50 Things the Most Successful Business People Have in Common & How You Can Begin to Emulate Them in 5 Minutes by iconsclub.com - HTML preview

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Wasting Time without Even Knowing It

Moving on, you know, it's amazing how much time we waste doing nothing useful even when it seems we are. Someone pointed this out to me four or five years ago and said hey, I have something for you to test. Next time you're doing a big job such as writing a report, or building a site, record how much work you do, how much you get done over how much time, then report back to me in the morning. I guarantee you I can triple the amount you got done without sacrificing quality the next day. Intrigued I did as she said. Came back the next day and she demonstrated to me how much time I was wasting doing irrelevant things. Either catching news reports on TV, going to grab some food, speak to some friends for a few minutes, flick through the tracks on my MP3 player between each song trying to find the good ones and so on. Here's another more recent example of this. I've been working on this report now and some software at the same time for many months. I just sat down for seven hours straight (something I can rarely do with the number of projects I’m working on currently) and wrote, and wrote, and came out with 60+ pages, which means if I'd really sat down and concentrated on the one project I'd have had 1200+ pages done in a mere 20 days. So here’s the thing. When you work try to either, keep a timetable, a set of goals, or at the very least a record of how much you're achieving and cut out all distractions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling you lazy. I know you want to move forward or else you wouldn't be reading this right now. Take some time out to work on your business. Sit down, remove all distractions and just work, straight, for 12 hours. Taking a look around on my desk now I have my headphones on, with set play list going, I have my keyboard, a watch, and a glass of iced water. That's it, nothing more. The best thing about this is there are no distractions, and I get work done. I'd suggest at the very least you might want to draw up a timetable for your work days, and set yourself goals to avoid this. It's amazing how time flies and the work amount and quality is affected through distractions. Try it, you might just find the pace of things pick up.