OK, maybe it’s not “easy”, but there’s certainly no magic to it. Books upon volumes have been penned about this fairly straightforward topic; books full of hacks, wisdom and tricks that will help you maintain your focus and not get sidetracked. But I’ve got some news for you, Jack…

It’s entirely up to you. Anything that you allow into your peripheral vision while you’re hammering away on that big proposal is, yep, your fault. That said, it’s time for a little thing the Russians call “tough love”.

When people in this day and age refer to distractions, most of the time they’re talking about computer-related things. Mind-yankers like instant messaging applications, Facebook, your fantasy underwater basketweaving team, etc. You need to relegate things like this to your discretionary time (obviously). And if you want to remove them as distractions, you have to get freaking guerrilla about it. Removing them from your bookmark toolbar in Firefox isn’t going to cut it (as you probably already know), because the temptation is too great and the satisfaction is too immediately had.

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Few would argue that Merlin Mann is the Godfather of GTD/productivity blogging. About a month ago he posted Four Years and followed it up with Time, Attention, and Creative Work. If you haven’t read these, please do so now… It’s good stuff. What do you think? I look at both of these posts in a [...]

If you were to ask me for the true marks of a really productive person (which I’m not, incidentally, so take this with a grain of salt), I wouldn’t say anything about their work area, notebook collection, or pocket contents. I wouldn’t even necessarily cite their ability to consistently meet deadlines (because that just means [...]

As we process our stuff and determine next actions, as good GTD practitioners we do any action we’ve just defined that will take less than two minutes to complete. After doing the action, how do you handle the piece of stuff and the action that was just processed & done? Some things I’m thinking about [...]

So you’ve read through GTD for the ump-teenth time and it looks like you used it to beat back a pack of wild boar. You’ve got your all of your inputs handled and your edges are so clean you could eat off of them. I hate to pee in anybody’s punch, but that was the [...]

The recent financial turmoil has created a situation where unemployment could be a problem for quite some time. The good news for the unemployed is that there are tangible things that you can do to increase your chances of getting noticed for the jobs that are available. Sure, jobs are going away, but jobs are [...]

A guest poster over at Get Rich Slowly recently shared an incredible tip for how to use a recording device to get control of your TV watching habits so you can redirect your attention to far more productive endeavors. Erica Douglass writes: 750 hours a year is 14.42 hours a week, or just over two hours a [...]

Hello, My name is Andy and I’m the new guy here at The Cranking Widgets Blog. While I hope to share far more valuable information in the months and years to come, I’d like to kick things off by getting some answers to the obligatory “who the heck is this guy?” out of the way. [...]

Well, as you’ve probably noticed, posting around here has slowed practically to a crawl. There are several reasons for this, many of them good ones, many of them attributable directly to the laziness of yours truly. I’m not happy about it, but this little blog has been the victim of what a database administrator would [...]

photo by shareski Of all of the the things you’d typically find in a man’s pocket (or a woman’s purse, I suppose), the wallet is probably the most pervasively adopted piece of hardware in Western civilization. Every Tom, Dick and Harry walking around almost certainly has a wallet in his back pocket. And the wallets [...]