Remote Work Digest: April 14, 2016

FRESNO, Calif. - April 13, 2016 - PRLog -- Simple Ways to Add 2 Hours More to Your Day | Laura Vanderkam, Fortune.com

Easy ways to reclaim two hours to spend on the good stuff.

If you free up two hours to spend on the good stuff, that's the next best thing to manufacturing time. Here's how to escape the ceaseless ticking, according to Laura Vanderkam.

1. Plan you days
Figuring out what's most important keeps you from losing hours as you blindly respond to whatever comes in. It also encourages investing time in high-yield activities such as mentoring new employees. By thinking through your days, you can also match the right kind of activity to the right time. Deep focused work is best done when you have a lot of energy.

2. Manage distractions
Between social media alerts, emails, and drive-by visits, people can be distracted dozens or more times per day. One study found that people take 25 minutes to resume interrupted tasks (after dabbling, on average, in more than 2 other "work spheres" in the meantime), pushing distractions to predictable times can easily save hours. One study also found that people spend 47% of their time on the internet procrastinating.

3. Don't do what others can do (or that doesn't need to be done)
If you're in upper management, you can easily spend 50% of your day in meetings, which comes out to 4 (or more) hours a day. If 25% of those meetings didn't need to happen - a conservative figure based on surveys, and how much people despise meetings generally - killing them would buy you an hour per day right there. It is also hard to rescue the time once a meeting starts, and many people are so busy going from meeting to meeting that they don't triage their schedules ahead of time. The solution is getting in the habit, on Friday afternoons, of looking at your calendar for the next week and asking what can be skipped or killed. Five minutes can buy back hours.

4. Change your schedule
Chances are, the reason you want more hours in your day is that you're too busy with work and family obligations to tackle your personal priorities. But most people, even busy professionals, have leisure time. The problem is that much of it occurs late at night when people are too tired to do anything but watch TV. The solution? Go to bed earlier, and wake up earlier. Most people feel more productive in the morning, so turning the TV off earlier turns unproductive evening hours into productive morning hours.

5. Telecommute
To be sure, even in most information jobs, working from home daily won't fly. But once or twice a week buys back massive time on those days. It's not just the 50 minutes of average daily commuting telecommuters save on the days they work from home.

Read More: https://blog.worksnaps.com/2016/04/12/remote-work-digest-...