46 Productivity Tips
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
Here are five of my favourites:
- Focus on value creation. There’s lots of sage advice in this article from Steve Pavlina:
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the real purpose of a business is to create value. While it’s possible to make money in the short run without creating much value, in the long run it’s unsustainable.”
- Take time to develop relationships. From The Simple Dollar:
“When you have a chance to connect one friend to another, make it happen. It might take you some time and effort - it might even make you grumble a bit. But when things happen in your own life, you will be met with an abundance of blessings.”
- Simplify your online life. From Web Worker Daily:
“If we focus on simplifying our online lives, we can drastically reduce the amount of time we spend online, the amount of time we spend working, the amount of information we have to consume, and the amount of stuff we have to keep track of.”
Our 4 steps to using Google Reader is a great place to start.
- Create a chain of success. From Lifehacker:
“Daily action builds habits. It gives you practice and will make you an expert in a short time. If you don’t break the chain, you’ll start to spot opportunities you otherwise wouldn’t.”
(You may be surprised that this one comes from Jerry Seinfeld!)
- Beat procrastination with a dash. From 43 Folders:
“My favorite tonic for procrastination—which I have mentioned in passing previously—is what I call a dash, which is simply a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time—perhaps as little as just one minute.”