This post describes three methods I’ve found to be extremely useful in creating a more productive workspace. By “workspace” I’m referring to your work environment – whether that be at home, at the office, or busking in front of a subway station.

1 . Use a dry erase board to track important things.

One of the more recent things I’ve been doing is using a dry erase board to keep a running log of various things that are going on.

Right now, my dry erase board currently has notes on a future blog post topic that I’m going to be writing. Because I’m doing a lot of prep work for the post (personal trials, research, etc.), I want to keep all of that information in front of me. Whenever I look off to the side, I immediately see my notes and I stay on track – cool, huh? I also have a magnet on the board that has one of my favorite quotes every from Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have!”

You can use a whiteboard to track a lot of different things, such as:

• Your goals - A lot of people use them for daily, weekly, and monthly goals. I’ve done this before, and I do love it – there’s something about always seeing your goals in front of you that spurs you towards action. If you always have your goals fresh in your mind, you have no excuse to procrastinate on something else!
• Quotas that need to be met - “Make ten sales phone calls” would be an example of a quota. When you finish with a phone call, put a tally mark by the quota. Personally, I also love making the tally marks while I’m filling up my quotas. Perhaps because the action of making those marks makes the quota feel much more tangible and realistic; it makes it feel more achievable.
• Dates, times, and reminders – This one should be fairly obvious. You wouldn’t want to miss a date, an appointment, or an important doing, right?

2. Keep your goals in front of you at all times.

The more you work, the more you realize that a thousand things can occur during a day that completely knock you off of course. Also, appearing busy doesn’t always necessarily mean that you’re getting anything valuable accomplished. Don’t try to fool me.

There are lots of ways you can keep your goals in front of you. Some people love and advocate putting up pictures around your house/office/place of work that adequately (and beyond) describe the goal that you’re after. For example, somebody who’s looking at shedding those pre-holiday pounds and wishing to gain some muscle might put up some pictures of people with toned up bodies without an ounce of fat on them. A variation of this theme is typing out, in large print, your goals and aspirations and printing out and using those instead of pictures.

You can do similar things on your computer as well. Change your screensaver to your goals. Change your background picture to a picture of your aspirations. There are programs out there that can act like Sticky Notes on your desktop – perhaps you wanna write a few of your goals down and stick them up on top of your background, as a constant reminder when all of your windows are minimized. (Just what you wanna see before you turn off your computer for lunch – “Don’t eat that slice of cake!” )

There’s really no reason you shouldn’t be reviewing your goals like this every single day. It might sound silly in practice, but it works. Without guidance, most people tend to falter. The pull of everything else going on around you is too great; there are too many things to become distracted by. If you don’t keep an eye on your goals, you’re going to get knocked off balance.

3. Let your desk and office space reflect who you are.

The biggest mistake when it comes to workspace productivity is trying to make everybody’s desk look homogenous. If you’re not exactly like everyone else, don’t try to be like everyone else!

Some people work well with lots of piles and clutter scattered all around their desk and office space with no rhyme or reason. To you, it may look like they’re about to skip town, buy a small trailer out in the boondocks, and live happily ever after with 20 stray cats. To them, it may be a highly efficient way of organizing materials that they need to constantly use. If you tried to use their organizational method, it’d drive you mad. If they tried to use your organizational method, they’d be booking their train ticket out of town faster than you can say “Here, kitty!”

Currently, my desk looks like something straight out of The Devil Wears Prada, and I couldn’t be happier. I have a small lamp which I use at night ’cause I don’t like working in super bright light at night. On the left side of my computer, I have a stack of personal development books I’m currently reading, reviewing, and taking notes on, as well as some other books which I’m reading for fun and information purposes. In the upper right hand side of my desk, I have a layout of some magazines (yes, just like Miranda!) that I flip through occasionally throughout the day. I like reading magazines because they’re often a great source of ideas for this blog, and they’re something very relaxing about perusing through a magazine that you enjoy. I also have a small notebook on top of my books that I use to take notes in. And of course, my laptop and mouse is right in front of me.

