18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work by Dave Cheong

1. Write out a daily task list and plan your day. There's nothing like a task list sitting next to you to keep you focused. When you have a list of the things you need to accomplish in a day, having that close to you constantly reminding you of what needs to be done is a great way of keeping on track.
   
   
2. Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you. In a busy work place, people are moving and talking all the time. If you play a role in a team where others need to interact with you, try allocating a time slot they can interrupt you. Instead of having people stop by your desk every 10 mins and asking you questions, let them know of a time in the day, say between 2-4pm you can be interrupted. At all other times, you can really get some work done.
   
   
3. Apply time boxing. In a previous article, I wrote about the benefits of time boxing. Instead of working at something till it is done, try working on it for a limited period, say 30 mins. By that time, the task is either completed or you allocate another time slot, perhaps in another day, to pick it up again. This way, you keep your work fresh and engaging throughout the entire working day.
   
   
4. Setup filters in your email. If you spend a lot of your time communicating and planning in front of your computer, chances are you deal with emails on a frequent basis. Setting up filters in your email client can be a great way of sorting out what's important and urgent from personal stuff which can wait. Instead of dealing with a single Inbox with hundreds of unread email, you only need to deal with smaller folders categorised by project, priority and context.
   
   
5. Do not check personal email in the morning. Checking personal emails can be very distracting even with filters setup. This is especially true when your friends send you links to interesting articles, jokes or videos on YouTube. If you're not careful, you can get side tracked for hours. Instead of checking your personal email as soon as you get in, try starting work straight away. This will build up some momentum as you ease into your work day. You should check your personal email only after you have a few tasks completed or underway. Also, if you don't want to perpetuate a particular distracting email thread, just don't reply to it until after work.
   
   
6. Set your IM status. If you use Instant Messenger, when you don't want to be disturbed, make use of the status and set yourself as being away or busy. Your friends and colleagues will honour that. They can either send you an email or look you up later when you aren't as busy.
   
   
7. Listen to the right types of music. Music is a great way of settling into the working routine. In addition, having music can drown out office noises like printers and background chattering. Be careful though, depending on personal preference, some types of music are not particularly conducive to productive work. For me, I can't work when listening to songs with lots of lyrics because the words interrupt my thinking process.
   
   
8. Use the headphones but leave the music off. Some people prefer to have absolute silence when working. I think that also depends on what kind of work you are doing. If you're doing some serious planning or something computational, having music blasting in your ears may not be the best thing for keeping focused. Try using headphones or ear plugs to block out the background noise but leave the music off.
   
   
9. Fill up a water bottle. Keeping yourself hydrated is pretty important for all sorts of health reasons. Instead of going to the water cooler with your glass every hour, try filling up a water bottle at the start of the day. This does a couple of things ' firstly, it limits the starts/stops associated every time you get up for water and secondly, it avoids being sucked into lengthy discussions around the water cooler.
   
   
10. Find the best time to do repetitive and boring tasks. No matter how much you try to avoid it, you're going to have to face doing things which are either repetitive or boring. For these tasks, I find it is best to choose a time in the day to work on them. For example, I'm more alert at the start of the day, so it's better to work on things which require brain power early. Working on boring tasks that can be done via auto-pilot are better left towards the end of the day when I'm usually tired.
    
    
11. Bring your lunch and have it at your desk. I'm not suggesting you do this every day, but if you really have to focus and are trying to meet a deadline, having your lunch at your desk really helps. The normal one hour lunch break can really interrupt any momentum you might have built up during the morning. I find when I'm eating lunch at my desk, my lunch breaks are shorter and I can get through a few emails while I'm eating. After I'm done, I'm straight back working on the next task.
    
    
12. Don't make long personal calls. Most of us have a good separation between our working and personal lives (or a least try to). I think we can all agree we should avoid having work intrude on our personal time as much as possible. The reverse of this also applies. Try limiting the time you spend doing personal things during work as they can be distracting and draining on your motivation. For example, you do not really want to be thinking about your weekend away with your spouse when you really need to get things done.
    
    
13. Clean up your desk. Some of you may have desks which can only be described as ordered chaos. That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as you can find what you need without too much digging around. However, if you can't, I suggest cleaning up your desk. That doesn't mean having an empty desk, it just means having neat stacks of paper, all filed in the correct location. It also helps tremendously having all the things you need easily within arms reach. For example, if you need a place to write, having your pen and notepad close by and easily accessible is incredibly useful.
    
