Wouldn’t it be great if staying focused and productive came as easy as breathing? Too often the daily interruptions eat away at the time and next thing you know you have only got half your project done or somethings came up that kept you from doing it all together. So I did some sarching for ways to be more focused and productive during the day.

David Choeng wrote a good post called 18 ways to stay focused and goes over the steps he takes to keep on track. from writing down things to do, setting IM statuses and even picking out music that will not be distracting, he seems to cover most of the bases.

Setup filters in your email. If you spend a lot of your time communicating and planning in front of your computer, chances are you deal with emails on a frequent basis. Setting up filters in your email client can be a great way of sorting out what’s important and urgent from personal stuff which can wait. Instead of dealing with a single Inbox with hundreds of unread email, you only need to deal with smaller folders categorised by project, priority and context.

On the same site he adds an additional 11 steps that supplement his other post.

Prioritizing constantly. To figure out which task I should be working on, I prioritize constantly. Some tasks are more important than others. Some tasks are more urgent than others. I’ve found that working on urgent tasks followed by tasks which have the greatest impact to work well for me - urgent tasks allow me to get things done on time and important tasks allow me to maximize the benefits I receive.

But that’s not all there is to think about. Scot young has a blog about getting more out of your life and he explains how with his hectic schedule he maximized his time in 15 minute increments.

Invest the time in sharpening your mind. Small investments here can accumulate to huge payoffs later. You could learn a new language, master a skill or become an expert in your field.

Really keeping focused and more productive could just be your workspace is completely cluttered and you need to take care of that. Checkout the happiness project for some tips on this. One thing that alot of people don’t consider could help with productivity and being more focused is the foods they eat. Need some advice on better food selections to make? Check out BootStrapper.

When it comes down to it, you may need to find ways to add time into the day. Well, scientifically adding time is not possible, but you can analyse your time and find out where you can cut things out to make sure you have the time to get the important stuff done. Lifehack.org has a post on ways to go about that.

The first step to reclaiming more time from your day is to get hold of the big chunks that aren’t being put to good use. “Good use” is a fairly subjective term here, but it could mean both work that doesn’t get much done or leisure time that isn’t enjoyable.

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