That’s it. There’s nothing else on the desk. There’s nothing directly in front of the computer; it’s empty space. There are no pictures of anything or anybody; there isn’t an inbox of any sort to collect random junk that gets thrown at me throughout the day; there’s no plant or decoration adorning the desk at all. In other words, my desk is clean, neat, and absolutely perfect!

You may not be like this. You may need to have a thousand folders strewn across the desk because the nature of your job requires you to constantly flip back and forth between one project and another. Or maybe you’re just passive aggressive with a hidden agenda against us neat freaks.

The point is simply this: let your workspace reflect who you are. Don’t be afraid to radically change your desk to look like somebody else’s if you think that another layout is going to get you better results. The end result is to become more productive – experimentation is your friend.

Now go make some changes!

For example, say that you’re a blogger. You can easily think of 10 different topics you’d like to write about, but you can’t really pinpoint the exact topic that you want to create into a post. What do you do?

Honestly? Just pick something!

Pick something. Pick anything. Stop debating. Just do it!

Don’t stand in front of the fridge debating what to eat for dinner. Just pick the best healthiest thing that sounds amazing to you, and chow down! Don’t stare at a stack of books mulling over what you want to read; just pick a book from the pile and read that first page. Can’t decide on what exercises to do? Well… maybe you can procrastinate on that for a day, like everyone else.

I’ve found out that little indecisions get in the way of life. They clog up my own mental RAM. For example, it’s no secret that I love writing for my blog. If I’m too busy debating what topic I want to write about, I’m not actually getting any work done. Ideas by themselves don’t provide value to my readers. But picking an idea, writing it up into an insightful blog post, and sharing it with people online gets the value out there. A little indecision like “what topic should I write about today?” can waste my time and put me in a worse position for tomorrow.

Likewise, procrastinating on eating makes me cranky. You don’t wanna deal with me when I’m cranky.

I’ve also noticed that even when I give myself a time limit to decide on what to do, I’m worse off than what I was. Thinking about my decisions for 10 minutes vs. 5 minutes vs. even 1 minute doesn’t lead to any better decisions than if I were simply to pick something right at that immediate second. It’s almost like I intuitively “know” what I should be doing.

Little decisions that are consciously put off for no good reason also invariably leads to procrastination. In this case, it’s not so much that procrastination is caused by analysis paralysis, but that it’s caused by one thing you should have done not being done at all. Because on action was taken, your motivation decreases. When motivation decreases, it’s harder to get it back up to previous levels.

So, what should you be doing right now? Right, you wanna read another blog post by me.

Unless, of course, you’re me. For some reason, even on projects I “know” I should be completing, I just can’t get myself to move forward. For example, who really wants to clean out a shelf in their closet? Just looking at the mess makes me want to sprint in the other direction faster than a lion chasing dinner on an African plain. First I’d have to actually go to the closet, then start pulling stuff out… then organizing all of said stuff… then putting everything in new places… ugh, it’s one big mess. And it’s boring, too.

Part of the problem that I (and many other people) have is that when we look at an unpleasant task or project, it shifts into this daunting, irritating mess. We all know that when we look at things in a negative light, it causes us to start labeling those things with negative assumptions. So, it doesn’t matter if the task is “clean out the entire closet” or “clean out two shelves in the closet” or “clean half a shelf in the closet,” the task still looks unpleasant.

How did I get around this problem?

The easiest thing I have found that helps me get around this problem is to do one simple task. One, simple, dirt easy task. Complete one task that’s so simple that it’d be foolish and silly for you to say “No, that’s too much work! I can’t do that.”

One simple task, that’s all it takes!

“One task?” you ask, “that’s all I need to do?” Yep. Here are some examples of doing one task on something that you might procrastinate with:

• Instead of checking all 150 emails in your inbox, check just one.
• Have a blog post you want to write, but you can’t figure out where to start? Type just one sentence – no more, no less.
• Want to start a new book but don’t have time for it? Read the first line of the first chapter, then put the book down.

I like to refer to these simple tasks as “mini-actions” – they’re things that are so obnoxiously simple, they’re like miniature action steps. It’s not quite doing an entire action step, but doing a very small sliver of one.

