Maximizing Productivity Archives - Page 3 of 5

A 5-Day Challenge for Your Most Successful Year Yet

Just like that, 2017 is almost over.

And with a new year comes the desire to make new year’s resolutions. Your big hopes for the future become your big goals for the upcoming year. You want to improve your relationships, take your career to the next level, get healthy, or finally tackle that home project you’ve been putting off forever.

But actually accomplishing those goals? That’s another story!

A few months — or even a few weeks! — into the shiny new year, you may find yourself throwing in the towel on those dreams.

So what’s the solution?

Setting yourself up for success with a step-by-step action plan from the get-go. [Read more…]

How to Craft a Foolproof Morning Routine That Saves Your Sanity

Getting out the door — for most of us, it’s the first project we tackle every day. And what a project it can be! Rushing around, frantically searching for lost keys and permission slips, hurling food into lunchboxes, and inhaling your breakfast as you run to the car.

But what if you could transform your mornings?

What if you could ease your way into your day, feel confident that you have all your belongings, and breeze out the door right on time?

Customizing your morning routine is the answer! Here’s how you can create your perfect, no-nag, set-it-and-forget-it morning: [Read more…]

5 Simple Ways to Save Time With Your E-Mail

Do you feel as though you are submerged in E-mail? Is your precious time being sucked up by the annoying but seemingly necessary task of reading, responding to, and organizing your E-mail?

If you’re tired of weeding through messages instead of doing what you really want to be doing, check out these 5 simple ways you can save incredible amounts of time with your E-mail! [Read more…]

5 Secrets of Extreme Couponers That You Should Steal

You’ve seen those exotic creatures on TV – the extreme couponers.

Their basements or dining rooms look like fully-stocked convenience stores. And everything they have they’ve gotten for next to nothing or even for free. It sounds incredible. But when you hear their stories, you learn that some extreme couponers often spend more time couponing per week than most people spend working at a full-time job.

What if it were possible to land amazing deals without devoting endless hours every week to the pursuit of saving money? What if you could tap into the strategies of experienced extreme couponers while dialing the effort required way, way down?

Here are five powerful secrets of diehard couponers that you can easily tweak and implement in your everyday life: [Read more…]

7 Astounding Ways a Checklist Can Revolutionize Your Life

Checklists — I just love ’em!

In my life, they take any number of formats. I’ve got my daily to-do list front and center in my planner. I’ve got a ready-to-print list of things to pack when I travel. My husband and I routinely make a big list of things to tackle when we’re hosting an event. Heck, I’ve even got a checklist I used to create this blog post.

You probably know that checklists for kids are incredibly popular. Kids love them, and moms love them too! They’re a superb way to keep your kid on task and motivate him.

Consider those kiddie chore charts that act as graphic checklists for each day’s must-do tasks. Each day features colorful images instructing a child to make his bed, brush his teeth, put away his pajamas, and more. And once he completes a task, he enjoys the most awesome part of the process — placing a congratulatory sticker or perky magnet next to the task.

That internal motivation? That excitement over finishing an action step? That pride in a job well done? Even that sticker if you want it! That can all be yours with a checklist.

If you hate the idea of committing yourself to a checklist, or if you’ve only thought to apply checklists to a couple of areas in your life, check this out. I’ve got 7 big ways that a checklist can not just improve but revolutionize your life!
[Read more…]

7 Free Chrome Extensions That Keep You Organized & Productive

It’s easy for your Internet browser to be a clutter magnet that slows you down. Your browser is a mess of favorite sites and dozens of open tabs — videos to watch, articles to read, messages to which you need to respond, and more.

But, if you’re a Google Chrome user, you can transform your browser into a tool that supercharges your productivity and keeps you on task and organized. Check out these 7 incredible (and free!) Chrome extensions that are more than worth the download:
[Read more…]

How Parkinson’s Law Will Make You Insanely Productive

This post is part 3 in the series Embracing Parkinson's Law.

Back in April, my husband and I did something rather significantly out of character. We planned a weekend trip for our family in one afternoon.

Now, when it comes to vacations, we’re usually big planners! We weigh our destination options, flip through hotel reviews, make spreadsheets of possible activities . . . it’s a job unto itself.

But, in a single afternoon, we planned from start to finish an overnight trip for our family. We booked a hotel, purchased tickets to a theme park, found some good places to eat, and more. We packed up that evening and headed out the very next day with our slightly confused but enthusiastic two-year-old.

And it was fun!

The success of our little last-minute adventure is a perfect illustration of a fascinating concept known as Parkinson’s Law.

In a 1955 essay published in The Economist, author Cyril Northcote Parkinson described what is now famously referred to as Parkinson’s Law. It states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Take that in for a second.

Parkinson’s Law contends that the more time you have to accomplish something, the longer it will take. If we had a month to plan that spontaneous trip of ours, you bet that it would have taken us that long.

So . . . how can you use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage in becoming insanely productive? [Read more…]

Your Not-To-Do List: 10 Time-Suckers to Knock Out

As much as we’d like it not to be true, our time and energy are limited.

We are mere mortals with finite resources and the same 24 hours in a day that everyone else has. So staying productive and keeping sane means occasionally taking inventory of how we’re spending our time. And where we’re wasting it.

In scrutinizing your own recent activities, see if you’ve fallen victim to any of these 10 common time-suckers: [Read more…]

10 Smart Ways to Streamline Your Life with Google Calendar

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Read my policy here.

Do you have a love-hate relationship with your calendar?

Maybe it’s a clunky thing tacked to your wall or a series of notebook pages. Maybe it’s an ugly electronic system from the stone age that your employer set up.

Your calendar is supposed to make your life easier by keeping you organized and in the right place at the right time.

If yours isn’t up to the task, it’s time to upgrade to Google Calendar. Need convincing? Here are 10 awesome ways that Google Calendar gets rid of the hassle and radically streamlines your life: [Read more…]

Touch It Once

What’s one of the best ways to waste your time?

Handling things repeatedly.

Here’s an example:

You grab the mail from your mailbox as you’re arriving home from work, and you dump it on your coffee table. Later, you open up the mail, scan it, and drop it back in the pile. Another time, you realize it’s time to pay some bills, so you sift through your pile to pull out the bills you need.

You return to the pile the next day to dig out your friend’s wedding invitation so that you can R.S.V.P. Finally, company is on its way over, so you grab everything off the table to tidy up and dust. Maybe you recycle the junk mail . . . or maybe you hide the papers under your bed until your guests leave.

(You might forget about them at that point.)

With this method of handling your family’s paperwork, here are just some of the problems you’ve inadvertently created for yourself:

You’ve had to refamiliarize yourself with the contents of your mail every time you touch it.
You’ve set yourself up to miss or forget about important communication.
You’ve started a moving pile of clutter that invites more clutter.

So what’s the solution? [Read more…]