is aligned with your purpose or goals.  If it isn’t, then maybe this interruption has no place in your space and it should be stopped or eliminated.  That can be difficult and touchy, but sometimes necessary.  Depending upon the circumstances, maybe you can simply manage the disruption.  For instance it might be fine for the kids to come into your home office in the afternoon when you’re just responding to calls and emails.  But not when you are writing advertising copy or articles in the morning.  The point is that you should never let distractions disrupt you from your high yield activities.

Problem of Environment. The environment in which you work is perhaps more important than most of my points in this article.  The bottom line on environment is this.  You cannot have a Million Dollar Thought in the middle of the kids screaming, the dog barking, and the TV rattling at the kitchen table.

Achievers actually utilize their time differently in different environments.  For all but just a very few, you can’t do all of your high priority revenue producing tasks in the same environment.  Maybe you can’t write copy or ads or build advertising campaigns in your home office.  Because in your home office there are phone interruptions, email and Social Media distractions, kids and inboxes…just about everything but intense 100 percent peak mental and physical energy performance.  Maybe you need to do your high intensity work at the dining room table early in the morning before the family gets up.  Or perhaps you’d like to take your work to a nice table in an isolated corner of the local library.

For me I like to clear my desk and focus on the high intensity things first in the morning.  When I’m making videos I like to get out of the office and into a room away from the phone and computer.  I like to use the office for more administrative tasks like uploading blog posts and articles, making calls and managing Social Media.  And I like to get away when I read for self-improvement.  So I use three separate environments.  You can experiment with this yourself.  The point is that if you try to squeeze all these various levels of activities into one environment, it will dilute your effort and your success.

Time Management Solutions – Getting Your Focus Back. Okay, now it’s time for some practical solutions to improving your productivity.  Here they are:

• Journaling. Just like a personal trainer logs your daily exercise results for later evaluation of strengths and weaknesses, you should log your activities throughout a week and evaluate them on Friday to see what you’ve really been doing with your time, particularly whether how often and how much time you’ve spent on multi-media and how much on priority tasks.
• Blocking Time. Set specific blocks of time aside on your schedule to deal with specific issues.  For instance if you are most productive in the mornings, set up one-hour blocks in your morning schedule strictly for your creative and goal-driven tasks.  Schedule blocks during the less productive times of the day for managing multi-media, accepting walk-in questions/disruptions, and handling mundane administrative or operations tasks.
• Setting Appointments. Just like you set appointments to meet with people to exchange information, set an appointment for you to handle your email, Social Media, texts, and phone messages.
• Batching. Batching is when you move multiple tasks to a time slot.  Follow the above recommendation to set an appointment to manage your multiple media, but consider carving out two days that you handle only priority tasks.  Trust me, the world isn’t going to end if you don’t respond to multi-media on Tuesdays and Thursdays, rather you batch the inquiries and handle them only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays you are free of multi-media altogether.
• Goal and Cycle. At the start of each task do two things.  First decide what you intend to do before you move to a different task.  Then set a finish time.  So now you have a goal (what you will accomplish) and a cycle (the start time and finish time).  This is very powerful.
• Drilling. The fact is, if you’re going to use goal and cycle technique above, you may as well drill yourself to work faster and faster.  Studies have shown that people who work fast are sharper thinkers.  And if you’re an entrepreneur, that’s exactly what you need.
• 50 – 10 Technique. I’ve written about a breakthrough technique called the 50 – 10 Technique, where you schedule one-hour blocks of time, use the goal and cycle technique above to determine what you’re going to accomplish, and use a timer to work 50 minutes, then take 10 minutes to walk, rehydrate, get your mind refreshed before returning.  This technique keeps you fresh and more productive all day long, preventing exhaustion by the end of the day.  If you do nothing else, adopt the 50 – Ten Technique.

There is nothing magical about time management techniques, unless of course by using them you come to realize that the biggest impediment to your ability to focus on your high-yield, goal-driven activities is YOU.  Then you can understand the true nature of being overwhelmed and learn to manage it.  You can learn to spot distractions in your life and remove them or control them, and you can learn to use the right environment for the right task.  If any of the concepts and techniques I have presented in this article help you, then I am honored.  Good luck and go focus!