Write one bar of music. Put one book back on the bookshelf. Place one dish from the dishwasher back where it belongs. Simple simple simple.

Doing one mini-action step overcomes any inertia that might have built up from procrastination or analysis paralysis. Can’t figure out where to start? Do one simple thing that couldn’t possibly be any simpler. Your project looks too large that it scares you? Figure out the easiest task to do that’ll take the least amount of time and complete it.

The great thing about this method is that once you do one thing, you’ll feel compelled to do some more. Since one little task is already done, why not try another? And then another? You break the pattern that was holding you back all along.

What’s going to be your next simple task you’ll complete? Ah, that’s right. You’re going to read the first sentence of another one of my blog posts.

Timeboxing 101

Timeboxing is a relatively simple thing to learn. First, you take a task that you have, and then you figure out how long it’s going to take you to complete the task. You try your best to finish your task in that amount of time, trying not to go over your time limit by any amount.

For example, say you wanted to write a 500 word blog post on the joys of time management. You decide that this task would take you about 45 minutes to complete (meaning: write the post, edit it, and hit publish). You slot out some time to work on this task (say, from 2 to 2:45 in the afternoon) and off you go!

When you’re timeboxing up tasks, a general rule of thumb is to only use time amounts up to an hour. If you have a large task to complete, break it up into small tasks. Bigger projects can always be sliced up into smaller projects, which can be completed in a smaller amount of time. And always remember, the end result of timeboxing is a completed project.

The Greatness of Timeboxing

Almost all of the main reasons timeboxing is such a fabulous time management tool is that it helps you overcome very simple problems.

• It stops you from being a perfectionist. Limiting yourself to X amount of time to work on a task halts the need to constantly edit a work when it’s completed.
• It forces you to work on the meat of the project. If you only have an hour to complete something, your energy is going to be focused on getting real work done. You won’t succumb as often to distractions. You also won’t be paying attention to the bells and whistles of your work – stuff that really doesn’t matter.
• It forces you to ship a finished product. Perhaps the greatest benefit of timeboxing is the fact that the end goal is the completion of something. This is especially beneficial to creative people – because they would have finished a creative project, they’re able to immediately ship it out the door and into the hands of other people who are hungry for their work. Creative people hate deadlines because they feel like it stifles their creativity – but if they don’t have anything to show for their creativity, what good are their crafts?

The Perils of Timeboxing

Of course, all time management techniques have a few downsides that you may want to consider. Some of these downsides for timeboxing include the following.

• Not adequately estimating the time it’ll take you to finish a task. Timeboxing works best when you can guess how much time you’ll need to complete a task within a reasonable margin of error. Trying to condense a 4 hour project into 1 hour might cripple your end results. Sometimes it’s best to slightly overestimate the time needed to complete something, so you can give yourself a little breathing room.
• Trying to squeeze large creative projects into a small amount of time. Some creative work is going to take you a bit of time to do. Examples of this include cooking a gourmet meal, composing a song, or writing a very large blog post. There are just too many steps to complete before you can ship a final product. Fortunately, this can be remedied by simply breaking up your project into a series of smaller projects, as noted above.

Is timeboxing right for you?

Timeboxing success depends on how you implement the technique and what kind of personality you have. All people can be successful with it, however.

If you’re a naturally creative person, timeboxing might feel like it’s a restrictive constraint that does no good. You may feel as if it stifles your creativity. On the other hand, like I mentioned above, very creative people tend to not produce much real value in the eyes of other people because they’re constantly refining their works to an outrageous standard.  If nothing gets into the hands of other people, how can you share your value? This time management skill fixes that problem by forcing you to accept that a finished product is better than no product at all.

On the flip side of the coin, if you’re a naturally left brained person, timeboxing might feel like it fits extremely well into how you naturally think. Limiting the amount of time you take with a task forces you to complete it well in a short amount of time. That feels like a natural extension of your “no nonsense, let’s finish the task and get it over with” personality.

Like everything in personal development, time management skills are something that you develop over time. These techniques are something you can constantly tweak and experiment with in order to become more productive… and this includes timeboxing.