    
14. Get a good chair. If you sit for long hours at your desk and I'm sure some of you do, you might find it helpful to get a good chair. I find it's pretty hard to stay focused when my neck and back are sore because I have a bad setup at my desk. A good chair can eliminate this, allowing you to work for long stretches without breaks and physical distractions.
    
    
15. Use shortcuts on your computer. If you find you do the same thing with your computer more than once throughout the day, you might find it helpful to look for ways in which you can do them without too much manual repetition. For example, if there's a project folder you access all the time, try adding a shortcut to your Explorer or Finder so you can get access to it with a single click, instead of expanding folder after folder in the tree panel.
    
    
16. Close programs you're not using. As a software engineer, I use a lot of programs important to my work. However, in most cases, I only need a few applications open at the same time. Instead of Alt-Tabbing constantly and fighting the computer to locate the program you need, try only having the applications you need open. Close everything else. For example, if you have already located a file and no longer need a particular Explorer or Finder instance open, close it. There's no reason to leave it around at all.
    
    
17. Limit time on Digg, Delicious, news sites and blogs. I don't think I need to say too much about this. There are so many sites on the Internet worth looking at, including this site . Digg, Delicious, news and blogs are great from an interest perspective, but they can really take you away from the work you should be working on. Try to limit going to these sites during the working day. If you really have to, try doing it during your lunch time. No, you don't need to have your finger on the pulse every single minute of the day
    
    
18. Change your mindset and make work fun. For me, I find it difficult to stay focused on doing things I'm not by nature interested in doing. In most cases, there's probably nothing I can do about it. However, be mindful of the fact that your perception of work is something you can control. For my last tip here, I suggest you try changing your mindset or turning work into a game. An unfocused mind, is an unchallenged mind. So make things fun!

I hope these tips will take you closer to more focused and productive work days. If you are still in need for more tips about staying focused, you can take a look at a previous blockbuster smash hit article I wrote entitled 11 ways of staying focused. In that article, I approached the issue from a top down, rather than bottom up perspective.

Ok, good luck!

Hey, what are you still doing here? Get back to work:)

· Why the relationships are so important.

· Practice the moderation in all the things.

· Balance the work and family life.

· Recognize when your life will come out of balance.

· Time management explains the attributes which are needed for the effective time management, and also the benefits of beginning with the limited range of the tactics, before extending these into the overall time management strategy.

Identifying a Time Loss
This will explains the importance of carrying out the objective review of how do you currently spend the time and identifying what proportion of the time is spent in the areas which are not essential for achieving the goals.

Urgency and the Importance
This will describes how to use urgency/importance grid to classify the tasks which you currently perform, and how to optimize an amount of the time which you do spend on each of the type of task.

· The Effective Decision Making
It describes the various techniques which can contribute to the more effective decision making.

· Setting the Goals
This will discuss of adopting the proactive approach in the order to anticipate the events and be in the position to identify and define the goals clearly.

· Defining the Objectives
This will explains how to analyze the goals to define the series of objectives and need to rank the objectives in order to identify means and actions which are needed to achieve them.

Dealing With The Interruptions
This will explains how to evaluate what the interruption represents as the demand on the time and how to deal with the non-urgent interruptions in the polite but an effective way.

Knowing When to Delegate
This will explain how to overcome a reluctance to the delegate, and also how to decide which tasks are most suitable for the delegation.

Delegating Effectively
This will give details about the practical aspects of the delegating work, the importance of providing the ongoing support and the feedback, and a need to evaluate a outcome and apply the lessons learned when delegating the work in future.

Managing The Incoming Calls
This will describes how to screen the incoming calls when you do not want to be disturbed, and a various tactics for keeping the incoming telephone calls as short as possible.

Organizing The Workspace
This will explains how to deal with the incoming paperwork in the efficient way, and how to identify the manual and the electronic filing systems which meet the needs of a way you do work.

Communicating Effectively
This will discusses the various time saving techniques which you can use to improve the efficiency with regard to the written communications. This includes: speed-reading, the business letters and the email.

Understanding the Overload
Describes most common sources of the work-related stress, and provides the objective assessment of an extent to which you would be suffering from the overload at work.

