Sophia Bera (Twitter: @sophiabera) www.GenYPlanning.com If I'm feeling stuck and I don't want to start a project, I
set my phone for 30 minutes and tell myself that I only have to work for that
amount of time. Once the time is up, I usually just spend a few minutes finishing
the project. Often times I surprise myself by how much I can get done with just
30 minutes of focused work. I love doing yoga and every Sunday I look at my
calendar and plan out my yoga schedule for the next week. By putting it on my
calendar with my other appointments, I actually end up going four to five times
per week instead of one to two times when I didn't take the time to put it on my
calendar. My other tip is to do walking meetings. Any meeting that I don't need
to take notes for, I try to turn into a walking meeting and just pop in my earbuds
while I go outside. I find that sitting in front of the computer for more than a few
hours makes me stir crazy so this is a great way to use the time within time. I'm
also more focused on what the other person is actually saying instead of being
distracted by my computer. I believe that finding ways to exercise or move
throughout the day is one of the best things we can do for our productivity.
Sophia Bera, CFP is a virtual financial planner for millennials and the founder of Gen Y Planning. Laura Berg (Twitter: @LauraBergInc) www.LauraBergInc.com I try to use the ‘touch it once’ principle when checking
emails. If you open an email, you answer it. Before I would waste so much time
reading through emails and then marking them ‘unread’ so that I could come
back to them when I had more time. Now, if I don’t have time to answer them I
don’t open them. Think about it, even if you take 30 seconds to re-read an email
that you’ve already read over the course of a week you are wasting valuable
minutes, those minutes add up. When you are an entrepreneur your time is
precious so don’t waste it re-reading emails. Of course, there is an exception
when you need to give an email some thought but I try my best to always ‘touch
it once’.
Laura Berg is the president of My Smart Hands and author of the Baby Signing Bible. She is an expert in video marketing, certified through Google as a YouTube specialist. She successfully used YouTube to grow her company into an internationally recognizable brand.
