Mange Your Time by Managing Your Self-Interruptions

The promise that technology will make our lives easier is true in many respects, but more people are finding themselves time poor than ever before. To run our businesses more effectively we need to become very aware of where the time bleeds are and manage them. 

If, for instance, you are in the habit of checking your email every 30 minutes or so, you will find that at the end of the day you wasted a considerable amount of time on a task that probably should be scheduled twice a day. Do you spend a lot of time in and out of Social Media sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Again, by designating a specific time, or times of each work day you can save hours of wasted motion. 

I use an online productivity tool called Rescue Time (available for Mac and Windows) that allows me and the members of my team to easily and effortlessly track how productive we are each day so we can avoid and in some cases, banish distractions. 

Rescue time actually allows you to specify a period of time you want to focus on the projects at hand and will block the parts of the web that you tend to go to without thinking or planning. You can set the number of hours you want to spend in a day on a particular site and Rescue Time will alert you on your email, RSS reader, or by SMS when you run out of time. You can create groups and compare your online stats with other users. There are Rescue Time widgets for blogs, iGoogle, and Netvibes. You can also create a white-list of sites that you want Rescue Time to pay attention to. 

Check out the free trial here and please be sure to let me know your thoughts on this tool after you have used it for a while.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://denisegriffitts.com, info @  virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.