Negotiating the Workload
Inability to say ‘No’ to the requests can be significant contributor to the stress and the overload. This section explains how to decline the requests when it will be appropriate to do so.

Planning The Day
Make schedule or plan all your tasks according to the workload and the performance cycle. This will save your time in thinking what to do next.

Using The Activity Networks
The activity networks, have become established as one of a most popular resource planning techniques that are available.

The Critical Path Analysis
It will show how to identify a critical path within the networks of the activities and how to calculate a total float and a free float available.

The Effective Resource Planning
This describes the resource planning, which is concerned with an effective scheduling of all the resources available in the order to deliver outputs which are required.

Preparing The Planning Diagrams
It discusses various ways which the resource planning information may be summarized for presenting to the senior management.

· Eliminate a time wasters in life;

· The Law of an Excluded Alternative;

· Identify a major time-wasters;

· Practical ways to overcome and avoid them if possible.

· Work with full capacity;

· Develop an ability to get the results;

· Concentrate on the high-value tasks;

· Increase a quality and the quantity of the results.

Young entrepreneurs don't have a lot of experience. That's a given. And in many cases this is rarely brought up as an issue. But in certain industries (especially in "older industries" or B2B-related industries) that lack of experience will be a sticking point. At least for many people inside the industry.

It's certainly been a point of discussion around Standout Jobs. We've received a fair amount of good press, but one of the sticking points we see consistently is our lack of experience in recruiting. None of the founders are recruiters. We haven't lived the last 15 years of our lives in HR.

Experience is valuable. There's no question about it. But it's not a guarantee of success. If that was the case, very few startups would ever succeed. And there are ways of getting around a lack of experience.

1. Do Your Homework. Before diving into an industry that you're not intimately familiar with, you better do some research. Luckily, it's not hard. You can find a ton of information online ' be it from analysts, industry trends, blogs, etc. Research and understand the problems in an industry. Talk to people. Get a feel for the space so you can form intelligent opinions based on more than just whimsy.
   
2. Find Great Advisers. You can never have all the answers. No one can (I don't care how much experience they have!) Surround yourself with great advisers that fill in the gaps in experience you have. In the case of Standout Jobs we've been working with a number of veteran recruiting experts for many months, it's just not something we've announced publicly (yet).
   
3. Solicit Lots of Feedback. You can't be afraid of feedback. One of the advantages of being green is that you have fewer strong opinions than the grizzled veterans of your industry, and are more apt to listen. Speak to the experts. Speak to other entrepreneurs. Collect lots of feedback. Ask for it. Engage people for it. Just don't get bogged down in it.
   
4. Find Believers. Unless you're completely wrong and your idea is absolutely brutal you will find believers out there. Go get 'em! Believers turn into evangelists. Evangelists turn into customers. Evangelists turn others into customers. That's all good. Of course, if all you look for is positive feedback you're doing yourself a disservice. You need a more balanced view of things, but believers are great for providing support, pointing you in the right direction and buoying your spirits.
   
5. Go Faster. Be Flexible. Test More Often. One of the downfalls of experience is getting locked into one way of thinking. It happens all the time. How often have you said to someone (or thought it), "I've been doing it this way for years, and that's the way it's supposed to be done. End of story." That rigidity can kill you. For young entrepreneurs it's much less of an issue, and you can turn that lack of experience and "stuck thinking" into an advantage. Do things faster. Be flexible and adjust quickly. And always test & validate your theories and practices.
   
6. Admit What You Don't Know. There's no shame in admitting that you don't know the answer. Go find it.
   
7. But Stand Up For What You Believe In. At the same time, don't be afraid to express your opinion. You've done your homework, brought on great advisers, collected positive and negative feedback and are actively experimenting with your ideas to see what works. Don't be ashamed of your opinions and beliefs. Whether you've been in an industry for 10+ years or not doesn't mean you're incapable of understanding it, the problems it faces and coming up with solutions.

No matter what I do, I can't turn back the clock, get a job in Human Resources, spend decades in the industry and then rush back to the present to start Standout Jobs. Neither can you. But don't be disheartened by a lack of experience. If you've got enough brains in your head to look at problems analytically, surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, work insanely hard and accept the bumps and bruises of failure you've got as a good a chance as anyone else. Even the grizzled veterans of your industry.