On 28 Jan, I highlighted two challenges to achieving my goals: Time and fear. I tackle the first challenge here, with possible solutions.

Making time

• Stop doing things that waste my time.
• Optimise and be more efficient with the things I do.

I’m being strict about how much television I watch: One hour a week for Desperate Housewives (what can I say? It’s my guilty pleasure).

I won’t even have television in the background because I tend to get distracted by it, sometimes being tempted to start watching it instead of doing things.

I’ve downloaded an egg timer program called Minuteur (Mac app), which is helping to jolt me out of procrastination. By default it makes a ticking noise, this is good because it reminds me that time is slipping away and I’d better not waste it!

I’ve been reading some articles about procrastination and the best advice I’ve heard includes:

1. Eight minutes as a suggested period of time to work dedicated to one specific task. When that’s up, you can do another burst if you want and so on.
2. ‘Fill your hands’ when tidying: Grab a handful of stuff and rush around putting things where they belong - stops you from worrying about where to start and encourages you to just get on with it.
3. When working, sometimes you’ll become aware that you’re daydreaming. When you do, make yourself switch back to working. As you do this more you’ll increase your awareness of when you’re procrastinating and encourage yourself to stop.

Some excellent articles from lifehacking, productivity etc. blogs:

• LifeDev: How to use Twitter as a productivity tool
  I use Twitter (Bright Achievements) to record my successes, so as to increase my self-confidence and maintain a record of what I’ve done. LifeDev shows how you can use it to increase awareness of you procrastination.
• LifeHacker: Get rid of clutter with the container method

What do you think? Any articles to recommend?