How many times do you get distracted in a day?
Do you even know how many hours are spent productively?
You might be online for eight hours a day, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting that number of hours’ work. Most entrepreneurs are buzzing with ideas, which makes us easily distracted. You might start out doing research for something, but very few articles are on a webpage all of their own with no other distractions on the page.
It is for this reason, I am banned from tabloid websites! They have hundreds of celebrity gossip articles on the right, with crazy, hard-to-ignore headlines. Not good when you are running a business.
I use a program called the Action Machine which is a desktop application that you add tasks to at the beginnning of each day, and then set a timer for each one. It’s a comprehensive program that actually gives you a report at the end of the day (or any time you choose) on how you spent your time.
Its involves inputting the name of the tasks, and notes if you want to. You can also reorder them, and choose different alarm sounds. The best thing though is the fact it can produce detailed reports.
But what if you just want to set a timer and start working immediately?
One great tool for doing this is E.ggtimer.com.
Its default timer is for 5 minutes, so you can land on the page and press GO!
If you want a different length of time, it takes just seconds to add any number of minutes. Just remember to check your speakers are on!
And the Egg Timer website can be used on any device, wherever you are. Another clool thing about it is it shows the time left in the title of the page – and therefore the tab. So if you are working on another tab, you can still glance across and see how much time you have left.
It’s a favorite tool with lots of people who work online. In fact I have it at the very top of my bookmarks, under “IM Tools” and have set it to write this and all my blog posts.
An invaluable and simple free tool.
